This document reconstructs an art movement that was all but erased from history; it is based on testimony and documentary evidence and was carried out with great attention to detail by Luis Mario Schneider (1914-98). The list of bibliographic and newspaper references is eminently useful. In addition, the study includes hundreds of references to intellectuals and artists of the era.
Etridentismo, an early Mexican avant-garde movement, arose at the end of 1921, at the same time as the Muralist movement. Its creator, and for some time its only member, was Manuel Maples Arce, a poet from Veracruz who openly rebelled against modernist poets and the pictorial academy. As evidenced by the group’s publications, the movement was related to Dadaism, Futurism, Ultraism and Creationism—both European and Latin American strains. Estridentismo was a movement focused on agitation strategies through its deep connection to machinist aesthetics. The group promoted a new urban sensibility, wherein experiences amassed together simultaneously, at the same pace as modern life itself. The very name of the movement refers to the hustle and bustle of the city, but also to its will to be acknowledged both for its embedded transgressions and excesses.
The movement contained artists working in literature, music, painting, engraving, photography and sculpture; the headquarters of the Estridentistas group was El Café de Nadie in Mexico City, and then later in Xalapa, Veracruz, where its members became involved in an education revolution that was then taking place. The movement had various publications, such as the magazine Ser [Being], Irradiador [Irradiator] and Horizonte [Horizon].