Tezcatlipoca

“It was called Tezcatlipoca — the Jaguar Knight, the Jaguar’s Son Who Rules at Night. And so the Pachuco was a creature of night, so to speak. That suit was not for broad daylight or early in the morning. It’s really for night — the urban night, on top of that, under streetlamps. Eddie encapsulates it. He is the jaguar. That’s his power.”

The name of the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca was Lord of the Smoking Mirror, a reference to obsidian.

“I’m not superstitious, but blessed be Tezcatlipoca!” he quipped, referring to a major Aztec deity associated with providence and sorcery.

The figure is that of Tezcatlipoca, an Aztec god whose name was sometimes translated as "smoking mirror".

“Tezcatlipoca was the god of all those things, and more,” my grandfather once told me, when I was a girl in Puebla.