The Hands of the Nahuals: Violence and Resistance in the Era of Neoliberalism

In his Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (1585), Fray Bernardino de Sahagún provides one of the first portraits we have of these pre-Columbian sorcerers or necromancers that we know today in Latin America as nahuals:

To understand this combative identity of the nahual that Clément incorporates in his characters, it may be helpful to review the way in which Mexican folklore has described this mythological figure in recent centuries. In his essay, “Totemismo y Nahualismo” (1944), the Mexican writer and anthropologist Francisco Rojas González (1904–1951) carries out an exhaustive analysis of the spiritual practices of the Mexican highlands to understand fully the phenomenon of nahualism as a method of expression of individuality in opposition to the communal vision of Indigenous populations. For Rojas, one of the important factors that distinguishes nahualism from totemism is the social aspect. Although both, as ritual practices of the Mesoamerican peoples, resort to animism – the belief in attributing a vital principle or human characteristics to living beings and natural phenomena – totemism employs that principle as a means of family or communal protection, a way of resorting to the powers of nature to safeguard the integrity of the group. On the other hand, nahualism uses such knowledge as “a clearly individualistic practice, tending to protect a man, but not a group” (Rojas 1944: 367). In this sense, isolated from the clan and the social context, the nahual makes use of his “strength, sanctity and skill” to survive or achieve his objectives, to sneak, transformed into an animal, through the undergrowth and perhaps steal food from rural communities. That agency and individuality that Rojas ascribes to the nahual does not fit with the social structure of primitive peoples “who found in grouping their best defense” (368). This therefore begs the question: when did the nahual become a terrifying character, a malevolent sorcerer who is only interested in causing panic?

Rojas finds that this significant change could have developed after the conquest of New Spain, and to do so, he draws mainly on the writings of the French priest Charles Etienne Brasseur (1814–74). In texts such as Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l’Amerique Centrale (1857), Abbé Brasseur suggests that the practice of nahualism took hold as a way of countering the advance of Spanish culture within the colonized territories. In Brasseur’s eyes, the nahuals were the custodians of an ancestral knowledge who attempted to resist Catholicism’s process of assimilation through the dissemination of such knowledge: “the nahuallis were nothing more than Indigenous people who persisted in idolatry, who, by means of artifice, found proselytes among those who had exchanged their ancestral religion for the Christian one” (Rojas 1944: 362). Daniel G. Brinton also agrees with Brasseur in supposing that nahualism was more of an esoteric cult that had unified several tribes in Mexico and Central America in an attempt to generate opposition to the government and religion brought by the European conquerors (1894: 12). Under this idea, the nahual is presented as an individual at war, resisting the advance of Western knowledge personified in the European evangelizers. He uses as his weapons the artifice, animistic magic, cunning, and primitive practices that have been conferred upon him over generations in order to preserve his culture. This process resulted in a method of self-protection in which the individual clearly sought to escape from the snares of the Catholic religion and submission to Spanish rule, and for this he isolated himself from the civilized world, finding refuge in the pre-Columbian cosmogony: “Primitive nahualism, that is, the terrifying type, is transformed in the first days of the conquest into a secret and xenophobic sect, later to metamorphose into a semi-religious complex, which searches for protective spirits for the individual” (Rojas 1944: 369).

Clément employs this same sense of resistance by giving the nahuals in his graphic novel the knowledge and skills to confront the invaders, in this case the Spanish and the angels. In the “Introducción al profano lector” with which Operación Bolívar begins, Clément recounts how the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the continent accompanied by “ejércitos de ángeles armados,” who attacked the Indigenous populations (Clément 1999: 1). In this reinterpretation of the conquest, the eradication at the hands of these “emisarios de la destrucción,” these angels brandishing their weapons against the populations of the new continent, not only decreased the number of settlers but also diminished the culture of those pre-Columbian civilizations through the indoctrination of the Catholic religion. Only the nahuals, as bearers of ancestral knowledge, were capable of resisting and fighting against these celestial oppressors: “The sorcerers resisted. The nahuals, the most powerful sorcerers, took on the task of fighting the angels” (Rojas 1944: 1). Here Clément’s narrative coincides with the bellicose characterization that Francisco Rojas and Charles Etienne Brasseur conferred on nahualism. The nahualli, a powerful pre-Columbian sorcerer, embodies the figure of a solitary and transgressive being who opposes colonial power, a supernatural and thaumaturgical force that seeks to oppose the methodical annihilation of the original cultures on the continent. However, the alliance between the Spanish Inquisition and the angels initiates a systematic hunt and persecution of the nahuals, which succeeds in reducing their numbers and eradicating traces of their presence. Clément also suggests that the systematic extermination of nahuals carried out by the colonial power helped the process of assimilation and indoctrination of the American populations, resulting in the loss of a complete understanding of ancestral worldviews among the new generations: “Los hijos de los nahuales, los mestizos, perdieron la memoria, empobreciendo la grandeza de sus dones” (Clément 1999: 1).

The graphic novel shows how this struggle, this methodical fight between angels and nahuals, has continued to the end of the twentieth century. Now, under the principles of the free market and globalization, the children of the nahuals have become angel hunters. The prey has turned against the oppressors, giving a twist to the colonial subjugation that began with the conquest more than 500 years ago. However, this does not redeem the status of these heirs of the ancient nahuallis, transformed into mere hitmen profiting from the bodies of their victims. Leonel is clear when he says that “Podríamos ser héroes, pero nacimos marcados con vocación para la muerte” (Clément 1999: 15).

The novel also explains how the nahuals are able to kill angels, how they manage to transmute divine matter into something tangible, transforming the ethereal into something palpable and mundane. The magical, almost sacred, condition of the nahuals and their offspring allows them to have an intimate and unique contact with that otherworldly and metaphysical realm, forbidden to the rest of the people. With their hands they are able to touch and feel the weightless and insubstantial matter of which the angels are made; with their eyes they can see and discern the form and features of angels even though they are invisible to the rest of the population. All these abilities make them special and necessary for the global market in angel parts, since they are the only ones capable of manufacturing and distributing such merchandise, the only ones who can have real contact with the divine experience and essence. This is made clear in the work when Román – one of the protagonists – interrogates an angel to get the information he needs about the illegal transfer of weapons to Colombia. The text shows Román hitting the face of an angel tied hands and legs to a chair under the glow of a lamp. Below this scene, as a small tableau, important information from the Centro de Estudios de Angelología y Ciencias Afines helps the reader understand the unique quality of an angel’s body: “Un ángel sólo siente dolor hasta que un cazador le toca, de otro modo permanece como Materia Divina, inconsciente e insensible. Los gemidos de los ángeles no se oyen pero trituran el corazón i enloquecen a los niños i las hembras preñadas” (Clément 1999: 27). The scene makes evident the obscene cruelty, sadism, and lack of empathy of the children of the nahuals. But it also shows how the hands of the nahuals manage to give materiality and weight to the ethereal consistency of the angels, even giving them awareness of the reality that humans inhabit by causing them pain and suffering.

The plot thickens when the United States Army wants to seize power to control the market in angel-bone dust, a market that lies in the hands of the children of the nahuals. To do so, they decide to cut off and steal the hands of Juan Grande, “el más viejo de los cazadores de ángeles,” and experiment with them (Clément 1999: 18). Clément thus introduces the Angel Protector, a mercenary who unquestioningly follows the orders of the American general John Smith. Armed with a machete, the Angel Protector lunges at Juan Grande to sever his hands. The scene, divided in two, shows the Angel Protector at the top of the page with his back turned, his enormous bat-like wings above the body of Juan Grande, who is kept restrained by judicial agents, while the angel hunter’s severed arms are shown at the bottom. The images in turn are accompanied by three phrases that give them meaning: Above, the expression “Santísimo Destino Doloroso” seems to recount the fate that awaits Juan Grande and all the nahuals; while below, “I Need Their Hands / Their Hands” appears to echo of the desire of the North American army to obtain the ancestral power of the nahuals; all this is divided in the middle by the onomatopoeia of Juan Grande’s cry of pain (“¡AAAHHH!”) that serves as a bridge and link between one image and the other (22). The hands have an important role in the development of the story, since they not only mark the reason why Leonel and Román go to the United States, to recover them, but also show the transnational interests that the American army has in Mexican territory, to create a monopoly on angel dust. Juan Grande’s hands symbolize the legacy that the ancient nahuallis inherited from the mestizos and that American interventionism is now trying to usurp. Also, under the motto “I Need Their Hands / Their Hands,” there is an echo, by way of metonymy, of the overexploitation of the nahual’s work, of the poorly paid work, coming in dribs and drabs, of the Mexican day laborer, of the migrant.

Thus, Clément’s artistic production, as well as the complex mythological framework that he constructs in Operación Bolívar, would have the function of thinking about and rethinking a form of national “identity” in opposition to the otherness represented by the United States and its American way of life. As Héctor D. Fernández L’Hoeste suggests, “by using the United States as a narrative driving mechanism; as a form of otherness sponsoring a particular version of mexicanidad” (2007: 16), the Mexican cartoonist manages to bring to light a type of combative mexicanidad that is capable of surviving and challenging these interventionist forces. It is here where the nahual, the mestizo, as a symbol of that mexicanidad rooted in pre-Columbian and ancestral practices, along with the exacerbated machismo and violence associated with Mexican masculinity, rises as a personification of resistance in the face of abrupt changes in the geopolitical scene. It is that same nahual that, both in the description of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and in the account of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, throws himself combatively against the Spanish conqueror to keep his freedom and culture alive. It is this same nahual that in Clément’s graphic novel must show his fierce mexicanidad to survive the neoliberal transformations that put his job as an angel hunter at risk, while he fights against the new invaders.