45 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia Moreno-GarciaVelvet Was the Night
Silvia Moreno-GarciaFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Maite Jaramillo
Maite is one of the novel’s dynamic protagonists and point-of-view characters. Outwardly, Maite is a highly introverted and even taciturn character; she lives alone and has no friends outside of the women she works with. Maite pet sits for the other people in her building, and when she does, she always steals something from their apartments—something seemingly inconsequential, like the statue of San Judas Tadeo. These thefts highlight that Maite believes that life has been less kind to her than it has been to others, so she feels justified in stealing from those who she perceives to be more fortunate. More than this, though, the fact that Maite lovingly collects all of these trinkets from her neighbors suggests a desire for connection that she hasn’t found a healthy outlet for.
Maite is also very critical of other women around her. She resents Leonora for most of the narrative, in large part because of what Leonora represents: Leonora is wealthy, beautiful, and involved with multiple men. Maite’s resentment is, in part jealousy, because “[l]ove, frail as gossamer, stitched together from a thousand songs and a thousand comic books, made of the dialogue spoken in films and the posters designed by ad agencies” is what Maite values most of all (14). She seeks romantic connections, like the ones she reads about in Secret Romance. Maite’s arc in this narrative is ultimately one of disillusionment as her fantasy of finding storybook love is shattered.
Maite’s arc ends with her encounter with Elvis on the bus. She’s left with a decision to make: She can go home and listen to music, “[a]s she should” (278), or she can meet Elvis for coffee. The novel doesn’t end with Maite making a direct decision. She chooses to get off the bus before her stop, looking to the café and “wonder[ing] what would happen if she started walking there” (278). Though the ending is ambiguous, the fact that Maite sees a date with Elvis as a possibility reveals how her disillusionment with the standard narrative of love and romance has opened her to other ways of finding emotional fulfillment and thriving in her womanhood. Whether or not she chooses to pursue Elvis, the fact that she sees him as an option demonstrates the nature of her growth.
Elvis/Ermenegildo
Elvis is one of the novel’s dynamic protagonists and point-of-view characters. Elvis was born and raised in a low-income neighborhood of Mexico City and, after a failed stint as a conman, was offered a position working with the Hawks. He is different from the other Hawks in his aspirations. Unlike the other men who joined the group to exorcise their violent inclinations, Elvis doesn’t “like beating people” (1). He longs to ascend to a position within the group where he can only give orders and doesn’t have to engage in the daily violence. Illustrating the theme of Aspirations of Class Mobility, Elvis yearns to use his work to achieve a higher social status, as embodied by El Mago. His hopes are ultimately dashed when El Mago’s true motivations are revealed, and the Hawks are disbanded.
Elvis also joined the Hawks because he was in search of community: “His real family were the Hawks. El Mago, El Gazpacho, even those fuckups El Güero and the Antelope. That’s what he had” (210). Elvis joined the group, in part, to reinvent himself and craft a new identity that would be accepted and nurtured by this newfound community. Elvis carries some amount of shame from having been raised in a low-income community, and he aims to shed this shame by taking on an entirely new identity: an identity based around his chosen name, “Elvis.” This chosen name speaks to Elvis’s love of American pop music but also to his ambition. Elvis Presley was, after all, the “King”; Elvis longs for a similar social standing.
The revelation of El Mago’s true motives and the disbanding of the Hawks throws Elvis into an identity crisis. By the novel’s Epilogue, he has lost his father figure, community, and employment. When Maite asks him on the bus who he is, he tells her, “I was a Hawk. I’m not anything in particular now” (276); then, he reveals that his name is Ermenegildo. It’s unclear if this name is a new name that Elvis has chosen for himself or a reversion to the name he had before taking on the Elvis identity. Either way, dropping “Elvis” indicates that the man is ready for a new chapter—one that isn’t defined by the naked ambition that came with the Elvis allusion but instead a simpler, more manageable life. The ending of the novel speaks to Elvis’s impulse toward optimism; even though he has lost the only community that accepted him, he still believes he can find comfort in other people, revealed by his decision to reach out to Maite, with whom he feels aligned.
Rubén Morales
Rubén is a member of the radical art collective Asterisk and is Maite’s primary love interest for much of the novel. Rubén met Leonora through Asterisk and dated Leonora for a while; Leonora eventually left him for Emilio, which caused Rubén to resent Emilio. Unlike Emilio, Rubén comes from a working-class background and, in Maite’s estimation, isn’t nearly as handsome as the dashing but traitorous Emilio. When Maite first meets Rubén, he works in a printing shop but spends his free time dedicated to Asterisk’s causes.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia uses Rubén’s presence in the novel to flesh out the sociopolitical conflicts present in Mexican society in this historical moment and to humanize the struggle leftist students and activists faced when protesting the PRI. In Chapter 22, Rubén gives Maite (and the reader) an overview of what he perceives to be wrong with the political situation in Mexico. He complains about alleged radicals who believe they are “changing things from the inside” (213)—a philosophy of gradual progress akin to what Emilio espouses. Rubén’s monologue gives insight into the leftist ideology of the moment that held that change cannot be made by using the mechanisms of a broken political system; he, along with most of Asterisk, believes that the system must be overhauled entirely.
Rubén acts as a foil for Maite in that, unlike Maite, he doesn’t immediately romanticize their sexual relationship and assume that they are headed for a long-term romance. As Maite discovers too late, Rubén has only ever conceived of their connection as casual sex between friends; it’s revealed at the end that he’s never fallen out of love with Leonora and longs to get back together with her. His sexual relationship with Maite isn’t manipulative; Rubén genuinely cares for her as a friend, even becoming protective of her when he fears that the Hawks might be closing in on them. Ultimately, Rubén’s arc in the novel is about reconnecting with Leonora—an arc that spurs Maite’s realization about the romantic fantasies she’s always harbored.
El Mago/Leonardo Trejo
El Mago is Elvis’s boss, the leader of the Hawks, and Leonora’s uncle. He is the static villain of the novel whose true intentions remain hidden for much of the narrative. From Elvis’s early perspective, El Mago is the model of powerful masculinity: He is in control of a large group of men, he is wealthy enough to have his own, well-appointed apartment, and he speaks and acts with a reserved finesse that, in Elvis’s eyes, makes him “classy.” Elvis’s perception of El Mago slowly shifts over the course of the narrative after Justo plants the idea that El Mago might have killed El Gazpacho. Elvis begins to see a different side of his boss as Anaya’s investigation closes in on them: El Mago becomes cruel and petty, criticizing Elvis as “a fool” even as Elvis remains the only man loyal to him.
Elvis initially believes that El Mago, or “the magician,” has chosen his name because of the way he enacts power: Like a magician, his power is unknowable but potent, and he operates without being detected. As the narrative progresses, though, this name begins to take on additional valences of meaning. El Mago also deals in tricks and deception, as Elvis learns when he discovers that the woman El Mago has had him searching for all this time is actually his niece and that he’ll do anything—including killing the innocent Maite—in order to get his hands on the films in his niece’s possession. El Mago reveals himself to be a piece of the broken political apparatus of the PRI; he is a self-serving manipulator who uses power only to benefit himself. Contrary to what Elvis initially believed, El Mago never intended to help the Hawks who worked for him, and he even killed El Gazpacho in order to achieve his own ends. Elvis ultimately kills El Mago with a screwdriver—a twisted homage to El Mago’s theory that his Hawks should use guns as little as possible.
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