![]() He describes the “country Clubs” perpetrated by the wealthy ‘mexicanas modernas’ and the foreignization of Mexico.īy mixing these descriptions of past and present Fuentes eloquently paints a picture of a modern Mexico with no respect for it’s history. He describes the shift from indigenous religions to Christianity. He contrasts these aspects of indigenous Mexico with descriptions of Mexico post Spanish colonization. Sources: Huizilopochtli image:, Tlaxcala image:, Teotihuacán image: An Indian man answers the door who we understand to be the newly transformed Chac Mool. The creature enslaves Filbierto in his own home and torments him until one night Filbierto escapes to Acapulco where he drowns soon after.īack in the present day, Filiberto’s friend arrives at his house with his body. Then, the weirdest thing of all, the ChacMool starts transforming from stone to flesh. The water pipes in his house mysteriously burst, rainwater starts to seep in from outside flooding his home, he starts to hear inexplicable howling in the dead of night. Soon after lots of weird things start to happen. The story flips between past and present as the friend reads Filibiertos diary and tries to understand what happened to him.Īs the story progresses we learn that Filbierto is obsessed with indigenous Mexican art. ![]() ![]() His friend comes to collect his body and possessions and discovers his diary. The protagonist, Filibierto, drowns at the beginning of the story. What happens in Chac Mool?Ĭhac Mool is a short story from Fuentes’ book, Los días enmascarados (1954). Usually made out of stone in the form of a man with a bowl on his belly or chest, the Chac Mool was used as a place to make sacrificial offerings to the Gods. My position is that this story is less about supernatural events and more about a critique of Mexico's construction of identity and its relationship with the indigenous past and present.A Chac Mool is a type of Mesoamerican statue associated with the Aztecs and Mayans. Nonbinary sexuality is erased from this picture. This image serves to complicate and question the validity of Filiberto's identity and the machismo that underpins it, that is, la mexicanidad as championed by political nationalists of the last century who argue that Mexicans constitute a homogeneous mestizo population, neither fully European nor fully indigenous, but rather an amalgam of conflicting races and cultures. He wears a bathrobe with a scarf around his neck his face is powdered, his hair dyed, and lipstick is smeared on his mouth. The narrator's final description of the Indian who answers the door at the end of the story is clearly one of a man in drag. ![]() Furthermore, it argues for an alternative story that is hinted at, not by what is said, but by what is not said, suggesting Filiberto's implied homosexuality and the "moral depression" that he suffers because of it. This essay argues that the narrator's description on the last page of Carlos Fuentes' "Chac Mool" provides us with a tantalizing suggestion about the sexual orientation of the Indian who opens the door for the narrator in the surprise ending.
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