Velvet Was the Night

Like many thrillers, Velvet Was the Night features multiple point-of-view characters, and the chapters oscillate between their perspectives. Silvia Moreno-Garcia uses this narrative structure to create tension in several different ways. First, chapters typically end on cliffhangers; the opening chapter, for instance, ends with El Gazpacho getting injured during the protest and Elvis making the choice to disobey El Mago’s orders and drive his wounded friend to the hospital. At the end of the chapter, it’s unclear whether El Gazpacho will survive and whether Elvis will face consequences for his disobedience. Moreno-Garcia creates tension by using the shift in perspectives to delay the answers to these questions, keeping the reader invested in Elvis’s plotline while developing Maite’s. The point-of-view shifts also create tension by raising more abstract questions. Through this opening section, there’s no clear overlap between the plots in each point-of-view character’s plotline: Elvis is immediately embroiled in the sociopolitical conflict surrounding the protests, while Maite’s narrative appears to be more domestic, as she navigates her family life and cares for Leonora’s cat. The disparate natures of these plots raise questions about how these characters could possibly be connected and what circumstances could cause Elvis’s violent, politically charged world to intrude on Maite’s quieter home life.

Though Maite and Elvis don’t actually meet in person until the very end of the novel, their connection eventually develops into the beginning of a relationship. Moreno-Garcia seeds the possibility of such a connection between these characters in this opening section of the novel. In the first two chapters, Elvis’s and Maite’s mutual love of The Illustrated Larousse and Bobby Darin connects them; these small details speak to the possibilities of mutual interests between these very different people. Moreno-Garcia also uses the oscillation between points of view to create more subtle links between the two. Elvis’s first two chapters establish his desire to become more like El Mago; the narration in Chapter 3 notes that El Mago insists that “[b]oys need routines” (38). In the opening lines of the following chapter, Maite professes, “Routines provide meaning” (44). These small details speak to the potential ways that these two characters might help one another grow: Maite has already established a characteristic that Elvis wants to emulate in order to become more like the man he perceives his boss to be.

This opening section establishes the complicated dynamics of the dissemination of American culture and its impact on Mexican culture and identity through the motif of music. In relating his backstory, Elvis remembers a relationship with an older American woman who had “some sort of a fetish for ‘authentic’ Mexican culture” (33). In order to gain access to the financial stability she could provide, Elvis played into her fantasy of what Mexican “authenticity” looked like, trading “his shoes for huaraches to tickle her brown meat fantasy” (33). It is through his relationship with this woman that Elvis discovers his genuine love for American music. Elvis’s passion for American music is intimately connected with the need to self-stereotype his Mexicanity for consumption by American audiences. This piece of his backstory begins to speak to the complex ways in which the embrace of American cultural products can threaten the “authenticity” of Mexican identity, a theme that will run throughout the rest of the novel.