Racial Amnesia and Queer Identities in Carlos Fuentes’s “Chac Mool”

Abstract

Few of Carlos Fuentes’s short stories have achieved greater recognition than “Chac Mool,” which has been anthologized on numerous occasions. Most of the scholarship centers on how the story treats the tensions inherent to the promotion of a modernity-driven, mestizophillic postrevolutionary state and the pre-Columbian cosmologies that continued to exist in the country well into the twentieth century. In this reading, Filiberto’s ultimate death by drowning in Acapulco results from his ignorance about pre-Columbian deities. This article validates previous readings while also suggesting that Fuentes’s story opens possibilities for parallel readings that emphasize different cultural critiques. Alongside the nationalist paradigm, we posit a queer reading of the story. When read through this register, our interpretation of different elements of the story—particularly the narrative surrounding Filiberto’s ultimate death—necessarily shifts. Beyond simply criticizing a nationalist order that reified its Indigenous past while remaining ignorant about pre-Columbian peoples, the story also communicates the author’s uneasiness with the role that gay and LGBTQ+ individuals were playing in national literature.