Cortés may have praised Tlaxcala as an agrarian and commercial arcadia but, as Motolinía explains, when its citizens thought about their own political values, they actually saw those values as coming from the desert. Like other Nahuatl speakers, including the Aztecs, Tlaxcalteca liked to claim they were descended from Chichimec. These were considered the original hunter-gatherers who lived ascetic lives in deserts and forests, dwelling in primitive huts, ignorant of village or city life, rejecting corn and cooked food, bereft of clothing or organized religion, and living on wild things alone.
