Colorismo y violencia estructural en Salvar el fuego de Guillermo Arriaga: Una lectura desde la colonialidad del poder

Abstract

This article analyzes Guillermo Arriaga's Salvar el fuego (2020) from the perspective of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; Fanon, 2009) as the interpretive key for the novel's differential distribution of narrative humanity. My central thesis is that the novel reproduces, in its own narrative economy, the pigmentocratic logic it denounces in contemporary Mexico: the white protagonist—Marina, whose name evokes the historical figure of Malinche—monopolizes reflexive interiority and narrative voice, while Esmeralda, the racialized woman, is tortured, raped, and mutilated without her destruction generating a narratively equivalent ethical crisis. This asymmetry is the effect of a learned coloniality that the author reproduces without noticing it, in keeping with Fanon's (2009) diagnosis of the colonial internalization of European value. The analysis draws on critical literary discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 1993), with focus on narrative focalization, typography as visibility politics, and the lexicon of corporeality. The article engages with the available scholarship on Arriaga's work—Ródenas (2019), Panero (2020, 2022), Wieser and Delgado (2008)—to show that the critical force of Salvar el fuego is inseparable from the structural limit that defines it.