The Bones of Angels: The Body of Progress and History

In his article “De ángeles, narcos y libre comercio,” Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste analyzes how angels interact directly with the sociopolitical and geopolitical background that Clément creates in his work and concludes that, just like the nahuals, angels are linked to “national identity” (2007: 16). That is, instead of depicting these celestial beings as protectors or messengers between the divine and the earthly, the motif of the angel appears more as a narrative mechanism in the work of the Mexican cartoonist that allows multiple facets of Mexican identity to be explored: “it is not an allusion to the resurgent profile of Mexican Christianity, as could be interpreted in a reductive way, but rather a glimpse of the latent elimination and extinction of countless versions of Mexican identity” (7).

Clément’s narrative reinterprets national history to make room for an alternative reality in which the existence of angels gives meaning to Mexico’s historical framework. The slaughter of a group of young angels to satisfy the ambitions of a transnational operation references to the student massacre of Tlatelolco in 1968. The tragedy of the angels surprised by the bullets of the Olimpia battalion and the American helicopters masks the tragedy concerning the university students riddled by the Mexican army during the presidency of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–70). It should be emphasized that this act does not diminish the importance of the original event, but that the Mexican cartoonist uses the feeling, pain, or anguish generated by the historical moment to catapult and frame the enormous force of what he describes in his images. Thus, emblematic moments of national history are disguised or reinterpreted under the figure of angels as a way of inserting them into the logic of this fictional world. We have already seen this with the process of the conquest of the Americas, where armies of celestial entities allied themselves with the Spanish conquistadors, contributing to the defeat of the pre-Columbian civilizations. The Mexican cartoonist uses the angel to speak of mexicanidad, but also to question the historical background and the vicissitudes that have shaped the present.

Angels have formed part of the culture and history of Mexico since colonial times. In Angels, Demons, and the New World, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes explains how the Catholic imagery behind angels allowed early missionaries, after the conquest, to help Indigenous communities in the Americas understand, among other things, the complex relationship between heaven and earth. From the very beginnings of Catholicism, angels have always served as a bridge between the earthly and the divine, emissaries between both planes, or an intermediate point for dialogue between man and deity. This prominent facet of angels was already present in the first liturgical texts in Nahuatl, which the religious and mendicant orders used to convert the Indigenous peoples in New Spain, such as the Psalmodia Christiana (1558–61), a text compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún (Cervantes 2013: 73). Of course, the existence of angels within the intricate development and structure of the universe was a de facto truth for Catholicism. Beginning with St. Augustine (354-430) and his defense of Christianity in The City of God (412–26), the presence of these winged entities and their variegated hierarchy comprised another way of understanding the divine plan that God had for man: one in which the human race had to share its earthly existence along with these ethereal characters.

The mendicant orders – such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, Jesuits, among others – exploited these principles to avoid idolatry and carpeted their churches and rituals with angels to make visible to the native populations that these entities were there to protect them, but also to observe them. As Fernando Cervantes states, many of these mendicant orders made sure to demonstrate that the natural world, that the reality in which they lived, was already influenced and affected by divine grace (2013: 86). All this reinforced the idea that the supernatural world in which angels existed shared that same time and space as the Indigenous populations, coexisting in unison in a sense of transcendental community: “This almost instinctive awareness of the closeness between the material and the spiritual worlds was taken for granted in the late medieval period and was preserved in early Nahuatl literature with a deep sense of realism ” (88). For both Fray Juan de Zumárraga (1468–1548) and Pedro de Gante (1478–1572), the presence of angels was imminent, and therefore they were used in the liturgy to reinforce spiritual exercises and the value of virtue in colonial education. But also, over time, angels began to populate the private and intimate space of the homes of Indigenous communities. As Caterina Pizzigoni points out, the images were mounted on altars next to the saints to ensure protection of the home, paving the way for a more private and different spirituality than that usually practiced en masse in churches (2013: 143–4). In the privacy of their homes, Indigenous communities were adopting new ways of approaching these ethereal figures, allowing a dialogue between the spiritual vision of Catholicism and the complex supernatural world of pre-Columbian cults.

Of course, this closeness between the human world and the supra-terrestrial space of angels observed during the colonial era is difficult to understand from a modern and Western point of view. However, for the motley and postmodern fiction that Clément proposes, it is a possibility that gives clarity to the development of his work and enables us to understand the great transnational changes, the great critique of the neoliberal system. Edward King and Joanna Page suggest, in turn, that the motif of the angel in Clément’s work allows us to understand the connections between materiality and abstraction, between the terrestrial and the supernatural, but within the context of postmodernity, the digital age, and the period following the signing of NAFTA (2017: 91). To do this, both draw on the work of Brian McHale, who proposes the term “postmodern angelology” to describe how angels show a constant loss of ontological boundaries in writers such as Thomas Pynchon or William T. Vollmann. For King and Page, the angel inhabits a certain liminal space in the imaginary of Western culture, an “in-between” of ontological spaces that only certain hybrid constructs, such as cyborgs, can occupy. According to McHale, the angel and the cyborg symbolize human aspirations to reach a state beyond their mortal condition (King and Page 2017: 91). In this sense, the angel would be presented as a longed-for bridge to shorten the distances between the human and the nonhuman, between the earthly and the heavenly (92). For King and Page, this hybrid nature allowed movement and communication between man and God, between the human and the divine, during a colonial past to be regulated. However, in postmodern works such as Operación Bolívar, the angel allows a division of ontological limits, one related to mass culture, to be generated (93–4). The angel is no longer an ethereal presence inhabiting the Empyrean, but a material and physical construction, even used as a commodity for the global market (96). In this corporeality of the angel, in this exotic materiality that both nahuals and North Americans desire, Clément finds a reason to speak of rampant capitalism, exposing the brutality of the neoliberal market and highlighting the presence of drug trafficking as a result of these socioeconomic conditions. Because, as Rafael Acosta rightly asserts, the variegated relationship between late capitalism and the neocolonialism of drug trafficking after the signing of NAFTA allows us to imagine fantastic creatures that defy logic and open a door to rethinking the complex sociopolitical reality of fin-de-siècle Mexico (2011: 152).

Thus, the marketing of angel parts can be understood as an overexploitation of the supernatural world to feed the interests of the earthly world. While before, the function of the angel during the colonial period served as a bridge between the earthly and the celestial, now the massacre of angels, during the rift opened by globalization, allows the wheel of capitalist consumption to be fed as if the immediate reality that Clément describes depended on the trivialization of the act of killing in order to survive or grow economically and technologically. The modern world, in Operación Bolívar, builds its foundations on the bones and organs of the angels, on the materiality of the divine that is incarnated in the exotic body of these celestial entities. It is in this exotic element, alien to the human world, that the success of the entire operation and commercialization of angelic bodies, which were once described as ethereal but in Clément’s fable acquire unique properties that allow human society to progress, lies. This is made very clear at the beginning of the work when Leonel explains and introduces his reader to the hunt for angels, accompanied by the image of a naked angel reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: “Pese a lo que dice La Iglesia, los ángeles no son del todo etéreos. Ligeros sí, pero no etéreos. Están hechos de materia divina, al parecer bastante desconocida aún por la ciencia. En ello radica parte de un buen negocio” (Clément 1999: 9). Progress and possible technological development in the graphic novel depend on the death of hundreds of angels to bring and commodify the divine in everyday consumer objects.

It is significant that one of the characters most interested in increasing his power in this market is the Archangel Michael himself, general of the heavenly armies. And unlike most angels, who appear passive and defenseless before the children of the nahuals, this heavenly portent shows himself belligerent and aggressive – willing to support the American army in the operation that steals Juan Grande’s hands. Wearing gleaming medieval armor and the skull of a beast with sharp fangs for a helmet, his frightening and bellicose countenance signals to the reader that he is ready to enforce his imperialist will on any obstacle (Clément 1999: 94). Michael thus symbolizes the corrupt and immoral heavenly power that attempts to take control of the transnational trafficking of this drug. The sadistic and ambitious mentality of the Archangel Michael has his eyes set on the power over the life and death of all the angels he commands. This power to decide who lives and who dies compels him to cross transnational borders between Mexico and the United States in order to carry out his whims.

Of course, to achieve this, Archangel Michael requires the help of the nahuals, the only ones who can manufacture angel dust: “El Arcángel Miguel es quien nos va a proveer de ángeles para que ustedes los manufacturen. Cosa que ustedes y sólo ustedes, que tienen el DON, pueden hacer” (Clément 1999: 94). The pseudo transnational cooperation between Michael and the nahuals would thus aim to dismantle the monopoly of the Mexican market through the modernization and industrialization of the massacre of angels. This modernization, of course, sets aside the ancestral practices that the children of the nahuals have employed for centuries, while seeking to benefit from their cheap and poorly paid labor. One way in which the author shows the reader this precarization of labor is by showing the aftermath of the adoption of this socioeconomic system in Mexico. To this end, he inserts small fragments of fictitious newspapers that illustrate this illusion of accelerated growth deriving from the manufacture and industrialization of angel dust: “Para aprovechar el TLC, narcos de Ciudad Juárez y Torreón preparan maquiladoras, bodegas y terrenos fronterizos” (95). Likewise, Leonel’s words echo this position that clearly attacks the neoliberal and imperialist interests of the North Americans: “Para ti el mundo no es más que un montón de mano de obra barata” (96). Along with the symbolism of the hands, Clément also adds that of the maquiladoras, which have an enormous sociocultural weight within the entire neoliberal imaginary in Mexico. Both show the degree of modern slavery to which the Mexican is subjected, due to the imperialist interests of the United States. Operación Bolívar uses a border background and takes it to an urban context, from the border to Mexico City (Angelópolis) where Archangel Michael ends up taking all his angels and massacring them in Tlatelolco.