[Answer]-Where does django get initial fixtures from on manage.py test?

Django looks for fixtures in the fixtures folder of each application by default, as well as where you specify in the FIXTURE_DIRS setting.

What is happening in your case is that there is no initial_data fixture, which is the one that gets loaded when you run syncdb/migrate. The fixture to load must be specified in the fixtures attribute of the testcase you run in the second command.