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8. Operación Bolívar: The Work of Art in the Age of Globalization
- University Press of Mississippi
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164 8 OPERACIÓN BOLÍVAR The Work of Art in the Age of Globalization “When our Spanish ancestors arrived on the continent,” reads the brief introduction to Edgar Clement’s graphic novel Operación Bolívar, “they did not come alone, with them came their gods and their armies of armed angels. For our indigenous ancestors these angels were not the incense vendors of the present day, they were emissaries of destruction. Between the sword of Cortés and the sword of Saint Michael the Archangel there was no difference” (1). In response to fierce resistance from the indigenous brujos (medicine men) and nahuales (guardian animal spirits), “the Holy Inquisition closed ranks with the archangels in the persecution of the nahuales, eliminating the most dangerous ones, mixing with the most capable, isolating the holdouts” (1). Historical traces of this holy war, asserts the introduction, are lost to the faded memory of Mexico’s mestizo majority , but live on in the modern descendants of the nahuales, who have inherited the ability to “touch the gods and their emissaries,” and hence the ability to kill angels (1). The 160-page, black-and-white graphic novel Operación Bolívar, the reader is informed, “is the first story about the angel hunters and their complex relations with the children of the gods and the children of men. Each one of these chess pieces has a past, present and future: RECUPERATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS” (1). Operación Bolívar was published in installments in the Mexican magazine Gallitos Comics, and again as a graphic novel in 1999 by Ediciones del Castor and the graphic arts collective Taller del Perro (Dog’s Workshop), with a distribution of 1,000 copies. Caligrama issued a new edition in 2007. Artists consider The Work of Art in the Age of Globalization 165 it the most important work of graphic narrative art in Mexico in the last two decades. According to fellow graphic artist José Quintero (author of the Buba series): “Operación Bolívar is the only work to date that has approached the graphic novel format in an intelligent, humorous, critical and virtuoso manner ” (Reyes). The premise of the novel is at once mystical and bloody: there are angels, and there are angel hunters who historically have had the ability, inherited through indigenous ancestry, of killing angels. The hunt for the mythical beings follows an economic logic, because angelic body parts possess an array of instrumental values. For this reason (and because one of the use values is a powerful narcotic known—in a literalization of a metaphor of the real-world drug culture—as “angel dust”), transnational corporations and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) are also interested in the angels, hoping to monopolize this supernatural resource in order to enrich themselves, and to strengthen their own technological development, their market position, and/or the national security apparatus of the United States. Narrated by an angel hunter, the story recounts how he and his partner, a brutish judicial police agent named Román, uncover and attempt to thwart a U.S.-based plot to massacre angels as a first step toward establishing total control over the global narcotics market, and thereby cementing unchallenged political control over the hemisphere. Behind the novel’s unique narrative premise is a long view of globalization in the Americas, from the European conquest of native peoples in the early sixteenth century, to the subsequent forceful imposition of a Eurocentric mercantilism by the colonizing powers, to the transnationalization of domestic markets under the twentieth-century hegemony of the United States. This regional story of globalization is the backbone of Operación Bolívar’s plot, the operational context for its angel hunters, and the historical circumstance that motivates the story’s proposed recuperation of the relationship between “past, present and future.” The introduction carefully binds the reader’s attention to how Clement’s novel fits into the much-vaunted contemporary “global moment,” because it announces the novel as a graphic counterpart to a centuries-long war for material and spiritual control over the Americas. Two important threads of this connection are immediately apparent: first, collective historical memory is posited as the political stakes of the work, and second, the work reaches back across 500 years of history in order to present its own genealogy, in order to construct itself as legatee of a historic struggle still unfolding in the modern present. Intriguingly, Clement’s work of fantasy does not sound so fantastic when...