Transnational Mythologies: When the Nahuals Cross the Border

Clément’s work is deeply marked by transnational and symbolic dynamics that give movement to the plot. These dynamics not only create situations or conflicts that strain political and social relations between nations – such as the incident of the American army in Mexico or the attempted interventionism to control angel-dust trafficking – but also allow for changes and transformations in the behavior of the characters, unexpected directions that make them rethink the immediate reality in which they exist. For example, Leonel and Ramón become true nahuals when they cross the border to recover Juan Grande’s hands. The scene described shows this process of transition that occurs both in the dream space, as well as at the moment they cross the dividing line between both countries. For Marteen Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, the dream induced in certain ritual processes in pre-Columbian Mexico allowed humans to split into two or reach a state of communion with their counterpart, the nahual. Analyzing the iconography of the Yoalli Ehecatl Codex, also known as the Borgia Codex, they explain that the liminal space generated by dreams allowed contact between gods and human beings, making possible the practitioners’ transformation (Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2007: 556). The interaction that Leonel and Román have with the old shaman during the dream has a certain hint of these ancestral practices, which help them awaken the legacy of the nahual living within them.

But the dream itself is an alien territory to the reality inhabited by Leonel and Román: foreigners and strangers in this magical world where the divine dwells. And just as they ask the poultryman Juan Caronte to help them cross the border “como mojados” (Clément 1999: 75), they must also ask this shaman for permission to wear the masks and enter this territory. These masks, in one way or another, allow them to adopt a new identity, to show an otherness that allegorically becomes their nahual face. Only then, as nahuals or migrants, do they manage to move between liminal and clandestine spaces where celestial beings dwell, or violent and transgressive ones where the border patrol is constantly on the lookout for anyone who wants to cross into the United States. Crossing the border allows Clément to reposition his characters outside the symbolic boundaries of the national or the supernatural, making them understand that their actions can have repercussions in a global context.

Crossing or moving through territories implies a transformation in the characters in Clément’s work. But this transformation is catalyzed by transnational or binational dynamics (thinking of the close relationship between Mexico and the United States) that give it agency and mobility beyond the confines or limits of the merely national. This transnational background is, without a doubt, given by Operación Bolívar, the joint maneuver between the Americans and Archangel Michael for the control of angel dust. And what is Operación Bolívar if not a process of destabilization of national sovereignties in Latin America due to American interventionism? Once inside the American army’s fortress, Leonel Arcángel meets the Gringo (John Smith) who, thanks to the help of Doña Marina, who serves as interpreter, manages to communicate his plan to insert the free market into the continent and unify the region: “Crearemos, a partir del comercio, un NUEVO ORDEN que rebasará las fronteras para traer nuevas riquezas al continente. EL SUEÑO DE BOLIVAR será una realidad” (Clément 1999: 89). Here, echoes of the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny – “¡¡América para todos los Americanos!!” (91) – seem to accompany the words of the Gringo, who distorts the so-called “Dream of Bolívar” to establish the free market. The United America is presented more as a dystopia where transnational corporations manage to eradicate the borders between nations, allowing the free passage of angel-dust trafficking. To achieve this, the gringo advocates a post-historical world in which “la riqueza material, y las fuerzas productivas de la humanidad también han cesado de crecer” (88) and where the control of religion, the media, and drug trafficking would allow him to mold continental America as he pleases: “Si tenemos el control de las Naciones, es para tener el control de las fronteras. Si tenemos el control de las fronteras basta con propaganda y flujo de droga para que los mismos pueblos se subleven” (93).

Thus, Clément creates a transnational mythology that is capable of dislocating the systems and mechanisms of representation by moving the characters from one side of the border to the other, from one side of Mexico to the other and from one side of the United States, in order to subvert the affront that Operación Bolívar represents. In the first part of Operación Bolívar, Clément manages to rethink and reinterpret the figures of the nahual and the angel by taking them out of the historical and cultural context in which they are ordinarily anchored (thinking of a Judeo-Christian vision, or a traditional vision of Mexican folklore), and positioning them in an alternative present where neoliberalism is lurking and where hyperviolence reigns as a measure of production. In the second part, the representation of these figures is exposed to this transnational context that challenges the very limits of national identities and nation-states and that calls into question the system of hyper-consumption in this present besieged by neoliberalism.

In “El Gabacho,” in the United States, Leonel, and Román can recognize and rediscover each other as nahuals, allowing a communion with spiritual and traditional practices that had been lost since the conquest. In the same way, the search for Juan Grande’s hands becomes a heroic and praiseworthy enterprise that goes beyond the individualistic desire to make money. From being antagonistic mercenaries concerned with their own interests, they turn to the search for and protection of that cultural legacy that is framed in the hands, claiming their work and their heritage as true pre-Columbian sorcerers, who resist. Because the hands, from this point of view, are the repository of the history and historicity of the native peoples who challenged the colonial forces to prevent the assimilation and destruction of their people, the legacy of the ancestors, tradition; but they are also the national heritage, the transmutation of magical practices into a violent and sadistic trade that in one way or another allows the stability of the domestic market in Mexico. To rediscover the hands is to safeguard national sovereignty in the face of global powers and foreign forces that are trying by any means to take control of them, as well as control of Mexico and Latin America.