Velvet Was the Night

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).