Velvet Was the Night

Both Elvis and Maite struggle to fit into rigidly defined and often damaging gender roles that are modeled for them by life in 1970s Mexico City. The characters’ arcs demonstrate the challenges of both adhering to and rebelling against gendered expectations amidst turbulent times.

Maite finds herself in a cultural moment that is very much defined by sexism but is also at the start of a transition that might offer her the beginnings of liberation. On the one hand, Maite notes that this historical moment offers shifting expectations of what womanhood is or should be. Maite reflects that her views of what is and isn’t respectable for a woman to do differ from her mother’s: “Women didn’t leave home until they were married, but two years before, Maite had grown tired of the limits of her mother’s home and decamped for her place at the Escandón” (23). This observation reveals how this historical moment is a watershed for women’s liberation. Maite, in spite of her conservative upbringing, feels empowered enough to leave home as a single woman and become financially independent.

Despite this, Maite lacks empowerment in her life as a lower-middle-class woman in Mexico City. This fact is repeatedly underscored by her interactions with the mechanics who are holding her car: She believes that they are taking advantage of her because she is an unmarried woman. Because she’s unable to do anything about this, she is subjected to even more abuse on public transportation at the hands of men. Maite also internalizes this disempowerment, in part through the types of media she consumes. Her female-focused magazines, for example, tell her exclusively about how she should act in public in order to attract men: “‘The Fantastic Guide to Flirting’…included the recommendation to remember that every man you meet is a potential date, so women shouldn’t ruin their chances by being too rude or shy” (61). Maite internalizes the idea that women exist only as objects for the male gaze. In reflecting on her relationship with Cristóbalito, she remembers how she hated looking fat around him and how she “pinched the flabby skin of her belly and thought about cutting it with a pair of scissors” (98). Maite’s internalization of sexist beauty standards creates her self-loathing; she sees herself both as a body that must be desirable at all times and as one that is constantly under threat from male violence.

Cultural attitudes toward women and femininity also impact how men in the novel perform masculinity. Working for the Hawks, Elvis is surrounded by men who constantly police other men’s masculinity. Before Elvis becomes El Güero’s boss, El Güero tells him, “A man who spends so much time running a comb through his hair isn’t a man at al […] The real Elvis Presley is a hip-shaking girlie man” (4). In this critique of Elvis Presley and implicit attack on Elvis himself, El Güero defines successful masculinity in opposition to femininity; men should, in his estimation, never possess qualities like vanity, which belong only to the realm of the feminine. For the men of the Hawks, masculinity is also defined by its proximity to violence. When the group is tasked with following Maite, the Antelope complains, “I’m damn good at target practice and never get to shoot anyone. Instead, there’s this fucking busywork, which, frankly, should be for bitches” (82). According to the Antelope, men’s work is that of action, violence, and destruction. This is a construction of masculinity that Elvis is part of but one that he also hopes to escape. His obsession with El Mago is, in part, an obsession with gaining access to a type of masculinity that is both socially acceptable and free of the expectation of violence, revealing the connections between gender roles and Aspirations of Class Mobility. At the end of the novel, Elvis discovers that the masculinity El Mago inhabits is deeply toxic in its own right; he is left to define what a “successful” masculinity might look like on his own terms.