There are very few creatures that have so profoundly disrupted the inhabitants of the center of the territory now called Mexico, as the formidable Axolotl has done. A small swamp monster, with nocturnal and completely aquatic habits, who dominates the secrets of eternal youth, and who has the power of extreme morphological regeneration. Let's say that not for nothing did the Aztecs consider him as the reincarnation of a god. But the emblematic amphibian not only sneaked into Mexica mythology, but later would go on to populate naturalist treatises with its enigmatic life cycle, it would be literary muse of Cortázar, Salvador Elizondo, José Emilio Pacheco, among other great authors, it would be forged as a metaphor of Mexicanness for anthropologists and as a symbol of extinction for biologists, and it would even be stamped on our currency, the already iconic 50 peso bill. Today, on the verge of its disappearance in the wild, we have one last chance to maybe turn his figure into a sign of conservation, and that largely depends on the literature and a possible new conception about ourselves and the place we occupy in the world.