45 pages • 1 hour read
Silvia Moreno-GarciaVelvet Was the Night
Fiction | 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.
Symbols & Motifs
Music
Music is a motif that plays a critical role in Velvet Was the Night, for both the novel’s plot and its themes. While Maite and Elvis occasionally listen to Spanish-language music, most of their music consumption is dominated by 1950s and 1960s American pop—Bobby Darin, Elvis Presley, Nancy Sinatra, Arthur Prysock, and others. The use of music in the novel is often critical for aligning the timelines of Maite’s and Elvis’s chapters and allowing the reader to easily understand the order in which events unfold. More than this, though, the ubiquitous presence of American pop speaks to how American culture and its norms are beginning to bleed into Mexican culture. Elvis and Maite are different people from very different walks of life, and yet both listen to all of the same music; by 1971, American culture had thoroughly become a part of most Mexicans’ lives.
Early in the novel, the Antelope criticizes Elvis for his music taste, saying that he listens to “all that propaganda, like a fucking degenerate anarchist” (39). The Antelope’s criticism is aligned with the PRI’s attitude toward American music at this time; Silvia Moreno-Garcia notes in the Afterword that the government asserted that American pop “fomented rebellion and anti-nationalist views” (279). This attitude toward the influx of American art speaks to the PRI’s highly nationalist, xenophobic views. The fact that Elvis—a member of a paramilitary organization—is obsessed with American pop, though, speaks to how little control the PRI has over the cultural cross-pollination their country is undergoing. Despite government crackdowns against the proliferation of American music, American-made music and Mexican music influenced by American pop would only continue to flourish in the decades to come.
Secret Romance
Secret Romance is a serialized romance pulp that Maite is obsessed with; as a motif throughout the novel, it illustrates the theme of Gender Roles in 1970s Mexico. It tells the story of “Beatriz, a young nurse sent to a distant tropical island to care for an ailing old woman, who is torn between her passion for two brothers, Jorge Luis, a chivalrous doctor, and Pablo Palomo, a dissolute playboy nursing a broken heart” (21). Within Velvet Was the Night, Secret Romance works to establish the heteronormative fantasies of sex, power, gender roles, and desire through which Maite understands her world. Secret Romance describes a world in which a woman’s life is defined by the choices she makes with regard to her sex life; Jorge Luis and Pablo Palomo each represent a different path that Beatriz could choose to take in life, and these are the sole paths available to her.
The sexual and gendered dynamics of Secret Romance are the lens through which Maite attempts to understand her growing connections with two of the men in the novel—Emilio and Rubén. Because one man is rich and debonair and the other is poorer and adventurous, Maite immediately begins to map the dynamics of Secret Romance onto her own life, casting herself as the heroine who must choose between suitors. Rubén’s slighting of Maite completely upends the mental narrative Maite had built about her love life. Earlier in the novel, Maite brings a copy of Secret Romance with her any time she goes to work or runs errands, but in the Epilogue, she is on the bus without a copy of the pulp. This absence suggests that she no longer subscribes to the gender dynamic at play in Secret Romance. The invitation from Elvis opens Maite to the idea that she can dictate the terms of her own romantic life; Elvis is a new path she can follow, but he is far from the only one.
The Statue of San Judas Tadeo
When she is first asked to care for Leonora’s cat, Maite steals a small statue of San Judas Tadeo from Leonora’s apartment. The statue has “a crack running down its side, and the girl had taped the bottom of it with yellow masking tape” (47). Though Maite initially believes that this broken statue will never be missed by Leonora, it is later revealed that the statue is broken because Leonora was hiding the incriminating film inside. The statue-as-container is a fitting symbol to represent the conflict at the heart of this novel. The statue-container mixes the religious and the political: A heavily Catholic object, typical of Catholic iconography present in most Mexican homes, conceals a dark truth about how the Catholic-aligned PRI treats its citizens.
It is also notable that this is a statue of San Judas Tadeo—Saint Jude the Apostle. In Catholic tradition, Jude is the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. His statue symbolizes both of the groups seeking him: Asterisk, who are on the brink of disbanding because of how fractured its coalition has become, and the Hawks, who are also on the brink of disbanding due to political instability within the PRI. While neither of these groups survives through the end of the narrative, the statue does end up saving two other lost causes: Maite and Elvis, both of whom are brought into scenarios of lethal violence on account of the film canisters but who ultimately survive.
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By Silvia Moreno-Garcia
