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Manuel Maples Arce, Salvador Novo, and the Origin

of Mexican Vanguard Autobiographies
ann warner-ault
the college of new jersey



his article offers a new reading of the Mexican avant-garde, arguing that a
cohesive aesthetic emerged in Mexico between 1921 and 1929, distinct from
avant-garde movements in Europe and elsewhere. My analyses of Manuel Maples
Arces Actual No-1 (1921) and Salvador Novos El joven: QUE MEXICO! Novela
en que no pasa nada (1923) suggest ways in which these early works influenced
other writers in the nascent Mexican vanguard movements of the 1920s, namely
the Estridentistas and Contemporaneos. The doubts that Maples Arce and Novo
so lyrically express about modernization, the Mexican Revolution, societal
changes, and the role of the intellectual in post-revolutionary society pervade
Mexicos avant-garde prose. Each author epitomizes the ideas and the techniques of their respective group. Maples Arce founded the Estridentista group
and Novo affiliated himself with the Contemporaneos. I will argue that during
the 1920s, these two authors produce strikingly similar prose that relies on main
characters who are intellectuals, struggling to make sense of the unstable political, social, and artistic climate in post-revolutionary Mexico. In both their subject matter and their execution, these two works lay the foundation for a
uniquely Mexican avant-garde.
While critics generally consider the Estridentistas and Contemporaneos separately, the similarities that emerge from reading their prose in tandem provide a
more complete picture of the avant-garde movements in Mexico. Drawing inspiration from Maples Arces and Novos early works, many pieces by authors from
both groups question the events surrounding the Revolution of 1910, nationbuilding projects by the state, the role of modernity in Mexico, and above all the
place (or lack of place) for intellectuals in Mexico in the 1920s. Though many
of the protagonists of these works are versions of the authors, they stop short of
divulging much personal information or making any confessions. By examining
shared aspects between Maples Arces and Novos early prose, I will highlight
elements that will reappear in works by both groups throughout the 1920s,
proposing that a distinct formthe Mexican experimental autobiography
emerged during the period. These non-linear texts by both Contemporaneos
and Estridentistas repurpose trends from Europe to interact specifically with the
social, political and literary environment of 1920s Mexico. Though the Mexican
vanguard works were among the first in Latin America, many critics overlook

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and misunderstand their authors, and fail to consider the possibility that the
Mexican avant-garde fostered original forms and styles that in turn influenced
other movements.1 I will propose that analyzing the Estridentistas and Contemporaneos together presents a much fuller picture of the 1920s literary scene in
Mexico and lays claim to a more prominent position for the Mexican avant-garde
in Latin American letters.
In December of 1921, Maples Arce posted Actual No-1: Hoja de vanguardia
on the walls of the Mexican capital city and thus launched the Estridentista movement. Though it was the first avant-garde manifesto in Mexico and perhaps in
all of Latin America, and though its influence is clear in many subsequent works
by Estridentistas and Contemporaneos, it took critics fifty years to discuss Estridentismo in a serious way. Luis Mario Schneider, the first literary scholar to study
the movement, describes Actual No-1 as a foundational moment. Schneider
proposes that the work inicia de cualquier manera el gesto mas atrevido y escandaloso de la literatura mexicana moderna (4950). In fact, in his 1921
manifesto, Maples Arce is the first Spanish-American author to use the term
vanguardia with reference to a home-grown literary movement (Niemeyer 19
20). Using a first-person narrator, the text depicts the experience of the Mexican
intellectual caught between wanting to capture the attention of readers in his
own country and those abroad. He incorporates references to European authors
and movements, melding them with cacophonous descriptions of post-war
Mexico where modernity steals the individuals identity, drowning him in a sea of
gasoline. Maples Arce employs catchy slogans and maxims to capture his readers
attention, but underlying cries such as Chopin to the electric chair and
Death to Miguel Hidalgo is the lurking fear that no one will take him seriously.
The colorful text certainly draws attention to Maples Arce, and becomes the
founding gesture of what will later be called Estridentismo, a fitting name for a
group that stridently expresses hyperbolic mantras like those above.
A basic understanding of Maples Arces biography helps decipher the dense
broadsheet he pasted on the Mexico City walls at the end of December of 1921,
a year after arriving in the capital. Maples Arce spent his childhood in Tuxpan,
Veracruz, and his adolescence studying law in Veracruz, arriving in Mexico City
in 1920at age 20to further his legal studies, but with the secret dream of
succeeding as an author. In Veracruz, Maples Arce had published emotional
poetry in a student magazine and in the citys newspaper, El Dictamen. In addition, he had taken charge of the literary section of the daily, La Opinion
(Monahan 1921). Yet, he found it much more difficult to break into the publishing scene in the capital. Though he published a poem in Revista de Revistas
in June of 1920, critics panned his first book of poems, Rag: tintas de abanico, also
from 1920. An anonymous author, who Kenneth Monahan identifies as Carlos
Gonzalez Pen
a, wrote a savage review of Rag in El Universal. The critic disparaged
1
Some critics highlight the influence of Estridentista texts on European authors. For
instance, Christopher Domnguez Michael suggests that the Estridentistas inspired international authors, suggesting that the short work of prose, La senorita etcetera (1922) by the
Estridentista author Arqueles Vela influenced the Spanish avant-garde author Benjamn
Jarnes who lived for a time in Mexico (21). Very few critics, however, notice Mexicos impact
on the burgeoning Latin American avant-garde movements.

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Maples Arce personally, saying that a boy from the provinces had no business
trafficking in Parisian motifs. Even worse, he suggested that someone of Maples
Arces complexion should not write poems at all, but should put himself to use
as a shoemaker (Monahan 2426). In many ways Actual No-1, published one
year later, rebuts the charges the critic from El Universal had leveled against
himthe many quotations from European avant-garde figures serve to highlight
Maples Arces erudition and to prove him deserving of a place in Mexican letters.
Maples Arces manifesto opens: En nombre de la vanguardia actualista de
Mexico, but at the time no such group existed. Although the author goes to
great lengths to make the manifesto appear to be the product of a collective, it
is the brainchild of Maples Arce alone. He includes a list of names at the end
titled, Directorio de Vanguardia, approximately 200 names of writers from
both Mexico and abroad, as if these men directly endorsed his work. Ruben
Gallo posits that Maples Arce copied the list of foreign authors from a French
publication, since many of the Russian names contain errors and Mayakovski,
the most important Russian Futurist poet, is absent (22728).2 Since it was only
after the publication of Actual No-1 that Estridentismo took form, none of the
future Estridentistas appear on the list. Actual No-1 came to be known as the
Primer Manifiesto Estridentista only in retrospect.3 The notion of failure is
embedded deeply within the document, illustrated most blatantly by the fact that
at the time of publication, Maples Arce was the only Estridentista. As a massive
call to action the manifesto was unlikely to succeed, first of all, because very few
would be able to follow its complex web of citations that blends quotations from
European vanguard groups with advertising slogans from billboards in the capital. But it provides an apt commentary on the place of the artist or intellectual
in 1920s Mexico, caught between wanting to be understood by the public at large
and wanting to appear erudite for the benefit of foreign readers.
A large photo of Maples Arce dominates the first page of the manifesto. He
appears chic in a suit with a boutonniere in his lapel and a handkerchief in his
pocket (see image). The photo refers to the notion of artist as god, one shared
by the Chilean vanguard author Vicente Huidobro and F.T. Marinetti.4 Since
Maples Arce was a nobody at the time of publication, the overblown photo
appears to be some kind of joke. When he disseminated the manifesto he was a
provincial 21-year-old law student and minor poet. In Maples Arces memoir,
Soberana juventud, he describes the spectacle of walking in the streets of Mexico
City and his hopes of making eye contact with one of the elegant women
parading past. He also discusses dressing al estilo ingles, the style exhibited in
the photo: Yo andaba siempre vestido al estilo ingles, generalmente de gris o
de algun otro color oscuro, a rayas, sombrero de fieltro, polainas de ante,
guantes de piel y un baston prestados de la variada coleccion de mi padre (48).
This section does not appear in Gallos 2005 book that is based on his dissertation.
For example, the caption below the photograph of Actual No-1 in Schneider bears this
title (249).
4
Huidobros poem, Arte poetica, which he published in El espejo de agua (1916) ends
with the line El poeta es un pequen
os dios. His manifesto, Non serviam (1914), presents
a dialogue between a poet and mother nature in which the poet declares he will no longer
imitate the natural world in his art, but rather create his own realities (Schwartz 10001).
2
3

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Title page of Manuel Maples Arces Actual N-1: Hoja de vanguardia (1921). Image courtesy
of Mexicos Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL).

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In this memoir, published in 1967, Maples Arce remembers looking at himself

in the mirror and worrying that he appeared ridiculous: a veces, hasta me
aproximaba a contemplarme de cerca, como para tener una idea mas clara de
lo que yo era y del aspecto que ofreca a la sociedad que animaba aquel paseo.
No poda decidir si mi aspecto era natural o rebuscado. Sera yo ridculo como
otros transeuntes que exageraban la nota de la moda, o me comportaba yo de
una manera discreta? (49).
The same sense of self-consciousness pervades Actual No-1. Just as the
author wanted his stylish wardrobe to capture the attention of women on the
street, he created an eye-catching manifesto to divert peoples attention from
the seductive advertisements and bills that surrounded it. The large title above
the photo of him reads Actual No-1: Hoja de vanguardia and then in slightly
smaller type below: Comprimido Estridentista de Manuel Maples Arce. Tatiana Flores points out that comprimido has the double meaning in Spanish
of both pill and broadsheet (9). The work is both manifesto and remedy, a medication the consumer must take in order to get up to date with the most current
literary trends from abroad (Estridentista is the brand-name of the drug).
Below the title appears a summation of the manifesto: Iluminaciones Subversivas de Renee Dunan, F.T. Marninetti, Guillermo de Torre, Lasso de la Vega,
Salvato-Papasseit etc, y Algunas Cristalizaciones Marginales. This list of European vanguard authors that opens the manifesto functions as an endorsement
for what will follow. But iluminaciones subversivas suggests that Maples Arce
refuses to subordinate himself to the masters. Rather than copying their works,
he calls them into question. Finally, in downward type we see letters spelling out
exito with the following slogans after each letter:
E
X
I
T
O

MUERA EL CURA HID ALGO

A B A J O S A N - R A FA E L - S A N
L AZARO
ESQUINA
SE PROHIBE FIJAR ANUNCIOS

Actual No-1 employs political and advertising rhetoric to draw attention to

itself. Like all commercial products and political campaigns, the Comprimido
Estridentista assures a successful outcome (and in capital letters, no less). Of
the catchphrases in the Exito, Muera el cura Hidalgo stands out. This
slogan flippantly insinuates that national tradition does not interest the author.
German List Arzubide suggests that San Rafael and San Lazaro did not
refer to the saints of those names, but to specific places in Mexico City (Guariglia
6162). Flores points out other characteristics of the two locations: San Rafael
was home to more well-to-do Mexicans, whereas San Lazaro was a more working
class area. She proposes that Abajo San Lazaro was intended to offend the
bourgeoisie against whom Maples Arce rails throughout the work. She also postulates the idea that San Rafael and San Lazaro could be neighborhoods where
Maples Arce posted Actual No-1 (21). Both suppositions seem likely, especially
since the last slogan, se prohbe fijar anuncios, clearly refers to the manifesto

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being posted illicitly around the city. From the very beginning, the work exhibits
a hyper self-consciousness of its place in the world and of all the other discourses
with which it aims to compete; yet, the constant need to refer to itself and to its
perceived competitors (whether other literary genres or other authors) undermines the possibility that Actual No-1 puts forward an original message.
The moments of discursive self-consciousness in Actual No-1 bring up questions about the relationship between literature and other non-literary genres
such as advertising and political propaganda. The text also points to itself as a
way to comment on the genre of the manifesto as a whole. Comparing itself
to the commercial appeals from popular brands like Buen Tono cigarrettes or
Moctezuma beer allows the work to interact directly with its surroundings. It also
raises the question of the role of literature in generalis it more privileged than
any other written discourse? What makes a manifesto for Estridentismo different
from one for a consumer product? Maples Arce plays at being one more commercial entity, using slogans and common advertising catchphrases such as
exito to market this new movement. Mapless manifesto alludes to the advertisements for beauty products that filled the pages of Mexican magazines like
Revista de Revistas in the 1920s: the impossibly perfect men and women pictured
there, and the beauty imperatives that these advertisements spelled out. Advertisements for tonics and beauty products in these magazines insinuate that men
had to be energetic and women beautiful in order to survive in the nations
capital. During the 1920s many beauty-enhancing products emerged, some with
frightening descriptions such as the Lime Straitner (sic), which promised to
stretch out bowed legs and the Modelo 25, which would reshape noses during the
night. Elsa Mun
iz posits that the ubiquitous beauty imperatives of these years
resulted from Mexicos desire to compete with the United States, whose films
portrayed beautiful and modern women, and whose advertisements also made
preposterous vows to consumers (13134). The following ad for Potentol
appeared in Revista de Revistas in 1923 and makes the same promises as Maples
Arces literary Estridentista brand pill: Hombres y mujeres debiles, viejos prematuros, neurastenicos sin causa, malhumorados y achacosos, todos sepan que
los comprimidos Potentol, formula del doctor aleman, profesor Wesser, son la
ultima palabra en la terapeutica moderna, como un tonico nervino y estimulante
supremo del sistema genital (qtd. in Mun
iz 130).
Borrowing from the rhetoric of advertising and politics, Actual No-1 plays at
being a piece of propaganda for itself; readers can take this fabulous pill, Actual
No-1, to become instantly virile and modern. Maples Arce also mixes language
from Mexican political and advertising campaigns with that of literary movements, proclaiming sardonically that if the Futurists called for the murder of the
moonshine and the Spanish Ultraists demanded the liquidation of las hojas
secas then the Estridentists will have their own, equally extreme maxim:
Chopin a la silla electrica! (270). In this way, Maples Arce scorns the programmatic vanguard practice of founding schools on empty slogans, likening them to
pie-in-the-sky commercial rhetoric. He mockingly states the performative wonders of the Estridentista motto: Chopin a la silla electrica! (M.M.A. trademark)
es una preparacion maravillosa; en veinte y cuatro horas extermino todos los

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germenes de la literatura putrefacta y su uso es agradabilsimo y benefico.

Agtese bien antes de usarse. Insisto (270).
Actual No-1 does not hide its sutures, its createdness and artificiality. It
reveals the mechanism of parody, the act of consuming and changing ones
models. Maples Arce co-opts complete quotes from other movements, but frames
them in such a way to show that he is doing more than blindly assimilating them.
In section III, Maples Arce self-consciously invokes avant-garde tropes only to
criticize them. He cites the car-crazed MarinettiUn automovil en movimiento
es mas bello que la Victoria de Samotraciajuxtaposing the Futurists obsession with Maples Arces own apasionamiento por la literatura de los avisos economicos (269). Section IV dutifully cites all the things a good avant-gardist
should love, from the beauty of machines to factory smoke, to the explosive
workers blue shirts. In this way Maples Arce proves his proficiency in vanguard
tropes, while at the same time revealing the absurdity of avant-garde manifesto
writing.
Maples Arce exhausts the performative punch of other movements by
repeating their tropes and juxtaposing them with conscious jabs that reveal that
they are all the same. His manifesto is, therefore, much more complex than that
of Marinetti. In the first Futurist manifesto, Marinetti implies that his literary
movement will redeem Italy, liquidating museums and tired academics, and
cleansing the country of its rotting sensibilities.5 Maples Arce lightly ridicules
Marinetti for presuming to modernize Italy by means of theatrics alone. It is
absurd to think one could instantly transform literature as a whole by simply
publishing a manifesto or yelling maxims from the roofs of buildings as the
Italian Futurists were known to do. Instead of imitating Marinetti, as many critics
have claimed, Actual No-1 undermines him and the franchise that was
Futurism, a movement with a marketable program and artists and writers who
bought into it hook, line and sinker. Maples Arces mimicking of Marinetti does
emulate his style of vanguardism, but it parodies it as well. Like Marinetti, Maples
Arce sees the youth as the only way to revitalize Mexico. But Marinetti does not
possess the same level of irony and self-consciousness as Maples Arce in Actual
No-1. Here, failure and futility loom large. Having lived through the Revolution,
Maples Arce knows that Mexico needs more than slogans and demonstrations,
and that this very manifesto could be an empty gesture that leads nowhere. He
is not trying to create another Futurist movement, but instead something new,
after having revealed (and discarded) everything that came before. The manifesto brilliantly reveals the tropes of the vanguard as slogans, easily used and
adapted to sell any product from Futurism to Ultraism to something as nebulous
as Estridentismo. By citing and even plagiarizing the watchwords of other
groups, Maples Arce declares that the vanguard belongs to Mexico as much as it
does to Italy, Spain or France. He proves his adeptness at adopting and
employing the common images and metaphors of the international avant-garde,
5
It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary
manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land
from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long
has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless
museums that cover her like so many graveyards (Marinetti 252).

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parading the whole enterprise through the streets of Mexico City. The first sentence of section VII makes it impossible to believe, as many critics have, that the
Estridentistas merely duplicate other vanguard movements: Ya nada de creacionismo, dadasmo, paroxismo, expresionismo, sintetismo, imaginismo, suprematismo, cubismo, orfismo, etcetera, etcetera, de ismos (270).
Many critics have failed to credit the Estridentistas for their original contributions to Mexican and Latin American literature. Whereas I argue that Maples
Arce consciously parodies and transforms the tropes of the European vanguard,
many previous critics propose that the group merely plagiarized from European
avant-garde movements. For instance, Carlos Monsivais suggests that the Estridentistas possessed no such awareness of their actions: sus fallidas, torpes maniobras se incluyen en los terrenos del humorismo involuntario, pero, en cierto
modo se han enriquecido con los encantos de lo patetico. . . . El estridentismo
era la parodia a pesar suyo de la vanguardia (11718). Monsivais goes so far as
to call them [d]iscpulos incoherentes de Marinetti y de Tzara, cuyos poemas,
ruidosos, disparatados, cursis, libraron sus combates en los terrenos del simple
arreglo tipografico y nunca superaron el nivel de entretenimiento infantil
(121). Luis Leal also posits, albeit more kindly than Monsivais, that the group
blindly copies European movements: es mas bien un reflejo del futurismo italiano de Felipe Tomas Marinetti (105). Enrique Anderson Imbert dedicates only
a quarter of a page to the Estridentistas in his two-volume anthology and introduction to Latin American literature. Here he mentions their debt to Tzara and
their derivative industrial images and then brusquely transitions to a discussion
of the Contemporaneos, whom he describes as de mas vitalidad, en la intencion
y en el fruto (335). Many theorists have conflated the Estridentistas with Marinettis entourage. For example, Mike Gonzalez and David Treece are dismissive
of Estridentismo, calling it a Mexican variant of Futurism (11921). Likewise,
Daniel Balderston describes them in the following fashion: The Estridentistas
like the Italian futurists, sought an aggressive masculinist aesthetic based on warfare, technology, the subjugation of women, and the bashing of effeminate
males (60). Odile Cisneross 2003 dissertation describes the group in a similar
way: Between 19211922, the Estridentistas produced a manifesto and published two of their literary works: Maples Arces Andamios interiores and Arqueles
Velas La senorita etcetera. These works, we noted, were innovatively steeped in the
avant-garde vocabularies of futurism and cubism, and had little political import
and even less relation to the specific context of Mexico (53).6
With his categorical negation of all -isms, Maples Arce denies the possibility
that he could create a unified school. Actual No-1 categorically scorns all movements, from those associated with the government to those surrounding other
literary figures of the time. Those who align themselves with the government
have been maleados por el oro prebendario de los sinecurismos gobernistas
6
Critics who have argued for the importance of Estridentismo as a literary school include
Schneider, Unruh, Pappe, Gabara, Gallo, Flores, Ternes, Escalante, Niemeyer and Rashkin.
Others have discussed similarities between the Estridentistas and the Contemporaneos
(addressing either aesthetic similarities or the ambiguous attitude toward modernity and the
Mexican Revolution on the part of both groups.) These critics include Paul Arranz, Gordon,
Fell, Niemeyer, Escalante, Gabara and Ternes.

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(273). Those who care what the public thinks are corrupt. He accuses those who
flock to Enrique Gonzalez Martnez (a prominent poet of the time) of trying to
make art with el estilicidio de sus menstruaciones intelectuales (273). Unlike
Marinetti, Maples Arce shows disdain for nationalism, saying it reeks of pulqueras
and left over fried food, and he calls out only to those who share his contempt
for group affiliation (274). Of all the -isms, Maples Arce preserves only actualismo, which by nature can have no affiliates as it is determined not by a central
figure or ideology but by whatever the present moment brings. Art that looks
backwards or forwards is of no use: Nada de retrospeccion. Nada de futurismo
. . . [H]agamos actualismo (273).
Part IV of Actual No-1 presents a hallucinated collage of the present, a
snippet of what Estridentista literature could be. This paragraph prefigures
descriptions of the less-than-perfect experiences of modernity in Mexico in works
by Salvador Novo, Gilberto Owen, Xavier Villaurrutia and Arqueles Vela (Novo,
Owen and Villaurrutia were part of the Contemporaneos group). In this tense
portrayal of modernity, bodies blend with consumer and automotive images:
Me ladeo mentalmente en la prolongacion de una elipse imprevista
olvidando la estatua de Carlos IV. Accesorios de automoviles, refacciones Haynes, llantas, acumuladores y dinamos, chass, neumaticos,
klaxons, bujas, lubricantes, gasolina. Estoy equivocado, Moctezuma
de Orizaba es la mejor cerveza en Mexico, fumen cigarros del Buen
Tono, S.A., etcetera, etcetera. (270)
The people, half machines themselves, drink gasoline, and the mandate, fumen
cigarros de Buen Tono, leaps from a billboard to the manifesto. The firstperson narrator perceives modern life as a place without borders or boundaries,
where machines cut through bodies and natural images and smoke steals fingers
(271). He evokes the new urban subject: recent arrivals from the countryside,
lost and confused in the city, [l]os provincianos planchan en la cartera los
boletos de tranva reminiscente. En donde esta el hotel Iturbide? (270). The
final section of the manifesto presents a few theatrical scenes that add to this
general sense of disorientation. In section IX, the narrative voice causes us to
doubt if we can take him at his word: Y la sinceridad? Quien ha inquerido?
Un momento, sen
ores, que hay cambio de carbones. Todos los ojos se han anegado de aluminio, y aquella sen
orita distrada se pasea sobre los anuncios laterales. He aqu una grafica demostrativa (271). The scattered voice at the end of
the manifesto challenges the confident photographic image of Maples Arce from
the beginning. Finally, the last section portrays him as an airy specter, presiding
over the city and threatening to take it apart with his gran risa (274). He leaves
his readers, at last, with an apocalyptic image of himself, with only his amplified
senses: yo, gloriosamente aislado, me ilumino en la maravillosa incandescencia
de mis nervios electricos.
Novos El joven: QUE MEXICO! Novela en que no pasa nada takes place in 1921,
on the very day after Maples Arce had posted his manifesto. The exact date of its
setting becomes clear when Novos protagonist wanders the streets of Mexico,
reading many billboards including Maples Arces manifesto. Like Actual No-1,

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El joven tells of an intellectual, a version of the author himself, alienated by modernizing projects in Mexico City, and coming to terms with his role in the
changing urban environment. This three-page work sets the stage for later
pseudo-autobiographical works by Novo as well as other Estridentistas and Contemporaneos. Like Maples Arce, Salvador Novo moved from the provinces to
Mexico City. In 1917 (at age 13) he and his mother moved from Torreon to
live with his mothers family so that Novo could attend the Escuela Nacional
Preparatoria, where he met Jaime Torres Bodet and Xavier Villaurrutia along
with other members of the group later called the Contemporaneos. Novos posthumously published La estatua de sal (1998) tells of his difficult transition to life
in the capital and the slow process by which he deciphered the many unwritten
rules about how to behave, especially as a gay man. However, Novos early works
barely mention his sexual inclinations. While El joven refers obliquely to the Mexican bus drivers, in La estatua de sal it becomes clear that they were his frequent
sexual partners. This 1923 version of El joven would provide the seed for two
longer versions of the same title that Novo published in 1928 and 1933. It also
sets the stage for his urban chronicle, Nueva grandeza mexicana, which came out
in 1946.7 In a 1958 interview with Emmanuel Carballo, Novo described El joven
as a first-person account of his first ventures into Mexico City: El joven lo escrib
en 1923 y se publico en 1928. All esta el germen de la Nueva grandeza mexicana. . . .
Es un poco el resumen de mi regreso a Mexico en 1917, y de mi vida estudiantil.
Narra mis primeros esponsales con la gran ciudad (Carballo 334).8 Novos use
of esponsales, a word usually reserved for marriage rites, evinces the extremely
close relationship he perceived between him and Mexico City: in El joven, his fate
and that of the city are entwined. Rosa Garca Gutierrez suggests that Novo was
one of the few to focus on Mexico City as a modern urban center and that his
portrayal would go unrivaled until Fuentess La region mas transparente (1958)
(29599). However, it is clear that Novos depiction of the Mexican capital owes
much to Manuel Maples Arces Actual No-1, especially since he cites Maples
Arces collage-like text directly.
Novos 1923 El joven spans one day, from when the main character leaves his
house to when he goes to bed. Novo published this three-and-a-half-page novel
in Jaime Torres Bodets magazine, La Falange, in the KODAK section of the
journal. This 1923 version of Novos El joven bears the title QUE MEXICO!
Novela en que no pasa nada. This title provides a synopsis of the plot. First, the
narrator tries to capture the city in a series of snapshots, like Kodak pictures.
7
For a more detailed look at Novos urban chronicles (including a comparison between El
joven and Nueva grandeza mexicana) see the third chapter of Mary Kendall Longs dissertation,
Salvador Novo: 19201940 Between the Avant-Garde and the Nation. Viviane Mahieuxs
recent book, Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life,
also discusses Novo in depth including an analysis of El joven where (as in this analysis) she
discusses how the hybrid work reflects the radical changes taking place in Mexico City in the
1920s (1314).
8
Here, Novo says that he wrote El joven in 1923 and published it in 1928, failing to mention
that he published a version of it in La Falange in 1923. Rosa Garca Gutierrez convincingly
argues that the longer 1928 version was written by a more mature Novo later in the 1920s
(291).

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The frenzy of the city excites him (captured by the proclamation, QUE
MEXICO!), but the discontinuity of everything makes him feel bored or overwhelmed, as the subtitle indicates.
Maples Arces and Novos texts share many similarities. Both narrators engage
in dense monologues, pausing often to incorporate language from advertisements, newspapers, store windows and street signs. Yet neither narrator knows
where to begin nor to whom he is speaking. This hyper-awareness of audience as
well as the physical place in which the works were composed both depicts Mexico
City in the 1920s as well as the lack of a space for individual expression there.
Both works present details from the authors lives, but both shy away from presenting much personal information or making any confessions. In this way, both
pieces become a collage of found text mixed with the authors own words. The
historian James Clifford has described the possibility of using collage in order to
tell the story of a people without explaining away cultural differences: To write
ethnographies on the model of a collage would be to avoid the portrayal of
cultures as organic wholes, or as unified, realistic worlds subject to a continuous
explanatory discourse (147). But while Cliffords Parisian artists utilize so-called
exotic artifacts from cultures other than their own, the Estridentistas and Contemporaneos fuse text from the city with their own dreams and experiences to
create uniquely Mexican works. This innovative use of collage both presents the
Mexican reality in the 1920s and deeply questions the authors role as intellectuals in a nation undergoing radical change. Both Maples Arce and Novo use
fragmented structures as a way to demonstrate the sense of disconnect between
them, their city and the public abroad whom they would like to reach. And at
the end of each short text we find the narrator in an ambiguous place, very
much alone.
In a supreme act of meta-literary awareness, Novo incorporates a line from
Actual No-1 into El joven: se prohbe fijar anuncios (346). This command
from Actual also refers to the ubiquitous bills on city walls, where the manifesto was posted. In both El joven and Actual No-1, the protagonists are intrinsically entwined with the city, which circumscribes the individual with its
contradictory discourse. Therefore, the best way for these authors to depict
themselves comes with a portrayal of the fragmentary city. Novo duplicates signs
from the fuente-soda that advertises ice creams in English. He reproduces
candid personal ads from the newspaper and refers to the posters that blanket
the town. As the protagonist walks home, he sees human bodies fused with the
printed discourse of the city: people literally wrap themselves in discarded billboards, and the narrator remarks that el da impreso los envuelve (349). This
description may not be a vanguardist invention since it is quite possible that
Mexico Citys poor and homeless in the early 1920s actually used newsprint for
blankets.
As in Actual No-1, the narrator of El joven approaches both the Revolution
and modernity with a certain cynicism, as when he discusses two legacies of 1910.
First, the Revolution spawned newspapers with an excess of paper and advertisements, and second, it brought an onslaught of Fords to the capital. The narrator looks back to the late 1800s with some nostalgia. Then, you could travel in
a horse-drawn carriage, ride a bicycle or cross the streets free of danger. Now,

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the savage motorists have turned the streets into danger zones. The historian
Pablo Piccato notes that although an increasing number of people died in car
crashes during these years, the drivers were rarely held accountable (10001).
El joven recounts how pedestrians stand at intersections confused by constantly
changing traffic signs: first they had red, green, and yellow streetlights. And then
they replaced these colored lights with messages in Spanish: alto, adelante
or peatones. Yet, street-crossers in El joven are perplexed when they see the
word peatones, and those who do not consider themselves pedestrians stand
on the side of the road, waiting for a sign that better describes them. With the
advent of so many Fords, car horns replace rooster crows: Crisis del paseo en
automoviles. Los klaxons se contestan como gallos (349).
El jovens narrator notes negative changes in the capital city. While under
Porfirio Daz everyone aspired to be French, now everyone busily tries to emulate
the United States. In this way, he suggests that the events of 1910 in Mexico
failed to make any fundamental changesan idea that is consistent with recent
historical scholarship about the Mexican Revolution (Folgarait 56). The narrative incorporates scraps of English, like the menu from the Lady Baltimore soda
fountain, a reference to paperclips as clippers and one to Sanborns as the
house of tiles. These Anglicisms imply that one needed to know English in
order to navigate downtown, and the narrator offers himself as the ideal guide.
Yet, by the end of the day, the velocity of city life exhausts him and he feels
utterly alone: Que Mexico! Se aburre uno Todas las tardes te, mermelada! Y
ni siquiera se puede hablar de algo nuevo que le haya sucedido a alguien!
(348). By providing a series of snapshots, the narrator of El joven attempts to
orient his readers in the city. Yet he realizes such a goal is unachievable. By the
last paragraph, this sequence of images has already become obsolete, because by
the next day everything will have changed.
El joven, like Actual No-1, questions the individuals place in the modern
city. And like Actual No-1, El joven ends with a self-portrait of the narrator, who
finds himself lost in the changing urban environment. Finally, the narrator turns
the camera on himself, realizing that his own fate is probably no different from
that of the city, which is constantly changing without evolving in any way. This
final paragraph is the most incoherent, reflecting the mans exhaustion after a
full day in the streets:
Lo que hice hoydice el joven soltando sus zapatosno tendra ya
objeto man
ana. Hay cosas invariables, que gustan siempre. Tengo
suen
o; siempre me gustara dormir. Pero man
ana se habra muerto
alguien. Hay estadsticas como leyesno leyes mexicanasque se
cumplen siempre. Yo puedo ser alguien y morirme. Que es un siglo
para San Pedro? Sera divertido que yo resultara objeto de investigaciones. Se me acusa de ser muy alto. Y por que no haban de equivocarse los eruditos? (349)
Both Novo and Maples Arce depict Mexico Citys streets as a site of constant
tension between traditional and modern culture. This sense of narrative disjuncture is reinforced by actual street signs from early twentieth century Mexico that

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reminded pedestrians not to stop in the middle of the street and obstruct the
circulation of vehicles and animals (Piccato 25). Silvia Pappe goes so far as to
call 1920s Mexico City a parody of a real city like Paris, New York or London,
and discusses the many contradictions inherent in the Mexican capital: la
ciudad donde quieren vivir una modernidad vanguardista y escribir poesa, esta
llena de peones y campesinos pobres, saturada de los de la bola que llegaron
con la revolucion, y como si fuera poco, atiborrada de antiguos recuerdos porfiristas y nuevos suen
os obreros (179). Pappe suggests the Estridentistas were
constantly forced to negotiate the divide between this semi-modern existence
and that of life in an actual metropolis: desde este momento y ante los referentes de las grandes capitales de la modernidad, la Ciudad de Mexico amenaza
con convertirse casi forzosamente en una parodia. As urban transplants Manuel
Maples Arce and Salvador Novo had to learn to negotiate this strange cityscape,
where the modern and the traditional came into constant conflict. In both of
their works, the main character is a participant-observer who has to decipher his
surroundings while simultaneously proving to readers abroad that Mexico City is
in fact a real city.
Maples Arces collage-like manifesto clearly influenced Novo as well other
Mexican avant-garde authors and artists such as Arqueles Vela, German List
Arzubide, Xavier Icaza, Gilberto Owen, Jaime Torres Bodet and Xavier Villaurrutia. For instance, the first Mexican vanguard novel La senorita etcetera (1922)
by the Estridentista, Arqueles Vela also employs a fragmented style in order to
depict the chaos of the Mexico City streets.9 This work features a couple who
leave the Mexican countryside for the capital city, and lose their identities to the
metropolis. In a 1976 interview Vela confirms that La senorita etcetera intentionally
creates ill-defined settings and characters in order to portray the disorder following the Revolution in 1920s Mexico: La Senorita etcetera es la realizacion
literaria del desorden provocado por la Revolucion. La Revolucion nos disperso
materialmente: eso significa una dispersacion interior tambien. No podamos
encontrar un ritmo (Bolan
o 5052). La senorita etcetera typifies the Mexican
experimental autobiography and is only one of many texts whose disjointed style
reflects the confusion inherent in post-revolutionary society. In fact, both the
revolutionary Estridentistas and the detached cosmopolitan Contemporaneos espouse deep-seated doubts about both the Mexican Revolution and modernizing projects by the state. Arqueles Vela, who belonged to the Estridentista
group, continues with similar themes in his subsequent experimental novelines, Un crimen provisional (1924) and El cafe de nadie (1926), and in his novel
El intransferible, (1927). Gilberto Owen (a Contemporaneo) utilizes a collage-like
style to manifest doubts about modernization and Jose Vasconceloss positivist
projects in Mexico in his short novels La llama fra (1925) and Novela como nube
(1928). Dama de corazones (1928) by the Contemporaneo, Xavier Villaurutia, features a main character who feels alienated by the changing character of Mexicos
capital city with its flashy bilingual signs: open all night, english spoken,
abierto de noche (39). German List Arzubides El movimiento estridentista
9

Vela refers to La senorita etcetera as a novel or noveln, but it is only 18 pages long.

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(1926) initially appears to be a history of the Estridentista movement, but confounds readers when Estridentista authors intermingle with the fictional characters they created and inhabit both fictional and real spaces in Mexico City.
Current-day readers understand this type of meta-fiction, but few in Mexico (or
elsewhere) comprehended either the literary achievements of Mexicos avantgarde authors or their dense, self-aware texts from the 1920s.
Many critics have discussed the work of these Mexican authors as being derivative of European concerns and divorced from their concrete reality.10 I will argue
that these writers use meta-fiction, collage and non-linear formats, as well as play
with autobiographical conventions to contemplate the social realities of 1920s
Mexico. These dense contemplations are consistent with Vicky Unruhs model
for understanding social engagement in avant-garde prose. According to Unruh,
vanguard authors manage to tell a story while simultaneously questioning both
the act of storytelling and the possibility of being a storyteller: el relato vanguardista persegua la solucion a una aparente paradoja: como contar una historia al esquivar simultaneamente el acto de contar? (De quien es esta
historia? 249). Works by both Estridentistas and Contemporaneos provide some
of the first examples for the type of prose Unruh outlines: telling stories while
simultaneously undermining the authors own authority. Unruh argues that this
style of storytelling is not divorced from social concerns, but rather provides a
way to respond to concrete social problems during the 1920s and 1930s in Latin
America, including the ill-defined roles for artists and intellectuals: de quien
sera la historia que este relato intentara contar? quien tendra la autoridad
esclarecedora de contarla? hacia quien ira dirigida o cual sera su imaginado
publico lector? (25152).
With no defined audience for their works or secure funding to exercise their
craft, Mexican vanguard authors embody the difficult circumstances Unruh
describes. Although they objected to elements of the burgeoning Mexican state,
they also depended on political figures to help subsidize their writing. The Estridentistas drew support from General Heriberto Jara in Veracruz and the Contemporaneos depended on Jose Vasconcelos and others for their government
positions in the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health, and their diplomatic posts abroad. Yet, these jobs were not secure. When Jara fell from power,
the Estridentistas lost all funding. And the Contemporaneos constantly shifted
jobs in government agencies as ministers changed. Additionally, endemic corruption and cronyism was known to capriciously bestow and take away public
jobs. Furthermore, the extreme gender expectations for men in 1920s Mexico
aggravated an already difficult situation. During Mexicos great virility debates
of the 1920s and 1930s, journalists, authors and politicians vehemently attacked
anyone they regarded as different, especially men they perceived to be effeminate.11 Given these grim circumstances, it is not surprising that the authors shied
10
See the previous discussion of critical reactions to Estridentismo. Vargas, Perez Firmat
and Paul Arranz all mention meta-narrative elements in works by the Contemporaneos, but
do not relate these narrative innovations to the authors social milieu, instead criticizing the
lack of forward moving plots.
11
See Irwin for more on the Mexican virility debates.

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away from revealing many personal details in their prose, since being considered
un-masculine for any reason could jeopardize their professional livelihood.
So while almost all of the authors utilize protagonists who are authors, very
few of them reveal their characters and themselves to be one and the same, and
instead defy many of the conventions of autobiography. Philip Lejeune defines
an implicit promise in autobiography where the author promises reliability
through the use of his proper name in the text, or by entitling the work autobiography and leaving himself nameless (12, 21). Another theorist of autobiography, Elizabeth Bruss, states that autobiography must represent external events
and persons that are both real and verifiable (1011). In their experimental
autobiographies both Estridentistas and Contemporaneos flout the conventions
of autobiography, challenging Lejeune and Brusss directives at every turn.
Instead of sticking to real and verifiable characters, they meld real people with
fictionalized stand-ins. Often the authors and their friends appear by name as
tangential characters, while the main characters (who are stand-ins for the
authors) often have other names. Such is the case with Carlos in Jaime Torres
Bodets Margarita de niebla (1927), Julio in Xavier Villaurrutias Dama de corazones,
Ernesto in Gilberto Owens Novela como nube, and with Androsio in Arqueles
Velas El intransferible. In this last example, Vela uses his characters name to refer
to his own; like his own first name, Arqueles, Androsio begins with A, is eight
letters long, and uncommon. In other instances as in Torres Bodets La educacion
sentimental (1929) and in Velas El cafe de nadie trilogy (1926), the nameless characters share many autobiographical traits with their authors, yet these works are
packaged as fiction, not autobiography. In El movimiento Estridentista (1926), List
Arzubide refers to the group members by name, but discusses himself in the
third person, creating distance between him and the character with his name. At
other times, in a confessionary mood, the author pretends to open his heart to
the readeras in Salvador Novos Return Ticket (1928)but his confessions turn
out to be lies. The theatrics and assumed identities rife in these Mexican works
would put them far outside of the genre as Lejeune and Bruss define it.
The way in which these Mexican authors bend the conventions of autobiography provides another example of how their writing reflects their own concrete
circumstances. The vitriolic attacks of the great virility debates and the
unstable nature of public jobs in the 1920s shed light on why many authors do
not disclose personal details in their literary works. Consequently, their works
abound with images of watching and of being watched. This deep discursive selfawareness becomes a metaphor for the authors own reluctance to write straightforward autobiographies. Much of the experimental prose of these years take
place in contemporary Mexico and their protagonists are invariably intellectuals,
veiled versions of the authors themselves. Furthermore, in addition to playing
with the genre of autobiography, the authors use tools of the European vanguard, such as collage, to new purpose: to interact specifically with Mexicos
social, political and literary environment. In Actual No-1, Maples Arce does
not blindly copy the European avant-garde but rather rewrites it in a Mexican
context, often with a fair bit of humor. His manifesto, in turn, provides a model
that other Estridentista and Contemporaneo writers will follow in the many subsequent experimental Mexican autobiographies of the 1920s. Yet these works

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some of the first vanguard pieces in Latin Americaare rarely credited with
pioneering the Latin American literary vanguard movement. For example, Fernando Rosenbergs 2006 book recasts the mission of the Latin American vanguards as a critique of the modern as a global project (1), with a specific
interest in how Mario de Andrade and Roberto Arlt utilize a local point of view
to make their critiques (11). The Mexican avant-garde writers launch their critiques of modernity from a very local point of viewand earlier than many of the
authors Rosenberg discusses. It is therefore strange that he only briefly mentions
Maples Arce (with no further discussion of the Estridentistas and Contemporaneos).
Latin American authors of the 1920s would have learned of the Estridentistas
and Contemporaneos startling innovations from literary magazines such as
Argentinas Proa. Jorge Luis Borges reviews Maples Arces book of poems
Andamios interiores in the second issue of the seminal Argentine journal, Proa
(1922) and republishes the review in Inquisiciones (1925). Borges does criticize
certain elements of Maples Arces writing, but also lauds his poems as a vivsima
muestra del nuevo modo de escribir (123). Given the small number of vanguard authors throughout Latin America in the 1920s, it is certain that South
American authors would have read the Mexican journals in which the groups
disseminated their work. Actual No-1, El joven, and many other experimental
Mexican autobiographies use inventive forms of narrative in order to voice their
ambivalence toward the Revolution, state-sponsored nationalizing and modernizing projects and the place of the intellectual in post-revolutionary Mexican
society. Their critical approach to the official state party line lays the foundation
for similar concerns to be voiced in avant-garde writing throughout Latin
America. The remarkable works by both Estridentistas and Contemporaneos
would continue to influence other authors after the 1920s and beyond Mexicos
borders. Still, through the manner in which they so sharply reflect the circumstances and the personalities of 1920s Mexico, the works and the forms the
authors established are firmly rooted in post-revolutionary Mexico.
works

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