Free Republic

On the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest, people from Mexico’s smallest state Tlaxcala say their ancestors were liberators When people from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala travel to other parts of the country, they are sometimes insulted as traitors by their compatriots. Tlaxcala is Mexico’s smallest state in size, but it played an outsized role in Mexico’s early history, not least when indigenous Tlaxcalans allied with Hernán Cortés’ tiny band of invaders to bring down the Aztec empire. Now, as Mexico marks the 500th anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán on Friday, the role of the...

Excavations at the Zultepec-Tecoaque archaeological site in Tlaxcala, Mexico, have revealed that indigenous Acolhuas peoples captured a caravan of 550 conquistadors and their allies in 1520, kept them in captivity, and ate them over a period of nine months. And new research suggests that these acts were not random; it seems the Acolhuas people were re-creating their creation myths. Who were the Acolhuas’ Sacrificial Victims? Hernán Cortés , the Spanish usurper of Mexico at the time, was in the caravan to Tenochtitlan but rode ahead to help put down a rebellion in Mexico City before the Acolhuas party struck. The...