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Dialogues along aNorth-South Axis

Avant-Gardists in 1920s Mexico and Peru

Tatiana Flores

Early twentieth-century art of Latin America has tended to be framedaround national narratives, with the standard truism being that theEuropean experiences of an elite few were transmitted to this or thatcountry, leading to the development of modernism in Venezuela, Brazil,Uruguay, etc. Actual conditions were far more complex. Informationconcerning modernist tendencies was reported in the press and thereforedid not depend on a single source, and national and regional polemicsaround contemporary aesthetics complicate a simplistic definition ofmodernism. Furthermore, Latin American artists and intellectualsthroughout the 1920s actively sought to create a distinctly Americanistform of avant-gardism to counter the enduring legacy of colonialism,European cultural hegemony and US imperialism. They especially didso through dialogues across borders. Some of these figures – artists andwriters, primarily – had the good fortune to meet in person, but muchof this dialogue took place through postal correspondence and may betraced in the pages of avant-garde journals, including Amauta (Lima,Peru, 1926–1930), Revista de Avance (Havana, Cuba, 1927–1930)and Horizonte (Xalapa, Mexico, 1926–1927), to name just a few.Though Vicky Unruh’s seminal study on Latin American vanguards(1994) and David Craven’s 2001 article on the relationship betweenPeruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui, editor of Amauta, andDiego Rivera have demonstrated the interconnectedness of avant-garde thought in Latin America,1 it is only recently that art historicalresearch into the early modernist moment has adopted transnationalperspectives.2 In honour of David Craven’s foray into the Mexico–Peruconnection in the 1920s, I will expand on this topic, shedding new lighton previously unknown relationships between avant-garde thinkers inboth countries, and illuminating the commonalities and divergences

Third Text, 2014

Vol. 28, No. 3, 297–310, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2014.909213

# 2014 Third Text

1. Vicky Unruh, LatinAmerican Vanguards: TheArt of ContentiousEncounters, University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeleyand Los Angeles, California,1994; David Craven,‘Postcolonial Modernism inthe Work of Diego Riveraand Jose Carlos Mariateguior New Light on a NeglectedRelationship’, Third Text54, winter 2000–2001,pp 3–16

2. See, for example, EstherGabara, Errant Modernism:The Ethos of Photography inMexico and Brazil, DukeUniversity Press, Durham,North Carolina, 2008;Harper Montgomery,‘Rebellious Conformists:Exhibiting Avant-Garde Artin Mexico City and BuenosAires’, doctoral dissertation,University of Chicago, 2010;Michele Greet,‘“Exhilarating Exile”: FourLatin American WomenExhibit in Paris’, Artelogie 5,http://cral.in2p3.fr/artelogie/spip.php?article262, accessed 1November 2013. The launchof the Documents of 20th-Century Latin American andLatino Art of the

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between experimental aesthetics and ethical considerations that came todefine the Latin American avant-garde.

Significant areas of overlap exist between Mexican and Peruvianartists and writers, with convergences that relate either to commonintellectual, social and historical bases or to particular encounters.The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) captured the imagination ofleftist thinkers in Peru and elsewhere, so it should come as no surprisethat Mexico was a focal point and model for conceptualizing the futureof the Americas, in much the same way that Cuba would be later inthe century.3 Furthermore, just as the indigenous native became alocus for introspection among artists and writers and a catalyst forpublic policy in Mexico following the revolution, so in Peru indigen-ismo was the dominant intellectual current of the 1920s. In additionto the emphasis on issues of social justice that the avant-garde inboth countries came to embrace, experimental aesthetics and therapidly changing modern world were major areas of interest. I willfirst address how modernity was received and adapted to literary andvisual art forms in Mexico and Peru before turning to discuss avant-gardism as an activist endeavour in Mexican art and Peruvian politicalthought.

The advent of a literary avant-garde in Mexico is typically credited toEstridentismo (Stridentism), a movement inaugurated by the publicationof the manifesto Actual No. 1 by the poet Manuel Maples Arce in Decem-ber 1921.4 Intended to scandalize, the text rebelliously defied literary con-vention through its unorthodox prose and the vituperative insults itlevelled against lyrical poetry (the dominant literary tendency), localauthors and bourgeois society more broadly. Inspired by Futurism andother avant-gardist eruptions, Maples Arce urged his readers toabandon melodic verses inspired by nature and embrace modernity anddissonance. Practising what he preached, the author adopted a frenziedrhythm, with contrived run-on sentences, complicated constructionsand abstruse vocabulary, to describe the experience of contemporaryurban life, his favoured subject. Attempting to capture a sense of instan-taneity and simultaneity, the text sped forth so precipitously that it wasalmost impossible to understand upon first reading. Marshall Berman’sdescription of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen (1869) evokes Maples Arce’sform and content:

The archetypal modern man, as we see him here, is a pedestrian throwninto the maelstrom of modern city traffic, a man alone contendingagainst an agglomeration of mass and energy that is heavy, fast andlethal. The burgeoning street and boulevard traffic knows no spatial ortemporal bounds, spills over into every urban space, imposes its tempoon everybody’s time, transforms the whole modern environment into a‘moving chaos’.5

At the end of his manic, chaotic manifesto, Maples Arce conscientiouslycredited his predecessors in the ‘avant-garde directory’, a listing of about200 modernists, mostly European. Baudelaire, however, was not men-tioned. Despite being the archetypical flaneur, Maples Arce may nothave been aware of the importance of the French poet as one ‘of thefirst great wave of writers and thinkers about modernity’.6 His ideasabout the metropolis and new aesthetics were filtered through more

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International Center for theArts of the Americas (ICAA)at the Museum of Fine Arts,Houston has also greatlyfacilitated research into thisarea.

3. See David Craven, Art andRevolution in LatinAmerica, 1910–1990, YaleUniversity Press, NewHaven, Connecticut, 2002.

4. On Estridentismo, seeTatiana Flores, Mexico’sRevolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismoto ¡30-30!, Yale UniversityPress, New Haven,Connecticut, 2013; LuisMario Schneider, Elestridentismo, o, unaliteratura de la estrategia(Stridentism, or, a Literatureof Strategy), UniversidadNacional Autonoma deMexico, Mexico City, 1997;Elissa J Rashkin, TheStridentist Movement inMexico: The Avant-Gardeand Cultural Change in the1920s, Lexington, Lanham,Maryland, 2009.

5. Marshall Berman, All ThatIs Solid Melts into Air: TheExperience of Modernity,Penguin, New York, 1988,p 159

6. Ibid, p 132

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Manuel Maples Arce, Urbe, book cover, frontispiece and illustrations by Jean Charlot, 9 5/8×6 11/16 in. (24.4×17 cm),

Andres Botas e hijos, Mexico City, 1924, private collection, photo: Pablo Esteva, courtesy Museo Casa Estudio DiegoRivera y Frida Kahlo, Mexico City, # The Jean Charlot Estate LLC, with permission

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contemporary sources, namely the Italian Futurists and Spanish Ultraıs-tas, who were also acknowledged within the body of the text. (Indeed,Estridentismo is often seen as an offshoot of Futurism.) He neverthelessself-consciously sought to distinguish his own movement by focusingon the here and now. Actual in Spanish means current, and in the mani-festo Maples Arce refers to his movement as actualismo, a name that didnot stick. He also jokingly (and rhetorically) trademarks the phrase‘Chopin to the electric chair!’.

Maples Arce’s undeclared affinity to Baudelaire, his direct relation toEuropean avant-gardists (through correspondence), and his avowedrefusal to participate in a nationalist aesthetic tradition (‘Let us becomecosmopolitan’, he writes, ‘it is no longer possible to contain ourselvesin conventional chapters on national art’) clearly point to his desire notto be limited and defined by geography. He is an advocate for globaliza-tion before its time, fervently believing in the potential of new technol-ogies – among others, the radio, the telegraph, the aeroplane – tobreak down traditional borders, leading to the ‘psychological unity ofthe century’. Not grounded in Mexican social reality when he draftedActual, he does not ponder the underside of modernization: extremewealth inequality, centralization and the transformation of Mexico’s dis-tinct traditional cultures into a nameless and faceless urban labour mass.As Estridentismo became more consolidated through interventions fromother writers and visual artists, Maples Arce changed course and alliedhis movement to the Mexican Revolution. His most celebrated bookUrbe: Super poema bolchevique en cinco cantos (Metropolis: BolshevikSuper Poem in Five Cantos), published in 1924, addressed labour as aninextricable aspect of the contemporary city. Eventually, Maples Arcerelocated to Xalapa, Veracruz, and became chief-of-staff to GovernorHeriberto Jara, a tireless advocate for workers’ rights and states’ auton-omy. Despite embracing this new socially committed identity, MaplesArce’s faith in technology persisted.

Peru did not experience a literary movement analogous to Estriden-tismo, though, as noted by Mirko Lauer, ‘at the center of avant-gardePeruvian poetry, there was an intense relationship with machines andthe technology that they embody, and a consciousness of the advance-ment of physical science’.7 In his important study Musa mecanica(Mechanical Muse), which examines imagery of machines and newtechnologies in Peruvian poetry during the period from 1916 to1930, among the conclusions drawn by Lauer is that ‘visual experimen-tation was part of a search for literary liberation, a dream ultimatelydefeated by the social context’.8 While Maples Arce’s own embraceof the new was in itself a gesture of emancipation from what he con-sidered to be a stifling and retrograde literary tradition, for Peruvianauthors addressing modernity also involved pondering its social impli-cations. Their attitudes ranged from conflicted wonderment in CarlosOquedo de Amat’s 5 metros de poemas (5 Meters of Poems, 1927)to outrage in Serafın Delmar’s Radiogramas del Pacıfico (Pacific Radio-grams, 1927).

Oquendo de Amat’s celebrated 5 metros de poemas shares a spiritualaffinity but not a direct connection to Maples Arce’s writings. It is anunbound accordion-like book that unfolds horizontally (though it doesnot quite measure five metres) and begins with the instruction to the

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7. Mirko Lauer, Musamecanica. Maquinas ypoesıa en la vanguardiaperuana (Mechanical Muse:Machines and Poetry in thePeruvian Avant-Garde),Instituto de EstudiosPeruanos, Lima, 2003, p 11.Unless otherwise noted,quotes from publications inSpanish are by the author ofthis article.

8. Ibid, p 12

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reader ‘open the book like peeling a fruit’.9 The poems and their structureare inspired by the most modern of media, the cinema; the first poem,however, is addressed to the narrator’s village sweetheart, the aldeanitawho wears her hair in braids. Whereas Estridentista writings are full ofreference to the women of the city – stenographers, prostitutes, femin-ists – Oquendo de Amat begins with a picture of innocence beforeimmersing his reader in urban space and then in the wonderful worldof the movies. As the reader progresses through the book, the typographyshifts to create a dynamic reading experience. After the fourth poem, theword ‘intermission’ diagonally bisects the page, accompanied by ‘10minutes’ in much smaller font. In the following poems, the reader istaken through Paris, Vienna, landscapes and seascapes, and eventuallyarrives in New York:

wherein the outskirts

the park rangerscharm rivers

And the morning leaveslike any girl

Emilio Goyburu, cover for 5 metros de poemas by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, 1927, wood-block print, courtesy Jaime Goyburu

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9. Carlos Oquendo de Amat, 5Meters of Poems (bilingualedition), Alejandro deAcosta and JoshuaBeckman, trans, UglyDuckling, Brooklyn, 2010,no pagination. The bookwas first published inSpanish in 1927.

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in her braidsshe wears a sign

For RENT

THISMORNING 10

In returning the reader to the imagery of the beginning, Oquendo deAmat contrasts the idyllic village to a ruthless city where ‘TIME ISMONEY’ (written vertically and in English) and where the girl hasbecome a commodity. The transition is jarring, made even more so bythe box that surrounds the sign. Up to now, the reader has beenseduced by captivating images of romance and movie stars (the poetmentions Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino), intoxicated by thesmell of perfume, and has experienced sounds of the city and themotion of the elevator and the trolley. ‘We all unscrew our optimism/we fill our purse with stars’, writes the narrator, acknowledging themovies as a form of escapism. With the sign, the reader has beenbrought into a harsh reality, far from the glitz and glamour of theearlier verses.

Jorge Coronado posits that:

Oquendo de Amat’s subject finds himself trapped in the agon between theubiquitous representatives of those two powerful, though unequal,forces – traditional culture and modernization – whose fate is indistin-guishable from his very own . . .

concluding that ‘we can recognize this troubled subject as the migrant,whose presence is implicitly or explicitly represented in the oeuvre ofmany Andean intellectuals of the period’.11 Indeed, in another avant-garde book of poetry, Ande (1926) by Alejandro Peralta, the narratorwaxes poetic on the sights and sounds of the region around Lake Titicaca,the Andean Plateau or altiplano. The text is accompanied by picturesqueimages of traditional customs that aim to fix the Andean landscape asimmutable and eternal. They represent the essence of indigenismo in itspictorial and literary varieties. As defined by Coronado, ‘a constellationof extremely varied practices . . . indigenismo endeavored to vindicatethe area’s indigenous people after centuries of abuse and marginaliza-tion’.12 Though the images are sentimental, both poetic and visualforms are experimental, and the poem’s themes allude to a world thatis in danger of disappearing. The first poem in the book ‘La pastoraflorida’ (‘The Flowery Shepherdess’) mentions aeroplanes and a ‘pet-roleum sky’ in the context of a pastoral landscape. In ‘Canto enbrumas’ (‘Song in Haze’), the narrator, presumably having left hisvillage for the city, mourns the separation from his loved one. He men-tions that instead of the song of the birds he hears ‘the cry of the corru-gated roofs’, attesting to his impoverished living conditions.13

Pessimistically, he declares, ‘the cardiac hearts of the locomotive/haveburned the horizons of the days’. Like Oquendo de Amat’s narrator, Per-alta’s is also a migrant, but one who derives only misery from his urbandisplacement.

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10. ‘new york’, in ibid

11. Jorge Coronado, TheAndes Imagined:Indigenismo, Society, andModernity, University ofPittsburgh Press,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania2009, p 84

12. Ibid, p 1

13. Alejandro Peralta, Ande,Editorial Titicaca, Puno,1926; facsimile editionpublished as AlejandroPeralta, Ande/El Kollao,Pontificia UniversidadCatolica del Peru, Lima,2006, p 63

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Such a negative view of modernity is also evident in Serafın Delmar’s bookof poetry Radiogramas del Pacıfico. Though the title would seem to suggestsomething more innocuous, this is poetry of protest, in which modernityand labour are intertwined to reveal the misery that it has wrought on theworking class. In Delmar’s poem ‘El dolor de la mujer al parir un hijo parala fabrica’ (‘The Pain of the Woman upon Giving Birth to a Son for theFactory’) the poet describes the birthing process as fraught with anxietyinstead of joy: ‘with a hidden hatred/the machines protested in her eyes theanguish/of all men’.14 The accompanying rough-hewn print features awoman cradling a baby in her arms standing before smoking factory chim-neys. The city has wrought upon the once-idyllic life of the country pain,misery, and the ‘migrating Man/alone strong and proletarian’.15 ForDelmar,hopecomes intheformofsocial revolution. Inapowerfulconclusion,he affirms a fundamental right for the factory worker: ‘the right to kill’.

Though to contemporary readers Delmar’s conclusion may come as ashock, the author’s militancy was typical of the Peruvian avant-gardiststance during the second half of the 1920s. In Mexico visual artistswho engaged with Estridentismo, notable among them Fermın Revueltasand Jean Charlot, emphasized class divisions and social inequality insome of their images related to urban space. Revueltas’s watercolourAndamios exteriores (Exterior Scaffolding, 1923) emphasizes both tech-nological modernity, in the form of telegraph wires, and the labour thatmakes it possible. Jean Charlot’s series of 1924 paintings, includingBeggar and Hauler (Cargador), conspicuously call attention to the city

Domingo Pantigoso, illustration for Ande by Alejandro Peralta, 1926, woodblock print,scanned from Alejandro Peralta, Ande / El Kollao, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del

Peru, Lima, 2007, p 57, courtesy Manuel Pantigoso

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14. Serafın Delmar,Radiogramas del Pacıfico,Editorial Minerva, Lima,1927, p 17

15. Ibid, p 18

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as a site of misery. Through visual means, these artists critiqued MaplesArce’s one-sided, celebratory view of modernity. In Peru, such a criticalposition was more evident in the literary as opposed to the artisticavant-garde. Visual artists associated with indigenismo, including JoseSabogal, Julia Codesido, Camilo Blas and Domingo Pantigoso, framedthe traditional cultures of the Andes as timeless and immutable in theface of profound economic and social change. They rarely addressedthese transformations in visual form, whereas writers were acute obser-vers of the clash between tradition and modernity and its implications.

Serafın Delmar collaborated with the Marxist journal Amauta – thecountry’s most important progressive organ but by no means the onlyone – and Radiogramas del Pacıfico was published by Mariategui’sown Editorial Minerva. Delmar was deported from Peru in 1927,accused, along with other intellectual and political figures, of being partof a ‘communist plot’ (he would continue to contribute to Amautaremotely).16 He travelled to Cuba with his companion Magda Portal

German Baltra, illustration for the poem ‘El dolor de la mujer al parir un hijo para la

fabrica’, in Radiogramas del Pacıfico by Serafın Delmar, 1927, woodblock print. Everyeffort has been made to trace the copyright holder.

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16. For a biography of Delmar,see J Barquero, ‘SerafınDelmar: precursor de laliteratura social del Peru’(‘Serafın Delmar: Precursorof the Social Literature ofPeru’), Proceso 6,Universidad Nacional delCentro, Huancayo, 1977,pp 3–16. Available online:http://www.pueblocontinente.com/serafin_del_mar_pc.pdf,accessed 28 October 2013.

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and made his way to Mexico, where he met Maples Arce in Xalapa inSeptember 1927. The only evidence of their encounter is a pair of dedi-cated books, Radiogramas del Pacıfico, with the inscription: ‘ForM. Maples Arce – great poet of America – with true sympathy fromSerafın Delmar’ and El derecho de matar (The Right to Kill), co-authoredwith Magda Portal and published in La Paz, Bolivia in 1926, signed by‘The authors’ and noting the place, month and year.17 Portal andDelmar must have found in Maples Arce a kindred spirit, for theyshared similar trajectories, having been at the forefront of experimentalpoetry in their respective countries, founders and directors of avant-garde journals – Irradiador (Irradiator, 1923) for Maples Arce andFlechas (Arrows, 1924) for Portal and trampolın/hangar/rascacielos/timonel (springboard/hangar/skyscraper/helmsman, 1926–1927) forboth Portal and Delmar – and thoroughly committed to political acti-vism. Though no other documentary trace remains of their relationship,the portrait of Serafın Delmar by Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, a visualartist close to Maples Arce, further attests to a common network.

Delmar and Portal formed part of a small group of Peruvian exiles inMexico City that also included Amauta contributor Esteban Pavletich

Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, Portrait of Serafın Delmar, 1928, woodblock print, courtesyAndres Blaisten Collection, Mexico City

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17. The inscription in Spanishreads, ‘Para M MaplesArce – gran poeta deAmerica – con la simpatıaviva de Serafın Delmar’.

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and the politician Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, founder of theAPRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana or AmericanPopular Revolutionary Alliance) political party and an eventual rival toMariategui as a result of diverging ideologies. Haya de la Torre hadarrived as an exile in Mexico in 1924 and established APRA as an anti-imperialist organization that promoted Latin American unity. Duringthe next three years, he travelled through Europe and in New Yorkseeking supporters. When he returned to Mexico in 1927, he enticedthis community of Peruvian leftist thinkers to join his cause. Delmarand Portal, who had been close to Mariategui in Lima, decided tofollow Haya de la Torre, though the two espoused different positions.Haya de la Torre

. . . reject[ed] the Communists’ call for a single-class political party . . .

[and] propos[ed] a multiclass party embracing three main groups he sawas suffering from imperialist incursion in Latin America – factory andmine workers, campesinos, and middle-class elements in the cities and hin-terlands.18

Mariategui remained a committed Marxist; Amauta, nevertheless, hadsupported Haya de la Torre and described itself as an ‘Apristaforum’.19 The break between the two men happened in 1928 after theAPRA cell in Mexico City distributed the ‘Plan de Mexico’, whichannounced the formation of a political party, the Partido Nacional Liber-tador (Nacional Liberator Party), which would launch Haya de la Torreas a candidate for the Peruvian presidency.20 The plan was hatched withno warning to the network of Aprista supporters around the world, and aprolonged debate with Mariategui ensued over postal correspondence,until Amauta’s editor became convinced, some time in mid-1928, thatthe schism was irresolvable. By the following year, according to Hayade la Torre, the only periodical to publish his writings was the Lima-based magazine La Sierra, also a progressive organ, which treatedsimilar topics to Amauta on contemporary aesthetics and social issuesand shared many of the same contributors.

The political climate of post-revolutionary Mexico and the teachingsof Haya de la Torre had a profound influence on Magda Portal, whoremarked that her ideas prior to meeting him were ‘vague, unformulated,barely more than impulses towards solidarity with workers and campesi-nos’, whereas Haya ‘put forward a specific goal. His intention was to laythe groundwork for a new sociopolitical movement in Latin America.’21

The Aprista leader ‘considered [Portal’s poetry] an obstacle to her politi-cal development’, and she took this critique very much to heart.22 Duringa picnic, she impetuously tore up her latest writings, the manuscript‘Anima absorta’, and threw the pieces into a stream. She justified thisaction as follows:

[T]hat was my way of responding to a new attitude, that of social struggle.I now had a commitment. During my two years in Mexico I studied theMexican Revolution and learned everything I could about politicaleconomy, a rather tedious subject . . . But it was necessary for me tobroaden my understanding. I couldn’t continue simply as a poet.23

The idea of aesthetics as being incompatible with committed action – orat least occupying different realms – was also held by the Estridentista

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18. Kathleen Weaver, PeruvianRebel: The World ofMagda Portal, with aSelection of Her Poems,Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, UniversityPark, Pennsylvania, 2009,p 57

19. Ibid

20. Ibid, p 58

21. Quoted in ibid, p 52

22. Ibid, pp 52–53

23. Quoted in ibid, pp 55–56

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poet German List Arzubide, Maples Arce’s closest associate during theXalapa years. List Arzubide distinguished between his work of the newaesthetic (his 1926 book of poetry El viajero en el vertice – or The Tra-veller on the Vertex – for example) and that of social struggle (such asMueran los gachupines – or Death to the Spanish – of 1926 or EmilianoZapata: Exaltacion of 1927). Maples Arce himself did not frame his pol-itical responsibilities for the Veracruzan government in terms of avant-garde action and promoted only his poetry this way. Neither of them,however, turned their backs on art. A more nuanced position was heldby Jose Carlos Mariategui, who repeatedly addressed the relationbetween politics and aesthetics in Amauta, providing a forum for criticaldebates in order to promote a sui generis brand of socialism that did notdepend on Marxist dogma but, rather, ‘incorporated the greatest numberof subjects in the revolutionary struggle’.24 He defended his posture in thefollowing way:

Amauta . . . as regards Peruvian problems, has come to inaugurate andorganize a debate, not close it off. It is a beginning and not an end. I per-sonally bring to this debate my propositions. I will, of course, work so thatthey prevail, but will resign myself if they influence – in action, in deeds,practically – in the measure of their coinciding with the feeling of my gen-eration and the rhythm of history.25

Mariategui’s own views on aesthetics were expounded in the 1926 text‘Art, Revolution, and Decadence’, where he distinguished between revo-lution and decadence as the ‘two souls’ of the contemporary world andposited that only art with a revolutionary spirit could be considerednew. ‘An artistic revolution is not content with formal conquests’, hedeclared.26 He also expressed his kinship with Haya de la Torre. Speakingabout the inextricable relation between art and politics, he wrote, ‘But thefact is that politics, for Haya and for me, who consider it elevated to thecategory of religion, is the very plot of History’.27

As Magda Portal’s experience reveals, Haya de la Torre consideredaesthetics a hindrance to political commitment. This view is alsoexpressed in a striking anecdote that describes a meeting between himand a poet who could have been none other than Manuel Maples Arce.According to Haya’s testimony:

Once I found in a remote city in Mexico a futurist poet who made versesabout skyscrapers, enormous intense factories, gigantic blimps, under-ground trains, etc., but who knew nothing of that. Only the ‘swift locomo-tive that in the distance whistles and passes’, which excited [Gaspar]Nunez de Arce. I asked him why he did not write verses about the cows,the beauties of his village, the Indian, etc., and he told me that he was arevolutionary and needed to write about industrialism and describe therevolution just as he dreamed it. The youth had many imitators and fol-lowers in his town, who would spend their time imagining what a skyscra-per was like, stretched out over the country grass. The poet dreamed aboutinciting an October revolution in his little village. But the story wasnothing new to me. I know other poets in larger villages who spendtheir time thinking about demolishing a rudimentary industrialism or acolonial capitalism while rejecting the word ‘anti-imperialism’ for beingunworthy of their fantastic conceptions of the incipient reality in whichthey live. From those poets writing verses or articles, poems or theoriza-tions, may some saintly doctor of psychopathology deliver us.28

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24. Fernanda Beigel, Elitinerario y la brujula: Elvanguardismo estetico-polıtico de Jose CarlosMariategui (The Itineraryand the Compass: ThePolitico-AestheticVanguardism of JoseCarlos Mariategui), Biblos,Buenos Aires, 2003, p 54

25. Jose Carlos Mariategui,‘Polemica finita’, Amauta,year II, no 7, March 1927,pp 37–38, quoted in ibid,p 55

26. Jose Carlos Mariategui,‘Arte, revolucion ydecadencia’, Amauta, yearI, no 3, November 1926, pp3–4; reprinted in KlausMuller-Bergh and GilbertoMendonca Teles, eds,VanguardiaLatinoamericana: Historiacrıtica y documentos,Tomo IV: Sudamerica,Area Andina Centro:Ecuador, Peru y Bolivia,Iberoamericana, Madrid,2005, p 167

27. Ibid, p 168

28. Vıctor Raul Haya de laTorre, ‘Pensamientos deHaya de la Torre’(‘Thoughts of Haya de laTorre’), La Sierra 30,September 1929, p 24

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Haya de la Torre must have been describing Xalapa during Maples Arce’ssojourn there. The capital of Veracruz was little more than a sleepy town,and though he occupied a prominent political position, Maples Arcekeenly missed urban life.29 His 1927 book of poetry Poemas interdictos(Prohibited Poems), roughly contemporaneous with Haya de la Torre’smeeting with him, is rife with references to the city, modernity and newtechnologies. It also includes the poem ‘Revolucion’, which describessocial revolution in violent terms but in which technological modernityis not emphasized.

Despite Maples Arce’s evident political commitment, the poetic narra-tor was far too removed from hands-on activism to satisfy Haya de laTorre, who regarded artistic creation as ‘fantastic conceptions’, detachedfrom reality and who criticized the lack of a clear-cut ideology. APRA’scatchphrase was ‘Against Yankee Imperialism, for the unity of thepeoples of Latin America, for the realization of social justice’,30 andHaya de la Torre continuously emphasized anti-imperialism in histexts. He articulated APRA’s mission as follows:

1) Action of the countries of Latin America against Yankee Imperialism. 2)The political unity of Latin America. 3) The nationalization of land andindustry. 4) The Internationalization of the Panama Canal. 5) The solidar-ity of all the oppressed people and classes of the world.31

Regardless of Estridentismo’s outward reach and international network,its politics were internally focused, wholly relating to the legacy of theMexican Revolution and the tensions between the state and federal gov-ernments. The idea of Latin American unity was far from its imaginary,whereas it was Haya de la Torre’s entire raison d’etre.

The internal dynamics of Haya de la Torre’s political project withinhis circle of associates, both Peruvian and Mexican, are not fully clear,but references to the APRA leader emerge in the manifestos of theGrupo de Pintores ¡30-30! (¡30-30! Group of Painters), a movementspearheaded by visual artists, many of whom had been close to Estriden-tismo, including Ramon Alva de la Canal, Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma,and Fernando Leal.32 ¡30-30! arose in 1928 to defend the revolutionarylegacy in art education, particularly open-air painting schools, whichwere alternative centres for art education (as opposed to the traditionalacademy) that catered to students from indigenous communities andimpoverished urban neighbourhoods. Named after a strident carbinerifle associated with the Mexican Revolution, ¡30-30! distributed mani-festos, organized art exhibitions, and also published a magazine. Theirmanifestos were aggressive and unafraid to court polemics. UnlikeActual No. 1, they were also intensely local, making reference to internalpolitics and situations that are difficult to reconstruct. In the second mani-festo, the ¡30-30! members (called treintatrentistas) made the followingremarks about Haya de la Torre:

Among the painters of the open-air schools, with their deep and energetictradition, and the daubers [pintorcillos] of the Academy, with theirso-called ‘traditional culture’, there is as much of a difference as there isbetween the armed peasants of the Mexican revolution and theirenemies, the Indoamericanists, from the propagandist of British imperial-ism Haya de la Torre, to the last Aprista, parasites of the poverty of theindigenous masses.33

308

29. See Flores, Mexico’sRevolutionary Avant-Gardes, op cit,pp 204–205

30. Vıctor Raul Haya de laTorre, ‘What is theA.P.R.A.?’, in Robert JAlexander, ed, APRISMO:The Ideas and Doctrines ofVıctor Raul Haya de laTorre, Kent StateUniversity Press, Kent,Ohio, 1973, p 101

31. Ibid, p 97

32. On ¡30-30!, see LauraGonzalez Matute, ed, ¡30-30! Contra la Academia dePintura, 1928, MuseoNacional de Arte, MexicoCity, 1994; and Flores,Mexico’s RevolutionaryAvant-Gardes, op cit.

33. Grupo de Pintores ¡30-30!,Segundo manifiestotreintatrentista,broadsheet, Mexico City,1928, reprinted inGonzalez Matute, ed, ¡30-30!. In the text, they referto Apristas in a derogatorymanner as ‘Arpistas’(‘Harpists’).

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It is unclear what it was about APRA that had so deeply offended thetreintatrentistas. In the passage, ‘Indoamerica’ refers to the term that Per-uvian intellectuals used to substitute for Latin America, which they con-sidered Eurocentric. It related to the broader avant-garde project ofindigenismo, which was theorized by Jose Carlos Mariategui, who usedthe phrase indigenismo de vanguardia, to ‘describe the fusion necessarybetween the vanguard element (socialism) and indigenismo’.34 JorgeCoronado has pointed out that ‘by reason of its being a letteredproject – indigenismo from the outset could not include in its dialoguethe very subaltern subjects it sought to represent’.35 Perhaps thetreintatrentistas, in their promotion of giving subaltern peoples thetools of representation, recognized Peruvian indigenismo as elitist andpaternalistic. To say that the Apristas benefited from the poverty of themasses, however, was needlessly combative. The entire manifesto wasreproduced in Amauta with the following critique:

We transcribe this document with the strict informative purpose of givinga space within this [section] to the polemical vehemence with which thebattles of Art are fought in revolutionary Mexico and with which the aes-thetic dispute is mixed with political sentiment. But we cannot abstain

Grupo de Pintores ¡30-30!, 2o Manifiesto Treintatrentista, 1928, broadsheet, 31 1/2×19 11/16 in (80×50 cm), # Fernando Leal-Audirac Collection and Archives, reproduced in Laura

Gonzalez Matute, ed, ¡30–30! Contra la Academia de Pintura, 1928, op cit

309

34. Cynthia Vich, Indigenismode vanguardia en el Peru:Un estudio sobre el BoletınTitikaka, PontificiaUniversidad Catolica delPeru, Lima, 2000, p 52

35. Coronado, The AndesImagined, op cit, p 110

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from declaring impertinent the allusion to Haya de la Torre, who has justbeen deported from Panama by Yankee imperialism.36

Despite Amauta’s disapproval of ¡30-30!’s denigration of Haya de laTorre, the artists and writers around the movement continued to be fea-tured on a regular basis, mostly through the writings of Martı Casanovas,a Spaniard who had been active in avant-garde circles in Cuba and was afounding member of ¡30-30! before being ousted from the group, but alsothrough reproductions of images and an interview with Fernando Leal.37

The journal was intrigued by the movement’s marriage of art and politicalactivism, an avant-garde phenomenon that did not have parallels in Per-uvian art. In fact, the very terminology ‘avant-garde’ (or vanguardia)came to be the subject of spirited debates, with Casanovas affirmingthat ‘revolutionary art’ was a preferable designation because ‘avant-garde’ implied art for art’s sake.38 For the author, the revolutionaryartist was not simply one who painted scenes from the revolution, but,rather, a social agent with a ‘new moral [and] human sentiment’.39 Hisviews resonated with those of Mariategui, as well as with the paintersaffiliated with ¡30-30!.

Over the course of the 1920s, artists and intellectuals in Mexico andPeru explored many avenues around modernism and the avant-garde,including technological modernity, the possibility of abandoning artisticcreation in favour of embracing political engagement as a full-time endea-vour, and marrying politics and aesthetics. Despite geographical distanceor differences of opinion, the lines of communication remained open,and Mexican artists found a receptive forum in Peru for new proposalson the direction of revolutionary art. Concurrently, such artists as Fer-nando Leal and Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma would develop a greater con-sciousness of an ‘American’ identity and create works of art that fosteredregional solidarity. It was the close interaction with the Peruvian emigrecommunity in Mexico City and the dialogues with Mariategui that madepossible the shift from them being exclusively Mexican to becomingLatin American artists as well as conscientious hemispheric citizens.

310

36. ‘Panorama movil:documentos’, Amauta 21,February/March 1929,p 84

37. Tristan Marof, ‘En el atelierdel pintor revolucionarioFernando Leal’, Amauta28, January 1930,pp 86–87

38. Martı Casanovas,‘Vanguardismo y arterevolucionario:Confusiones’, Amauta 22,April 1929, pp 73–76

39. Ibid, p 75

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