ENGL 3860: Hiding in Plain Sight

The dawn of everything
Hiding
In plain sight
ENGL 3860 | Nathaniel A. Rivers | saint Louis university | fall 2023

What we propose to do in this chapter, then, is bring to the surface
this neglected strand of Mesoamerican social history: one of urban
republics, large-scale projects of social welfare, and indigenous
forms of democracy that can be followed down to the time of the
Spanish conquest and beyond.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 332-33

In fact, the entire trajectory of Teotihuacan’s political development
seems to have gone off on a remarkable tangent. Instead of
building palaces and elite quarters, the citizens embarked on a
remarkable project of urban renewal, supplying high-quality
apartments for nearly all the city’s population, regardless of
wealth or status. Without written sources, we can’t really say why.
Archaeologists are not yet able to distinguish the precise sequence
of events with any confidence.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 341

General view of the ancient city of Tehotihuacan in actual Mexico. Anxo Miján Maroño et al.
In other words, few were deprived. More than that, many citizens
enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a
wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including
our own. Teotihuacan had indeed changed its course away from
monarchy and aristocracy to become instead a “Tollan of the
people.”
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 343

Now here we have something going on that would obviously be very difficult to
square with the idea of communal living on a large scale; and this is precisely our
point. Below the surface of civil society at Teotihuacan there must have been all
sorts of social tensions simmering away among groups of radically different ethnic
and linguistic backgrounds who were constantly moving in and out, consolidating
relationships with foreign trading partners, cultivating alter egos in remote places
and sometimes bringing those forms of identity back with them […] By around AD
550, the social fabric of the city had begun to come apart at the seams. There is no
compelling evidence of foreign invasion. Things seems to have disintegrated from
within. Almost as suddenly as it had once coalesced some five centuries previously,
the city’s population dispersed again, leaving their Tollan behind them.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 345

Increasing the number of people living in one place
may vastly increase the range of social possibilities,
but in no sense does it predetermine which of those
possibilities will ultimately be realized.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 326

What Salazar describes in these remarkable passages is
evidently not the workings of a royal court but of a
mature urban parliament, which sought consensus for its
decisions through reasoned argument and lengthy
deliberations—carrying on, when necessary, for weeks at
a time.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 353

Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenthcentury
Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely
to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be
impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in
Europe was almost uniformly anti-democratic at the time. If
anyone was learning something new from the encounter, it
was surely the Spaniards.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 355

“The Tlaxcallan Senate,”depiction of
the Tlaxcalan government by Rodrigo
Gutiérrez, 1875.
This painting depicts a group of people
presided over by the four chiefs of the
districts that made up the territory of
Tlaxcala before the Conquest. The
participants in the meeting are discussing
the invitation made to them by Hernán
Cortés to form an alliance against their
enemies, the Mexica. A standing man,
blind and advanced in years, appears to
be expressing an opinion that is
seconded by a younger man to his right.
These two personages are Xicoténcatl the
Elder, Lord of Tizatlán, and Xicoténcatl
the Younger, his heir.

A fresco by
Cesare Maccari
(1888 CE)
depicting Roman
senator Cicero
(63 BCE)
denouncing the
conspirator
Catiline in
the Roman
senate.

Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to
demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of
self-deprecation—even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to
the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each
was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as
the proper reward of ambition, and then—with one’s ego in tatters—a long period
of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep
deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation
ended with a “coming out” of the newly constituted public servant, amid
feasting and celebration.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 357

A map of Tlaxcala.
What we have learned in this chapter is that the political
traditions of Tlaxcala are not an anomaly, but lie in one broad
stream of urban development which can be traced back, in
outline, to the experiments in social welfare undertaken
1,000 years earlier at Teotihuacan.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 358

A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the
perspective of the times and places in between. In that sense, this chapter
is not truly radical: for the most part, we are telling the same old story; but
we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the
teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for
embryonic versions of our modern nation states. We are considering,
instead, the possibility that—when looking at those times and places usually
taken to mark “the birth of the state”—we may in fact be seeing how very
different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of
violence, knowledge and charisma.
Graeber and Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | 382