Macho Camacho's Beat by Luis Rafael Sánchez

First published:La guaracha del Macho Camacho, 1976 (English translation, 1980)

Type of plot: Social satire

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Principal Characters:

• The Heathen Chinky (The Mother), a lower-class mulatto prostitute
• Senator Vincente Reinosa (The Old Man), a wealthy, corrupt, and lascivious government official
• Graciela Alcántara y López de Montefrío, the aristocratic, neurotic, and sexually frigid wife of Reinosa
• Benny, the pampered son of Reinosa and Graciela
• Doña Chon, a representative of traditional values
• The Kid, an encephalitic, retarded child

The Novel

Macho Camacho’s Beat is a fictional portrait of life in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at a time when the country is inundated with the sound of Macho Camacho’s guaracha, or dance tune, “Life Is a Phenomenal Thing.” Framed by a notice that reveals the subject of the novel and an appendix that provides the reader with the entire text of the guaracha, Macho Camacho’s Beat is a montage of fragmented narrative sections interrupted by a series of radio announcements that track the meteoric rise in popularity of the rhythmical and irrepressible Afro-Antillean tune.

The entire plot of Macho Camacho’s Beat occurs within the few minutes before, at, and just after five o’clock on a steamy Wednesday afternoon. As an immense traffic jam paralyzes San Juan, the novel’s characters are depicted in the act of waiting. With the accumulative fragments of sounds, images, thoughts, and experience, the reader is able to piece together a composite picture of Puerto Rican culture.

The Heathen Chinky (whose name is never mentioned) is introduced through the device of an omniscient third-person narrator whose relation with each of the characters in the novel is so intimate as to allow the narration to pass fluidly between the third-and first-person voices. As she awaits the arrival of her lover, the Old Man (Senator Vincente Reinosa), the Heathen Chinky indulges in sexual fantasies of her virile triplet cousins, Hughie, Louie, and Dewey and anesthetizes her body with a sea of alcohol and her mind with the incessant, insistent, and sensual salsa beat of Macho Camacho’s guaracha.

Senator Vincente Reinosa swelters in his Mercedes-Benz, stuck in the enormous traffic tie-up, impatient to meet his sultry and accommodating dark-skinned mistress (the Heathen Chinky), who waits for him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon in a studio apartment rented specifically for convenient fornication. The news of a bombing at the university in San Juan interrupts the senator’s lustful fantasies and political self-aggrandizements only long enough for him to worry whether he will lose votes in the next election. As the occupants of the hundreds of immobilized automobiles that surround him dance in the street with a frenzied abandon brought on by the guaracha s irresistible beat, the senator’s thoughts quickly return to the schoolgirl he has been ogling, and he wonders if he has time to make her his next conquest.

The senator’s aristocratic wife, Graciela Alcántara y López de Montefrío, waits for her appointment with her trendy psychiatrist, Dr. Severo Severino. In her elegant compact mirror, Graciela scrutinizes her face to detect signs of aging and dwells on the absolute abhorrence she has of sexual relations with her husband. Graciela flips through the pages of Time magazine, deliberately ignoring the ugly reality of the war in Vietnam and concentrating instead on photographs of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Finally driven to distraction by the vulgar receptionist who constantly plays the vulgar guaracha on her transistor radio, Graciela, in an uncontrollable fit of temper, rails against the devastating reality that she can never be truly like her ideal, Jackie O.

The Mother, by a number of similarities—the desire to be Iris Chacón, the affair with the Old Man—is identified as being one and the same person as the Heathen Chinky. In this guise, she is shown in her own home, apparently moments before leaving to keep her appointment with the Old Man. Because the Mother cannot bring her encephalitic three-year-old son, the Kid, with her, she leaves him alone to “sunbathe” on the steps of a basilica in a nearby park—a treatment that the Old Man himself has prescribed. The Mother’s neighbor, Doña Chon, agrees to pick the Kid up after the Mother offers to share the money she receives from the Old Man. Before Doña Chon arrives at the park, however, the Kid, cruelly abused by the neighborhood children, runs away from them into the street. Doña Chon arrives just in time to see the Kid hit by a speeding car.

Benny, spoiled son of the Reinosas, is also stuck in the five o’clock traffic. He sits in his beloved Ferrari, frustrated and furious at being compelled to keep his foot on the brake and restrain the power of his high-speed sports car, the object of his sexual fantasies. Benny’s thoughts return obsessively to ways in which he can convince his father that what Puerto Rico’s youth really needs are cars and fast tracks on which to race them. When Benny finally breaks free of the traffic, he roars down a narrow side street. The threads of the plot are tied together as Benny, privileged son of the wealthy and aristocratic Reinosas, hits and kills the deformed and retarded son of his father’s poverty-stricken, lower-class mulatto mistress.

The Characters

The characters in Macho Camacho’s Beat are grotesques, allegorical rather than fully rounded, and are defined primarily by their obsessions and a desire to be what they are not.

The Heathen Chinky/The Mother, representative of the masses as her generic labels suggest, is obsessed with sex and her desire to be television’s sex symbol, Iris Chacón. Barraged on all sides by mass-media hype, her self-perception is so distorted that it seems quite reasonable to prostitute herself for the price of a new linoleum floor. She believes herself to be a good mother because she fondles the Kid and sings to him, just as she has seen mothers do in Mexican films. To maintain her delusions of happiness, the Heathen Chinky eagerly subscribes to the pop philosophy of Macho Camacho’s guaracha, which insists, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that “Life Is a Phenomenal Thing.”

Senator Vincente Reinosa is obsessed with sexual fantasies involving black and mulatto women and fancies himself a modern-day Don Juan. He sexually exploits women whom he would never acknowledge in public and embezzles public funds to pay the cost of keeping them. He uses his political clout to keep his budding terrorist son out of jail (and out of the headlines), and he bilks the government for the price of a brand-new Ferrari to appease the boy. Reinosa wants Puerto Rico to become a part of the United States. He represents the desire of the wealthy to maintain the status quo by embracing American consumerism and eschewing the nationalist movement for an independent Puerto Rican nation.

Graciela is obsessed with the desire to be Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. As her last name (Montefrío, which means “cold mount”) suggests, she is sexually frigid and completely devoid of warmth and humor. She constantly tries to re-create herself in the image of an ideal promoted in trendy European and American magazines. Anything native to Puerto Rico, herself included, is repulsive to her. Graciela is the quintessential class snob and the model of Roman Catholic sexual repression.

Benny is obsessed with lust for his Ferrari. The product of his environment, Benny is spoiled, racist, lazy, fat, and soft. Still a teenager, he has already committed arson and probably murder. When Benny runs the Kid down with his Ferrari, the outlook for the future of Puerto Rico is clear: The hypocritical and materialistic upper class will continue to exploit and crush the nation’s poor without remorse.

Doña Chon, seemingly the last bastion of kindness in all of San Juan, is representative of cultural tradition: She cooks Creole food, and she keeps her house full of images of Jesus Christ and the Roman Catholic saints. She is the only adult in the novel who is not obsessed with sex, and she seems impervious to Macho Camacho’s guaracha. Even Doña Chon cannot avoid corruption completely, however; she accepts money earned by the prostitution of her neighbor in return for picking up the Kid. Delayed by her own affairs, Doña Chon arrives at the park a moment too late to save him. What little goodness exists in Puerto Rican society, it seems, is ultimately ineffectual.

The Kid, like his mother, is a generic representative of the masses. Apparently born quite normal, the child has been deformed by his environment. Helpless, he is tortured mercilessly by healthy neighborhood children, who all the while sing, “Life Is a Phenomenal Thing.” When this child of Puerto Rico is forced to confront his own image in a fractured looking-glass, he flees from his monstrous self to find his own destruction.

Critical Context

Luis Rafael Sánchez’s first full-length novel, Macho Camacho’s Beat was written after Sánchez had already been acclaimed as an important Puerto Rican playwright. A critic of literature and the arts, Sánchez has published many articles in newspapers and magazines and has also published a collection of short stories under the title En cuerpo de camisa (1966; in casual dress).

Macho Camacho’s Beat was an immediate best-seller. Sánchez’s use of language and symbol, his irreverent sense of humor, his incisive social criticism, and his ability to explore a culture that is uniquely Puerto Rican has led some critics to consider Macho Camacho’s Beat the single most important Puerto Rican novel of the twentieth century. In his second novel, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1989; the importance of being named Daniel Santos), Sánchez continued to explore mass culture and society. This second novel goes beyond Puerto Rico to include Latino communities in the United States, Central America, and South America as well as the Antilles, a much broader scope than that of the distinctly Puerto Rican Macho Camacho’s Beat.

Bibliography

Agüra, Helen Calaf. “Luis Rafael Sánchez Speaks About Macho Camacho’s Beat.” Translated by Jo Anne Englebert. Review 28 (January-April, 1981): 39-41. An interview with the author in which Sánchez speaks about the critical reception of his work and his own intentions in writing the novel. Sánchez gives insight into his use of street language and his attempt to “portray the spiritual decomposition of Puerto Rico.” He also discusses his novel as the expression of “a need to transform colonial reality in all spheres—political, moral, even in the realm of the physical.”

Cruz, Arnaldo. “Repetition and the Language of the Mass Media in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho.” Latin American Literary Review 13 (July-December, 1985): 35-48. This well-written and interesting article explores the ways in which the techniques of repetition and language act as distancing techniques, enabling the reader to approach the work with a critical eye. Interesting in its assessment of Sánchez’s use of language as social analysis. Cruz has some interesting insights into the aesthetic effects of Sánchez’s prose.

Guinness, Gerald. “Is Macho Camacho’s Beat a Good Translation of La guaracha del Macho Camacho?” In Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts, edited by Asela Rodriguez de Laguna. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987. Explores the techniques of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of the novel. An interesting assessment of the loss of certain aesthetic values in a work so distinctly defined by language. Guinness offers some insightful alternatives to Rabassa’s translation.

Melendez, Priscilla. “Towards a Characterization of Latin American Farce.” Siglo XX 11 (1993). Melendez discusses Luis Rafael Sánchez’s novel from the perspective of a parody. An astute assessment of Sánchez’s work within the context of Latin American writing as a whole.

Schlau, Stacey. “Mass Media Images of the Puertorriqueña in La guaracha del Macho Camacho.” In Literature and Popular Culture in the Hispanic World: A Symposium, edited by Rose S. Minc. Gaithersburg, Md.: Hispamerica, 1981. Explores the effects of mass-media advertising, focusing on the women in the novel. The Heathen Chinky and Graciela are looked at in terms of how their self-esteem and self-perception are defined by commercial advertisement and consumerism.

Waldman, Gloria F. “La guaracha del Macho Camacho as Popular Culture.” In Literature and Popular Culture in the Hispanic World: A Symposium, edited by Rose S. Minc. Gaithersburg, Md.: Hispamerica, 1981. Waldman writes about the specifics of Puerto Rican popular culture and explores the guaracha as the “ultimate equalizer.” An interesting, although brief, introduction to the nonfictional elements in Sánchez’s fictional world.