La Cortina de Nopal [the Prickly pear Curtain] is a manifesto published in 1956 by Jose Luis Cuevas (b. 1934) in "México en la cultura," the cultural supplement of the daily, Novedades. In 1959, the text was also published in English in the Evergreen Review and would later be included in his autobiographical book, Cuevas por Cuevas [Cuevas by Himself] (1965). This text has taken on a symbolic meaning for different reasons. First, it has a highly effective way of stating the ideas and theories related to the group’s emancipation from the Mexican School of Painting as well as its growing desire for internationalization. (Subsequently, the group would come to be known as la Ruptura.) Another specific reason is that the writer is not only a fellow colleague of the avant-garde artists, but one of the harbingers and most persistent spokesman of that movement. In other words, the writer was a person with first-hand knowledge of this problem, from which he had suffered personally at the outset of his career. Regarding the drafting of the document, we can see that the ironic language and informal tone have a double effect. On the one hand, as a rhetorical strategy, they make the manifesto more persuasive. In addition, they lend the text a defiant tone; it is a kind of call to arms against obsolete traditions in Mexican art in the mid-twentieth century.With the Cold War in full swing, the name of the manifesto refers indirectly to—or we could say, finds a version of the Soviet Union’s "iron curtain," though in a new location.