14

The Women of the Avant-Gardes

Vicky   Unruh

If the iconoclastic machine-woman and her virgin-mother doppelganger,

the two Marias in Fritz Lang’s 1927 futuristic film Metropolis, juxtaposed
gendered anxiety about modernity’s ills with their imagined antidote, key
works by male writers of Latin America’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and
1930s also displayed paradoxical responses toward gender change accompa-
nying the region’s incipient modernization. Thus we find the dancing office
workers of the “Arte moderna” manifesto by Brazil’s Menotti del Picchia or
of Arqueles Vela’s Mexican estridentista novel La Srta. Etc. (1922); the disinte-
grating corpse of the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade’s 1937 play A morta [The
dead woman], embodiment of a decaying lyricism and bourgeois morality;
the fragmented or flying women of Argentine Oliverio Girondo’s poetic
cityscapes of the 1920s; the bourgeois castrating woman and maternal pros-
titutes in Roberto Arlt’s novelized Buenos Aires; the silenced women of
Pablo Neruda’s early poetry; and manifestos throughout Latin America
equating innovation with virility – a maleness often enhanced by a New
Woman muse – and whatever was deemed aesthetically contemptible with
femininity.
Women linked through literary style or affiliation to Latin America’s his-
torical avant-gardes often engaged with these stereotypes through critical
mimicry, particularly in staging their own entrées to cultural life. But in con-
trast to this typecasting, women’s literature offers a rich range of responses
to the new, in women characters connected to the realities of an emergent,
radically unequal Latin American modernization. These fictional portraits of
women include those whose class privilege is undermined by social change,
workers struggling in growing cities, political activists pursuing social justice,
sexually liberated women alternately celebrated and chastised by media cul-
ture, and aspiring artists in a frustrated search for intellectual homes.

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 Vicky Unruh

This body of work is hybrid in genre and style, resistant to categorization,

and constituted by a mélange of fiction, memoir, poetry, experimental drama,
and journalism. Although women participated in Latin America’s avant-garde
experiments in numbers defying individual accounts here, four representative
figures and one representative group illuminate the distinct paths followed
by women of the avant-gardes and their literary virtuosity. These include
upper-class intellectual women, exemplified here by Cuba’s Dulce María
Loynaz (1902–1997), who, like Venezuela’s Teresa de la Parra (1889–1936) or
Argentina’s Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), examined modernity’s impact
on the partial autonomy afforded women sheltered by privilege; women,
exemplified by Argentina’s Norah Lange (1906–1972), who, like Cuba’s
Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta (1902–1975), collaborated with a male-dominated
avant-garde group while casting a critical eye in their writing on the contor-
tions in self-conception or dislocations this required; women like Brazil’s
Patrícia Galvão (1910–1962) who combined aesthetic invention with political
action in projects thematically comparable to writing by Magda Portal (Peru,
1903–1989) or Uruguay’s Blanca Luz Brum (1905–1985); women like Nellie
Campobello (Mexico, 1900–1986) who, similarly to Cuba’s Mariblanca Sabas
Alomá (1901–1983), negotiated with nationalist discourse through the perspec-
tives of women; and the numerous women, to be noted in conclusion, who
deployed the aesthetic malleability of mass-circulation journalism for inven-
tive self-portraiture and critical scrutiny of changing social roles.
The stylistic and genre hybridity of literature by women connected to the
avant-gardes manifests the nimbleness required to find discursive strategies
suited to their expressive needs and self-figuration as intellectuals. But hybrid-
ity also defined Latin America’s avant-gardes overall, as did the self-conscious
attention not only to art itself but also to the formation of the would-be artist.
As I  have argued elsewhere, the interwar vanguards in Latin America con-
stituted a multifaceted cultural activity that, as Peter Bürger asserts about
Europe, undermines the finished-product concept of art (Bürger 56) and that
“draws on an available repertoire of doings around art, culture, and politics
that coalesces in a quest for new styles, not only of writing but also of par-
ticipation in public life” (Unruh “Modernity’s Labors” 346). This public style
resembles what Pierre Bourdieu termed the “art of living” (58) to portray
late nineteenth-century literary cultural improvisation of literary personas.
Beyond experimental writing, then, avant-garde activity included the for-
mation of small groups around an artistic, intellectual, or political positon,
encapsulated in manifestos or little magazines, and participation in social
ventures, including tertulias, exhibitions, audience-engaging performances,

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

or even political actions. An ethos of engagement between art and life – aes-
thetic, metaphysical, or social – dominated the structures of feeling in Latin
America’s avant-gardes. Mid-twentieth-century literary historiography
cast the avant-gardes as a poetic movement through such figures as Vicente
Huidobro, César Vallejo, Girondo, and Neruda.1 But later scholarship encom-
passes the avant-gardes’ multiple genres, highlights the legacy of vanguard
experiments in the Latin American Boom, and examines the avant-gardes’
dynamic between the international and the local.2
Later scholarship also recuperates the complicated relationship of women
writers to the avant-gardes,3 and it was precisely the public facet of vanguard
activity that challenged women seeking to locate themselves as writers.
Upper-class women participated in nineteenth-century literary life in salons
or writing circles that drew public debates into quasi-domestic venues. But
the early twentieth century introduced new social actors in Latin America’s
cities. One was the professional male writer who pursued a living through
mass-circulation journalism; courted its middlebrow audience, often con-
ceived as feminine; and simultaneously cultivated a more rarified vision of art.
Inhabiting the same social field, the modern Latin American woman juggled
mixed signals about womanhood: media stereotypes of the New Woman a
la flapper; the civic ideal of social motherhood pursued by reformist femi-
nists that reinforced patriarchal structures; culturalist images of autochtho-
nous, ostensibly national mothers;4 and workaday realities of increasingly
public women’s lives as laborers, teachers, office workers, professionals, or
consumers.
The public facet of avant-garde activity exacerbated the challenges for
women seeking an intellectual identity or acceptance as writers by male
groups. Some women navigated that private-public from a class status that
allowed their participation from a semiprotected position and whose mate-
rial resources allowed them to craft their own avant-garde profile outside any
particular group. Dulce María Loynaz’s early writing manifests this shifting
positionality in its search for expressive registers, manifested in what Ileana
Rodríguez describes as the “textual doubts” (91) of Loynaz’s most avant-garde
work, the novel Jardín [Garden]. But the novel also exhibits an avant-garde
nostalgia, an oxymoronic structure of feeling also found in the literature and
self-fashioned personas of such women from comparable backgrounds as de
la Parra and Ocampo. This intense yet arm’s length embrace of the new in
Loynaz’s novel exudes a paradoxical sense of loss inscribed in the moderniza-
tion of women’s access to the world, bereavement at the disappearance of the
imagined creative wiggle room once enjoyed where the confines of gender

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 Vicky Unruh

intersected with the privileges of class. The result is a textual self-embodiment

of the woman intellectual with one foot in the vanishing world whose class
privileges she resists relinquishing and one in modernity with its promise of
greater freedom.
Loynaz was born in Havana in 1902, daughter of a military hero in the coun-
try’s just-completed independence wars and a mother from the landowning
criollo aristocracy, and came of age in a new republican Cuba. She received
an extensive tutorial education, read widely, and traveled with her family to
the United States and Middle East in her youth and later to Europe and South
America. She earned a law degree from the University of Havana in 1927.
She published essays, nonfiction prose, and biography but is best known for
her poetry, recognized through Cuban literary awards and Spain’s prestigious
Miguel Cervantes Prize (1992). Her novel Jardín, written between 1928 and 1935
(published in 1951), is one of the most innovative novels of Latin America’s
historical avant-gardes. But a striking fact about Loynaz is her absence
from Havana’s lively public avant-garde scene of the 1920s and early 1930s,
including the Grupo Minorista (1923–1927) and the creators of the Revista de
avance (1927–1930), writers who cultivated artistic experiments; a culturalist,
sometimes nationalist, construction of cubanía in resistance to the U.S. pres-
ence under the notorious Platt Amendment; and opposition to government
repression under Alfredo Zayas (1921–1915) and Gerardo Machado (1925–1933).
Loynaz’s work did appear in the groundbreaking 1926 anthology La poesía
moderna en Cuba (1882–1925) edited by minoristas. But although two women
signed the group’s manifesto and others attended their gatherings or collab-
orated in minorista ventures, there is no record that Loynaz did. Moreover,
although women were joining the Havana labor force as teachers, nurses,
office workers, minor bureaucrats, journalists, and textile and tobacco work-
ers (Stoner 38) and women involved with the minoristas worked for a living,
Loynaz largely did not.
In contrast to Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, Ofelia Rodriguez Acosta, Graziella
Garbalosa, and Maria Villar Buceta, who cultivated public personas at Havana
gatherings, Loynaz’s cultural life occurred in her home, as her family hosted
gatherings frequented by visiting writers such as Lorca and Juan Ramón
Jiménez. While this nineteenth-century model was not unusual for Loynaz’s
class, it seems anachronistic for a world-traveled woman writing a radically
experimental novel in the 1930s. Jardín’s protagonist, Bárbara, whose intel-
lectual formation and life trajectory constitute the work, manifests compa-
rable tensions between traditional enclosure and modern freedoms. The
novel begins with a metaliterary author’s prelude that reflects on its own

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

composition as a “libro extemporáneo” [extemporaneous book] (9)  whose

reading is designed to be “inconexa y entrecortada” [disconnected and inter-
mittent] (10).5 The protagonist, Bárbara, is conceived as “imposible de encajar
en nuestros moldes, en nuestros modos, en nuestros gustos y hasta en nuestras
creencias” [impossible to square with our norms, our ways, our tastes, and
even our beliefs] (10). The authorial narrator affirms the work’s aim to liberate
the protagonist from herself. In the opening and closing scenes, Bárbara stares
out the barred windows of her Havana seaside mansion, a sheltered space
invaded by sounds and sights of a city’s modernization. Bárbara’s trajectory
and the narrative flow vacillate between inward-moving reflections on the
past and pulls from this new world. The earlier chapters present Bárbara’s
self-guided education in the mansion’s interior garden and the pavilion it
encloses, and in the palimpsests of family/national history they contain: let-
ters, photographs, news clippings, notes, lost texts. Although leading through
interlocking spaces inhabited by familial and national ghosts and enveloped
in a nostalgic yearning for knowledge of the past, Bárbara’s quest through
these documents – recounted in a lyrical free indirect discourse – constitutes
an apprenticeship in modern reflective reading and a critical reiteration of cul-
tural scripts for women (Eve in her Garden, Sleeping Beauty, for example). The
novel characterizes this secluded intellectual activity as a “ventanal abierto”
[large open window] (96). Thus the backward-looking apprenticeship in criti-
cal reading propels Bárbara into the modern international city, a place whose
cult of speed, paralleled by a heightened narrative pace, contrasts with the lei-
surely reading enabled in the mansion. Once outside, Bárbara sprints through
a life cycle of marriage and family, through a mélange of European and Latin
American cities, and through historical time, from the world war when she
binds wounds to the postwar city, permeated by the “virus de la velocidad”
[velocity virus] and assembly lines (277). She eventually flees modernity back
to the collapsing mansion’s garden, apparently dying from the debris, and we
leave her staring out the barred window into eternity.
As I have argued elsewhere, Bárbara’s fl ight from workaday mechanization
(for example, in Cuba’s sugar industry) and nostalgic counteridentification
with traditional agricultural laborers are consistent with the romanticizing of
an imagined premodern cultural authenticity by Cuban minoristas in reaction
to the U.S. market-based work ethic taking hold in Cuba (“Modernity’s Labors,”
359). But Loynaz’s portrayal of Bárbara as the displaced reader-intellectual
stands out, eternally poised between the vanishing opportunities for criti-
cal reflection of her origins and modernity’s promise of mobility. The work
envelops Bárbara’s reflective scrutiny of family history with an illicit aura, like

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 Vicky Unruh

Eve’s proverbial curiosity, and portrays her foray into contemporary literary
culture as a silencing misstep: Attending a public tertulia at last, for all her
erudition, she has nothing to say (272). Although her writing career was quite
different from Loynaz’s, Teresa de la Parra elaborated a comparable image of
an intellectual woman poised between nostalgic reflections on losses incurred
by women of her class through modernization and her embrace of that very
modernity.6 A thoroughly modern woman who dismissed modern cultural
gatherings as frivolous and, like Loynaz, eschewed membership in vanguard-
ist groups, in Las memorias de Mamá Blanca (1929), Parra portrayed a profes-
sional modern woman writer mystified by futurist gatherings who reclaims
as her creative mentors characters from the neocolonial landowning past to
which she can never return.7
In contrast to Loynaz and Parra, the poet, novelist, and oratorical satirist
Norah Lange embraced her role as the designated muse of the aestheticist
wing of Argentina’s avant-gardes but transmuted the role through her writing
into an interloping anatomist who dissects the domestic world that formed
her and the male literary culture that selects her as its inspiration. As with
Loynaz, Lange’s literary initiation began at home with the tertulias hosted by
her mother, the formative gatherings of young Buenos Aires male vanguard-
ists, including Girondo (whom Lange later married) and Borges. Lange par-
ticipated in the group’s broadside Prisma (1921–1922) and little magazine Proa
(1924–1926), and, when the group began publishing the longer-lived magazine
Martín Fierro (1924–1927), she began delivering speeches at their gatherings,
assemblages that continued through the 1930s. Lange was born in Buenos
Aires to immigrant parents  – a Norwegian father and an Irish-Norwegian
mother – and spent her childhood in provincial Mendoza. Like Loynaz, Lange
was home-schooled by tutors, but the tertulias in her mother’s Buenos Aires
home placed her at the center of the emergent avant-garde group, and when
the martinfierristas began frequenting public venues, Lange joined them. And
in further contrast to Loynaz, although Lange began life in relative privilege,
after her father’s death, the family struggled, and in 1929 she began working
as a translator. She published three poetry collections, six prose works, and
the collected oral performances she delivered to the Martin Fierro group
(also known as the Florida group). Lange’s writing and biographies yield the
portrait of a woman navigating between worlds, the domestic world of her
upbringing and the male fraternity that welcomed her more as its muse than
as a writer among equals. But in her satirical orations, she assumed a superior
position with a critical eye, a tactic comparable to the character dissections
of her prose.

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

It was Borges in a preface to her 1925 poetry collection La calle de la tarde

[The Afternoon Street] who first cast Lange as the embodiment of the group’s
aesthetics, equating Lange and her poetry to the freedom sought in their
poetic experiments, “leve, y altiva y fervorosa como bandera que se realiza
en el viento” [light and proud and fervent, like a flag fulfilled in the wind]
(“Prólogo” 5). Although Lange embraced the performing muse role as her
entrée – declaiming poetry, playing instruments, or tango dancing – her first
prose work, the lyrical Voz de la vida [Voice of Life] (1927), inverts this role,
as the female speaker-writer seeks inspiration from an absent male muse.
Contemporary critics missed the critical irony in that inversion, instead taking
Lange to task for the poetry’s “palabras viríles” [virile words] and its ostensibly
male subject matter and abstractness, unsuited to a woman (Doll 335–336).
In her first novel, 45 días y 30 marineros [45 days and 30 sailors] (1933), Lange
allegorized her own position among martinfierristas, a woman surrounded
by men who interpellate her to perform. Because Lange had once made such
a trip, contemporaries read the tale of a woman’s transatlantic voyage from
Buenos Aires to Oslo as biographical, missing connections between the pro-
tagonist’s verbal cascades and performative virtuosity for male shipmates and
Lange’s own role in Martín Fierro gatherings. But as I have noted elsewhere,
the book’s official presentation encourages a comparison between the pro-
tagonist’s strategies among male shipmates and Lange’s tactics as an artist in
formation amid a literary fraternity (Performing Women 79). Accompanying
the event was a photo of martinfierristas dressed as sailors, Girondo as their
captain, surrounding a reclining Lange, dressed as a mermaid.
In her most accomplished avant-garde work, the fictionalized memoir
Cuadernos de infancia [Childhood notebooks] (1937), awarded the first place
Buenos Aires municipal prize, and her contemporaneous macaronic discur-
sos for Martín Fierro, collected as Estimados cóngeres [Esteemed congeries],
Lange honed a portrait of the writer as anatomist, a position from which to
dissect peers. This activity inverts the visual scrutiny stalking a female muse
into an analytical strategy for conceptual and verbal invention. Loosely plot-
ted around domestic episodes, Cuadernos reflects on the narrator’s childhood
in a küntstlerroman-style memoir structured as the formation of an artist,
where we see the narrator taking stock of her gendered world, while devel-
oping a distinct style for anatomizing others. Thus the narrator, with her sis-
ters, play acts at such studied, gendered gestures as fainting, convalescing,
or expressing occasion-appropriate emotions. These activities are embodied
physically by a narrator captivated by dexterous poses. Thus Cuadernos chan-
nels the avant-garde proclivity for synecdoche to the ostentation of isolated

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 Vicky Unruh

body parts incarnating an attitude, for example “un ojo mojado, un pedazo de
la nariz, un ángulo de la boca” [a dampened eye, a piece of nose, an angle of
the mouth] (27). The most ingenious feature of the narrator’s apprenticeship
as an interloping anatomist is her imagined incorporations  – a kinesthetic
epistemology – into the physical shapes of others, as she tries, for example,
to reproduce a particular facial profile with her own body. This fertile activity
yields critical renditions of the (often-gendered) performance of personality.
Cuadernos displays the avant-gardes’ economy of style, whereas Lange’s discur-
sos as Martin Fierro’s recalcitrant muse incarnate verbal excess. Sylvia Molloy
aptly links the brash multilingual rooftop performances for neighbors by the
Cuadernos narrator with Lange’s real-life discursos (At Face Value 135). Moreover,
the discursos, which by turns lauded and satirized group members or visiting
artists through their quirks, reproduced the Cuadernos narrator’s dissections.
In rendering the interloping muse as satirist, these orations also evoked the
classical genre of the literary anatomy portrayed by Northrop Frye as marked
by characterizations stylizing eccentricities; the anatomist’s verbal excess, eru-
dite display, and digression; and an assumed position of superiority, in Lange’s
case by standing on a box to tower above her audience.
In her initial appropriation of the avant-garde muse role, Patricia Galvão’s
late-adolescent initiation into São Paulo’s Antropofagia group (1928–1929) is
comparable to Lange’s relationship to the martinfierristas. But Galvão attacked
the role more directly and soon abjured it, rerouting literary experiments
toward political activism. Her writing includes poetry, two novels, a political
tract, and journalistic columns on film, theater, and literature. Her experimen-
tal writing of the late 1920s and early 1930s incarnates the Latin American van-
guardists’ quest for synthesis between art and politics. Galvão’s avant-garde
period is therefore more analogous in focus and intent to the work of Peru’s
Magda Portal, who had ties to the leftist vanguard journal Amauta (1926–1930)
and its circle, led by Latin America’s first renowned Marxist, José Carlos
Mariátegui, and to the continental Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana
[American Revolutionary Popular Alliance] (APRA) movement led by Víctor
Raúl Haya de la Torre.8 Much as Portal chronicled the gender trouble mark-
ing her artistic and political odyssey, Galvão’s irreverent transformation of
the primitivist muse role assigned her by the Antropofagia group generated a
scathing critique of Brazilian society that underscored intersecting inequali-
ties of gender, class, and culture and complicity by indifference in their prolif-
eration by bourgeois artists and intellectuals.
Raised by a middle-class family in Bras, center of São Paulo’s textile industry,
Galvão, born in 1910, was only eighteen when the painter Tarsila do Amaral

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

recruited her into the Antropofagia circle led by Tarsila’s then-husband,

Oswald de Andrade, a canonical figure of Brazilian modernism.9 The poet
Raul Bopp consecrated Galvão as the group’s muse (nicknamed “Pagu”) in a
poem that, along with sketches by Emilio di Calvacanti, portrayed her as the
overlay of primitivism and modernity embodying the group’s emerging aes-
thetic. At a 1929 São Paulo poetry festival, Galvão satirized the role in a mor-
dant, audience-taunting parody of Bopp’s lyrical portrayal and of the cultural-
ist stereotypes implicit in Antropofagia primitivism.10 The strip-tease quality
of this declamation, in which she alternated between running to the back of
the stage and flashing open her cape while advancing on the audience, inverted
the unidirectional gaze of musedom into a dynamics of seeing and not being
seen that embodied Galvão’s critical worldview. In contrast to less political
vanguardists, Galvão engaged only briefly in literary acts of self-figuration
and quickly moved her own persona offstage. This shift begins in the whimsi-
cal self-portrait in verse and drawings, O album de Pagu: Nacimento vida paixão
y morte [Pagu’s album: Birth life passion and death], also from 1929. In this
sequence of twenty-eight illustrated prose poems, the speaker maps her tra-
jectory from flying muse to a young urban woman living the gendered experi-
ences of São Paulo life. The initial section parodies through visual excess the
untamed nature woman and the hypermobile urban New Woman juxtaposed
in Antropofagia aesthetics. Two elements in this representation anticipate
Galvão’s turn from the muse role toward activist critique: She depicts herself
on a swing as a high-flying spy surveying her surroundings (like Lange on her
soapbox) from a superior position (O album 50), and, recalling her strip-tease
poetry declamation, portrays herself in a private moment with her back to the
reader-viewer unable to see what she is doing. Both tactics shift from personal
display toward critical viewing, but unlike Lange, Galvão from this point on
cast her characteristically anonymous critical eye on society.
Galvão’s activism coalesced in 1930 when the rise of Brazil’s Estado Novo
and the Gétulio Vargas regime catalyzed intellectuals toward political com-
mitment and she joined the Communist Party, demonstrated in support of
workers, and (the next year) worked in a factory in Rio de Janeiro. In 1930
she and Oswald (now her husband) published an eight-issue small newspaper
O homem do povo [The man of the people]. In her columns for the sheet, “A
mulher do povo” [The woman of the people] and theater and film reviews,
Galvão attacked bourgeois culture, as encompassed in Hollywood films, mod-
ern fashion, normal school education, and the Catholic Church. For Galvão
all fostered women’s frivolous display and reinforced gender inequality. She
also criticized mainstream feminism’s ideal of civic, social motherhood on

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 Vicky Unruh

the grounds that it reinforced class hierarchies to the detriment of work-

ing women. These columns bridged Galvão’s critique of musedom and her
avant-garde novel Parque Industrial (1933) [Industrial Park] (1993)]. They also
initiated her lifelong journalism career, soon to become a source of income.
Subtitled “A Proletarian Novel,” Parque Industrial draws together Galvão’s
critique of Brazilian class relations with her emergent ideology critique of all
dogma, including that of the party with which she would eventually break.
In short scenes of telegraphic phrases, brief character dialogue, and constant
shifts in the perspective or ideological position from which the anonymous
narrator speaks – often with irony or acerbic humor – the novel fictionalizes
everyday life in São Paulo’s immigrant textile district, Bras. Standouts among
its more than fifty characters include a mulatta sweatshop seamstress (Corina)
whose personal and economic woes lead to prostitution and imprisonment;
a middle-class normal school student (Eleanora), whose awakening to gender
inequity includes being required to declaim poetry for a bourgeois gather-
ing immediately after being raped; a woman textile worker and Communist
Party organizer (Otavia) who radicalizes Alfredo, Eleanora’s upper-class,
artist-intellectual husband, when he becomes Otavia’s lover; Otavia’s immi-
grant coworker Rosinha; and Pepe, a party informer who turns in Rosinha
for deportation. The loose plot interweaves character interactions in the fac-
tory, at party meetings and political events, at Carnival celebrations, and in
upper-middle-class soirees.
Hillary Owen argues aptly that the novel deploys its aesthetic modernism
to highlight gender, class, and race factors in character relationships, in an
implicit critique of Marxism’s “closed systems of difference” (84). Key to this
critique, I would add, is the shifting focalization through multiple perspec-
tives, eschewing hard truths, and the disembodied narrator’s anonymity as a
spylike observer unaligned with any particular discursive formation: feminist,
Communist, or modernist-aesthetic. Like Lange, Galvão favors synecdoche
to showcase singularities of a character’s body or of a scene, but here the
fragments often embody class, gender, or race tensions, for example, “um pé
descalço se fere nos cacos de uma garrafa de leite” (5) [a shoeless foot is cut on
the shivers of a milk bottle] (8–9) on a city street, in contrast to “punhos de
seda” (37) [fists of silk] (33) at a modernist soiree. One might want to identify
Galvão with the novel’s political organizer, Otavia. But in contrast with Lange,
who trained her searching eye on her own literary circle and literary forma-
tion, Galvão’s fictional world encompasses an urban network of economic
and social relations. Moreover, Parque Industrial sidelines modern artistic gath-
erings as at best disengaged and at worst complicit in that world’s inequities,

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

as exemplified in an oft-quoted line: as workers labor in sweatshops to produce

attire for the rich, inventive poets declaim at soirees “Como é lindo o teu tear”
(19) [How lovely is thy loom!] (10).
Galvão’s politics gave her novel an international scope, reinforced by her
subsequent travels in Europe, the United States, and the Far East as a journalist
and her lifelong work as a translator and critic who disseminated international
avant-garde theater masterpieces in Brazil. This internationalism transcended
the culturalist identity focus weaving through Brazil’s avant-gardes.11 Although
the Antropofagia group often approached cultural nationalism ironically,
as in Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma (1928) with its (subtitled) epony-
mous “herói sem nenhum caráter” [hero with no character], identity politics
in Brazilian modernism was sometimes strong, as was true of the Peruvian,
Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Mexican avant-gardes. The postrevolutionary cul-
tural nationalism within which Mexico’s avant-gardes emerged was the most
explicitly gendered, manifested in what Robert Irwin has dubbed the “great
virility debates” (117) whereby contemporary critics deemed quasi-realist lit-
erature with evident Mexican themes as virile and more introspective, lyrical
writing as effeminate. In part this polemic was nothing more than a homo-
phobic attack on some openly gay members of the Contemporáneos group,
and any sharp stylistic binaries between them and the left-leaning estridentistas
dissolve with close readings. But gender politics notwithstanding, some estri-
dentistas did focus more explicitly on Mexico, whereas Contemporáneos writ-
ing often exhibited more studied attention to style.
A member of neither group, Nellie Campobello negotiated her artis-
tic career in this polemical context, with writing marked simultaneously by
nationalism and aestheticism, and forged an androgynous self-portrait that
upended gender stereotypes and synthesized the idealized provincial setting
of her childhood during the revolution and the modern Mexico City that
shaped her as an adult. A dancer, choreographer, and founding member of the
Escuela Nacional de Danza [National School of Dance] (1932), Campobello
wrote poetry, lyric prose, two short novels, a military biography of Pancho
Villa, a study of indigenous dance, and a memoir. Born in northern Mexico in
1900, Campobello moved in 1923 to Mexico City, where her studies in theater
and dance ensnared her in competing (and gendered) cultural embodiments
of mexicanidad and of modernity a la New Woman. As a member of the
popular, commercialized dance group Miss Carrol’s Girls (led by a Texan), she
enacted stylized versions of the athletic New Woman and of Mexican folk-
loric figures, such as the male charro (cowboy) in control of his woman. These
crossover performances constituted Campobello’s initiation into the cultural

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 Vicky Unruh

and gender androgyny that would mark her subsequent self-representations

and foreshadowed the critique of gendered-power relations in her experimen-
tal fictions, Cartucho: Relatos de las luchas en el norte de México (1931), [Cartucho]
(1988), and Las manos de mamá (1937) [My Mother’s Hands] (1988).12
A 1929 trip to Havana introduced Campobello to international vanguardism
ranging from Afro-Cubanism to Mayakovsky, Lorca, and Langston Hughes
and inspired her turn to experimental writing, her assumption of an androg-
ynous persona (she sometimes called herself an Amazon), and her decision
to cultivate her Mexicanness. Published in 1930 in the Revista de la Habana,
her “8 poemas de mujer” [8 woman’s poems], actually eight autobiographi-
cal lyric prose segments, recount the narrator’s awakening in Havana to the
mixed signals mass culture sent women and the impact of her gender and
nationality on what was expected of her in Cuba. One segment highlights her
stylistic mentorship by the well-known Catalán-Cuban caricaturist Conrado
Massaguer, reflected in the piece’s own verbal stylizations, nonsequential tele-
graphic phrases, and portrait of its creator as a synthesis of earth-woman
power – ”una danzarina conquistando el sol” [a dancer conquering the sun]
(133) – and modernization: “fierros, rieles, tubos, pedazos de sol, cuadros de
luna se estampan en mis ojos y se agrandan en mi alma” [iron bars, streetcar
rails, tubes, pieces of sun, squares of moon engrave themselves in my eyes
and expand in my soul] (133). Anticipating Campobello’s first experimental
novel, Cartucho (published the next year), segments 7 and 8 constitute early
versions of two Cartucho episodes. The “8 poemas” also rehearse Cartucho’s
now-you-see-her-now-you-don’t authorial persona, toggling between the
perspective of an irreverent (often hiding) child and a more visible, openly
critical adult.
Cartucho was the first novel of the Mexican Revolution by a woman and
the most avant-garde text of that literary corpus from Campobello’s gen-
eration. But her artistic affiliations were fl uid. She collaborated with the
Contemporáneos members Xavier Villaurrutia and Jorge Cuesta in the experi-
mental Teatro Orientación, and the estridentista leader Germán List Arzubide
helped publish Cartucho and wrote its preface. Cartucho’s appearance, more-
over, coincided with Campobello’s engagement with postrevolutionary cul-
tural nationalism in performances by the Ballet de masas 30–30 [Ballet for
the masses], first at the Mexican national stadium in 1931 and throughout the
country for fifteen years. As the lead dancer of performances with up to three
thousand compatriots, Campobello, dressed as the androgynous soldadera
(woman soldier), crisscrossed the stadium waving the revolutionary torch
and calling all to battle (Segura 23). Through her life-spanning career at the

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

National School of Dance, whose directorship she assumed in 1937, and as

director of the Mexico City Ballet, Campobello joined the cultural bureau-
cracy initiated with José Vasconcellos’s cultural missions of the 1920s. But
Campobello’s memoir underscores the dissolution of her creative indepen-
dence in this institutionalized setting and situates her intellectual autonomy
in her writing, intent on disseminating what she saw as the truth of her own
experience.
Narrated retrospectively by an adult urban woman, Cartucho recounts scenes
of the northern phase of the revolution witnessed (sometimes surreptitiously)
by a child or as told to her by others. The work’s avant-garde style includes
loosely knit segments eschewing conventional sequencing or clear locations,
a predominance of nouns and verbs in telegraphic imagery, and a propensity
for the startling and grotesque often achieved through synecdoche. The child’s
matter-of-fact perspectives on violence and death and her self-identification
as a marimacha (tomboy) undercut gender stereotypes of innocent sweetness
implicit, as Campobello notes in the first edition’s introduction, in such diminu-
tives as muñeca (doll) or muchachita (little girl) that had been ascribed to the
author by her Havana hosts (ii).13 In contrast, the guise of a child who focal-
izes in Cartucho resembles the anonymous critical observer in Galvão’s Parque
Industrial and allows the work’s adult narrator autonomy and mobility she might
otherwise not enjoy. The adult voice and the child perspective share a talent for
an estranging take on reality and converge in the narrator’s periodic intrusions
of interpretive authority with the repeated phrases “Yo creo” [I think] or “Yo sé“
[I know] to reflect on a particular scene. These interventions also assert the nar-
rator’s freedom to fictionalize, an interpretive poetic license to affirm the truth
of what might have happened. The dynamics between the child’s observations
and the adult’s judgments also stage the work’s gender critique. For example,
the child awakens to gendered power when an armed general physically abuses
her mother, whereas years later, the adult, Mexico City–located narrator reads
a news account of the abuser’s court-martial and execution and delivers a “son-
risa de niña” [girl’s smile] to the executioners, who, she says, deploy her own
“pistola de cien tiros” (941) [“pistol of a hundred shots”] (34) for the job. As I have
argued elsewhere, this narrative move claims the power of those shots for the
adult narrator’s own writing (Performing Women 108).
Set in the same northern revolutionary ambiance as Cartucho, the more
nostalgic Las manos de mamá establishes greater temporal and spatial distance
between that childhood world and the modern narrator writing from a Mexico
City portrayed, like Loynaz’s Havana, as destructive to the freedoms afforded
women in a vanishing world. More complex in narrative structure and voice

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 Vicky Unruh

than Cartucho, Las manos is a more avant-garde work. But as a retrospective

portrait of the narrator’s mother, Las manos intensifies the gender tensions
in Campobello’s fictional world and in her own intellectual self-fashioning.
On the one hand, Las manos mythifies motherhood, a style that along with
its lyricism and reduced violence, conforms more with the period’s norms
for women’s writing.14 But as a reaction to the cosmopolitanism that the
narrator finds detrimental to creative freedom (a dystopian rendition of
Campobello’s own urban milieu) the novel represents the mother not only as
the antidote to modernity’s commercialized New Woman, but also as a pow-
erful, chain-smoking, androgynous dancer, whose sewing machine’s “llanto
de fierros” [metallic chant] struggles to compete, in her child’s mind, with
the “canto del canon” [shouts of the cannon] (983; 117) Along with Cartucho’s
bullet-dispensing narrator and Campobello’s androgynous dancing public
persona, Las manos offers an alternative rendition of the period’s polemicized
mexicanidad, and some have argued cogently that, in the gendered nationalist
context in which they appeared, both novels offer new ways of conceiving a
Mexican national subject.15
Campobello’s novels appear to be worlds away from the middlebrow jour-
nalistic columns on noteworthy people and events for the mass-circulation
periodicals El universal gráfico and Revista de revistas that constituted her
first published writing. But in fact numerous women of Latin America’s
avant-gardes – Galvão is another, as I have noted – participated in public cul-
tural life, or executed their entrée, through journalism. Considering the ambiv-
alent relationship between the historical avant-gardes and mass culture – and
recalling my earlier observation that professional male writers cultivating a
middlebrow audience often imagined their art as emanating in a world apart –
it is legitimate to wonder how exactly journalism itself might constitute a
form of avant-garde activity. Viviane Mahieux’s pioneering 2011 study on the
urban newspaper chroniclers of Latin America’s avant-gardes goes a long way
toward answering this question. Focusing on the urban chronicle, Mahieux
highlights its flexibility of structure and content; implicit intimacy with an
audience; immersion in present tense, urban life; and self-conscious construc-
tion of a narrating persona from within that world (1–11). All of these features,
I would add, embody the avant-gardes’ structures of feeling, in particular the
overarching ethos of engagement that I noted in opening this essay. I would
also argue that other journalistic genres – the topical column, reviews of the
arts, or travel accounts – share these features and that all possess the critical
potential of the rhetorical range (irony, parody, hyperbole, ostentation, per-
suasion, etc.) inscribed in the avant-garde project.

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

Striking common ground in the avant-garde trajectories of Loynaz, Lange,

Galvão, and Campobello, among many others not discussed here, are the
effort to craft thoughtful intellectual personas, the struggle for a viable loca-
tion from which to intervene critically in public cultural life, and the verbal and
genre inventiveness undertaken to bring this about. Mass-media journalism,
to which women had easier access than to literary cenacles, offered a path to
rehearse these goals and even in some cases to realize them. Victoria Ocampo,
for example, made her Buenos Aires writing debut with a short piece in La
nación, the basis for subsequent volumes of her sui generis testimonio, where
she assumed the guise of an intrusive tour guide who offers running – often
erudite  – commentary on artistic, historical, and philosophical topics.16 As
Gwen Kirkpatrick demonstrates, Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) used journalis-
tic chronicles in Buenos Aires media to transform an ostensibly frivolous focus
on fashion into serious social critique, and I have demonstrated elsewhere the
connections between the theatricality of these chronicles and Storni’s subse-
quent avant-garde theatrical achievements.17 Mahieux unpacks Storni’s skillful
use of the chronicle to undermine gender norms, work she compares to the
gender maneuvers of the Mexican chronicler Cube Bonifant (1904–1993).18 In
her columns for Havana’s Social and Revista de la Habana, Ofelia Rodríguez
Acosta (a collaborator with the minoristas, we will recall) rehearsed the con-
cept of “practical feminism” – enacted through everyday life – that coalesced
in her 1929 novel La vida manda [Life commands] about a liberated Havana
woman’s frustrated search for acceptance and a voice in the city’s cultural
life. María Wiesse (1893–1964), writing for Lima’s mass-circulation Mundial and
Variedades, juggled her concerns about mass culture’s trivializing of women
with a critique of bourgeois feminism consistent with the leftist cultural poli-
tics of the avant-garde Amauta circle to which she belonged.
The women of Latin America’s historical avant-gardes, mediating their
artistic identities and practices as individual figures among groups of men,
sometimes stand out for their apparent radical solitude within that lit-
erary culture. It is difficult to find the kind of group formation among
women writers (within countries or transnationally) that emerges in
the late twentieth century (for example, feminist writer workshops dur-
ing Chile’s Pinochet regime). But even a quick look at the journalism of
this period hints at a different story, for example, the minorista member
Mariblanca Sabas Alomá‘s writing for Havana mass media and the con-
tinental Repertorio Americano, where she promoted writing by Teresa de
la Parra, Storni, Magda Portal, Blanca Luz Brum, Gabriela Mistral, and
numerous Spanish Peninsular women intellectuals. Alomá‘s work of this

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 Vicky Unruh

kind – and she was not alone – intimates a literary network among women
that may constitute a crucial facet of the intricate relationship of women
writers to Latin America’s historical avant-gardes. That story, however, is
yet to be written.19

Notes
1 See Yurkievich, for example.
2 See Martinez, Osorio, Rosenberg, Schwartz, Verani, Videla, and my Latin American
Vanguards.
3 See, for example, Masiello, Molloy (“Introduction”), Rodríguez, and my Performing
Women.
4 I borrow the term “culturalist” from Appadurai, who defines it as “identity politics
mobilized at the level of the nation-state” (15), but expand it to encompass any repre-
sentation of collective power based on culture or ethnicity.
5 Unless otherwise documented, all translations are my own.
6 Sommer notes this tension in Parra’s Memorias (180).
7 For more on this reading, see Sommer and my Performing Women (16–22). Victoria
Ocampo’s writing also manifests pulls between nostalgia for the privileged world of
her origins and the cultural modernity she thoroughly embraced.
8 The Uruguayan poet and activist Blanca Luz Brum (1905–1985) also synthesized
avant-garde experimentalism and politics in her poetry and, like Portal, had connec-
tions with Mariátegui’s group early in her career.
9 Brazilian modernismo of the 1920s and 1930s corresponds to the Spanish American
avant-gardes.
10 See Campos for eyewitness descriptions of this performance (270–274, 321).
11 For similarly political reasons, Portal and Brum’s careers were marked by comparable
internationalist trajectories.
12 A literal translation of Cartucho’s full title would be “Cartridge: Tales of the Struggles
in Northern Mexico,” but in her published translation, Meyer opted simply to use the
shortened form of the Spanish title.
13 All other quotations from Cartucho and Las manos de mamá are from the 1965 Castro
Leal edition.
14 De la Calle explores these qualities and suggests that they may explain why Las manos
experienced a more favorable initial reception than Cartucho.
15 See Richards (chapter 3) and Oyarzún. The Cuban minorista poet, journalist, and non-
fiction prose writer Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, who assumed the nickname “Mariblanca
de Cuba,” also negotiated her avant-garde position within nationalist discourse.
16 See chapter 2 of my Performing Women.
17 See Kirkpatrick and Chapter 1 of my Performing Women.
18 See Mahieux’s Chapter 5.
19 A forthcoming volume edited by Carolina Alzate and Darcie Doll for Ediciones
Uniandes and the University of Chile breaks important ground in telling this
story:  Redes, alianzas y afinidades:  Escritura de mujeres en América Latina, siglo
XIX y XX.

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 The Women of the Avant-Gardes

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