This is an interview in which Manuel Maples Arce, the founding father of Estridentismo movement, explains his most recent avant-garde battleground set at the bookstore Librería de César Cicerón and the new aesthetics announcement of what is being tested there, about the Café de Nadie. The place meant the location where “the first manifestos,” and the movement’s first collections of poems were written. It is also underscored, the estridentista decoration of his apartment (realized by Roberto Reyes Pérez). At the same time, Maples Arce distances himself from Ultraism, and claims precedence for the penta-grammatical Mexican poetry (Pedro Echeverria), over Italian Futurism, as he announces the imminent publication in the city of Puebla of the collection of poems Esquina [Street Corner], by Germán List Arzubide, by their publishing house Ediciones del Movimiento Estridentista.

This text describes the state of the art of the Estridentista Movement in terms of its own leader, who sporadically sets the memory of this avant-garde movement. In addition to the inclusion of two photos of Maples Arce, it reproduces a take of the main estridentistas at the Café de Nadie.Estridentismo was an early Mexican avant-garde movement, originated in 1921 parallel to the muralist movement. Its creator, and for some time only member, was Manuel Maples Arce (1898-1981), a poet from Veracruz who rebelled against modernist poets and academic painting. Related to Dadaism, Futurism, Ultraism, and Creationism—in both its European and Latin American manifestations—Estridentismo was a movement centered on disturbance-creating strategies, and closely linked to unrestricted allegiance to a mechanical aesthetics. Members of the movement encouraged a new urban sensory perception, in which experiences accumulate in simultaneity, at the rhythm and speed of modern life. The very name of the movement refers to urban noise of cities, as well as to their willingness to be heard because of their embedded transgressions and excesses. As a movement of artists devoted to literature, music, painting, engraving, photography, and sculpture, estridentismo had its center of operations at El Café de Nadie in Mexico City. Later on, it moved to the city of Xalapa, Veracruz, where its members became involved in an educational revolution. It had several channels of information such as the magazines: Ser, Irradiador and Horizonte.