11 Forms of the Beast: The Figure of the Werewolf in Three Recent Mexican Novels

In line with the proposals of critics such as Chantal Bourgault du Coudray, “The more psychologized werewolf … would not necessarily undergo a literal transformation, but it would certainly exhibit lupine behaviour, indicative of an interior disturbance” (55). An approach to the figure of the werewolf that only contemplates narratives where the physical transformation of the subject into a beast is explicit can lead to the assumption that there are practically no iterations of this monster in contemporary Latin American literature. On the contrary, if we take a broader view of the monster, we can observe that contemporary Mexican narrative offers numerous examples of lycanthropic narratives.

The three narrative works that I will analyze in this chapter have the werewolf (and the were-woman) as a common thread. I will argue here that the appearance of this figure is not a mere coincidence but a determined attempt to use the classic figure of horror and Gothic fiction as a means to develop a popular representation of a series of complex political, economic, and social changes that have swept through Mexico during the past three decades. These changes are closely related to the incorporation of the country, like the rest of Latin America, into the paradigm of the Washington Consensus (Panizza 2009), which involved economic liberalization, the opening-up of the market, and the abandonment of economic interventionist policies. The novels that I will analyze represent three distinct moments in this series of changes. The first of these narratives will be El enrabiado by Felipe Montes (2003). In this novel, one can observe how the protagonist werewolf represents the sudden precarity of the lives of those workers who were left unemployed after the withdrawal of state financing from companies that had previously received support, as well as the change in the productive paradigm from an industrial model to an assembly model based on maquiladoras.

In the second novel, Perra brava by Orfa Alarcón (2010), I will demonstrate the construction of a coming-of-age novel in the years following the declaration of the “war on drugs” by former President Felipe Calderón in 2006. This novel, I will argue, uses the classic figure of horror narratives to attempt a form of mythic representation of the growing violence as well as its increasing level of savagery during the first years of the drug war. Finally, Lobo by Bibiana Camacho (2017), as a late narrative of this period, and published after the first decade following the declaration of war, resorts to the figure of the werewolf in an ambiguous way to attempt the impossible representation of the forced disappearance of people during this period.

These three narratives are traversed by a shared context of publication and reception of continued social crisis and violence in Mexico. The three novels present a reflection on and critical intervention in their context of publication in the tradition that the horror novel has upheld for centuries. As Mabel Moraña points out, the monstrous: “Proliferates in totalitarian regimes, in classic colonial or modern imperialist contexts, in segregated, impoverished and super-exploited societies in which otherness is expelled by the dominant powers to the outskirts of the system, to an indeterminate zone of helplessness and hopelessness” (2017: 46).

Indeed, these novels are perfect examples of the proliferation of monstrous narratives in a context of disintegrating social ties, impoverishment of livelihoods for the majority of the population, and growing economic inequalities.