This text is useful for its report on the specific contributions of the artists that were part of the Estridentista movement. Nevertheless, the importance of the report is lessened by its literary focus. Francisco Reyes Palma mounted the first Estridentista exhibition in the Biblioteca Nacional de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), in México City; it ran from October 25 through December 1, 1971.
Estridentismo, 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—in their 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 for both 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].
