There is a subtle snobbery at play here. It’s not so much that anyone denies outright that accounts of deliberative politics reflect historical reality; it’s just that no one seems to find this fact particularly interesting. What seems interesting to historians is invariably the relation of these accounts to European textual traditions, or European expectations. Much the same occurs with the treatment of later texts from Tlaxcala: extant, detailed written records of the proceedings at its municipal council in the decades following the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcalan Actas, which affirm at
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