2025/11/23 by Gómez Gutiérrez, Felipe
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Comics and Graphic Narratives #Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez #Media, Gender, and Advertising
paper · doi:10.23692/imex.28.6
pp. 102-124 This article examines the representation of nagualism in Mexican comics through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together colonial history, gender studies, comics theory, and ecocriticism. It explores how these figures —once demonized in colonial archives— are resignified as emblems of anticolonial, feminist, and ecological resistance. The study contrasts the pre-Hispanic vision and its colonial-era stigmatization with contemporary interpretations by Edgar Clément and Inés Estrada. It argues that naguales and nagualas, historically linked to boundary-transgression and interspecies communion, emerge in these works as agents of transformation and social critique. Through cultural hybridity, they merge visual resources from Amerindian and Western traditions to challenge power structures and explore new forms of female and communal agency. By analyzing Operación Bolívar, Los perros salvajes, and various fanzines by Clément, as well as Impatience and Alienation by Estrada, the study investigates intersections among the human, the animal, the environmental, and the technological. The article concludes that this re-signification goes beyond cultural critique: it proposes visions of more sustainable and just futures, enriching interdisciplinary dialogue on historical memory, ecology, and feminism in contemporary, dynamic, and vibrant graphic narratives.