Estridentópolis y la vanguardia

On the morning of December 31, 1921, one of the most singular and innovative aesthetic proposals of modern art began with the appearance in the streets of Mexico City of the flyer Actual no. 1, a stridentist tablet signed by Manuel Maples Arce. Stridentism was a polemic movement, a cultural, artistic and intellectual battle; a symptomatic state of its historical situation, in the fields of aesthetics, politics and morals; a collection of ideas, attitudes and instincts, within which, although not clearly, the need to be modern was expressed, whether in literature, painting, sculpture or photography. Around 1926, when Maples Arce joined the ranks of Heriberto Jara Corona in the government of Veracruz, stridentism made Xalapa its home, called this mythical city Estridentópolis and stayed to inhabit it. This book is the result of the V International Congress of Poetry Researchers, organized by the Institute of Linguistic and Literary Research of the Universidad Veracruzana in October 2012. Its pages bring together 16 voices from different generations that, based on literary research, integrate a homage to the first Mexican avant-garde, by putting back on the discussion table the study of some of the themes, images, poetics, magazines, group programs and individualities that made up the stridentist house. As Xavier Villaurrutia ironically affirmed, it would be tone-deaf not to devote a little judgment to the sonorous purposes of stridentism, this volume aspires to listen beyond the noise of the polemic, to the mystique that the movement created around a city, an era and Mexican literature.