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In Tlaxcala, de los Angeles is something of a celebrity. On the way to meet her that day, I walked into a large, bullfighting-themed restaurant connected to the bullring. One of several loitering servers raced to greet me. I asked if he knows Karla de los Angeles, if she's well known, and he responded by screwing up his face and said with a small laugh, "Claro," or "Of course." He studied my face and clothes for some trace of my origins before abruptly turning and walking away.But the day before I made it to the bullring, I spoke to some locals and got the sense that bullfighting, though it's one of the city's main attractions, isn't so popular. Tourists—mostly Mexican—fill its stands during the season. In a rock club where patrons order entire bottles of tequila and scream Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots songs in broken English, the lead singer of a grunge cover band intimated to me that the people there care little about bullfighting, and that it's a Spanish thing. He hocked a loogie on the floor, narrowly missing my shoes.Another local man told me that he believed the bullring to be a monument to a time when their ancestors had been duped into helping the Spanish fight the Mexicans.Tlaxcala's history stands at odds with much of Mexico, thanks to an early alliance with the Spanish. In pre-Hispanic times, the rival Aztecs surrounded the fierce Tlaxcalans, a situation that the conquistador Hernán Cortés exploited in his quest to conquer what is now Mexico City. First Cortés fought the Tlaxcalan. Then he convinced thousands of Tlaxcalan to join his ranks against the Aztecs. To symbolically commemorate their friendship—and physically cement Spain's presence—Cortés ordered the construction of the first church in the Americas, Tlaxcala's Iglesia de San Francisco, which is right against the bullring. Most structures, and many traditions—bullfighting included—are fraught with some historical burden."I would never let my daughter do this. The pain is too much."—Karla de los Angeles
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