In a memoir of Buenos Aires literary activity in the 1920s and 1930s, Alberto Pineta described his nervous, stammering debut in 1929 as a young lecturer for the prestigious cultural institution Amigos del Arte. Highlighting his recollection of the event is the intimidating impact on his demeanor every time he glanced up at the audience and encountered the imposing figure of Victoria Ocampo. Pineta also detailed a gathering of the vanguard Martín Fierro group and the arresting presence of Norah Lange. Her “grace, sensibility, and creative talent,” he noted, caused those present to accept “without protestthefatal factof...

In May 1919, as her regular contribution to the Buenos Aires periodicalLa nota, Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) crafted the whimsical tale “Historia sintética de un traje tailleur” (The concise story of a tailored dress). In this brief memoir, the garment traces its metamorphosis from the sheep that provided its wool to the tailored suit of a bourgeoisporteñato the mended attire of a widowed mother who rides the streetcar to work and, finally, to the refashioned dress of a lively young girl. Now outgrown and discarded in the trash, which also includes scraps of writing, the dress reflects...

Victoria Ocampo’s first play,La laguna de los nenúfares(1926) enacts the journey to maturity of its protagonist, Copo de Nieve, portrayed initially as a “snowflake that doesn’t melt” (14). Shipwrecked, the orphan Copo de Nieve is raised in an idyllic forest by an overprotective Magician and two tutors, Optimio the dog and Atrabilis the cat. But Copo de Nieve prefers play with animals to formal lessons and, in a search for self-definition, imitates his companions’ singularities. He walks on all fours with the hare, strives to grow a camel’s hump, and walks backwards with the crab. In a strikingly...

In the radically transformed landscape of Buenos Aires in the 1920s, the urban nomads of the literary avant-garde enacted a nostalgic quest for fraternity and familiar terrain. “Llaneza” (Plainness), a well-known Borges poem from his first collection,Fervor de Buenos Aires(1923), inscribes this yearning for participation in the analogy between a welcoming place and the literary kinship of an oft-read book. Here, with the “docility” of a turning page, the speaker’s perspective glides from outside a garden gate to a house within filled with well-remembered objects and “glances,” a place that, along with its inhabitants, knows him equally well...

In the closing lines of the autobiographical essay that prefaced the 1960 anthology of her writing,Mis libros(My books), Nellie Campobello (1900–1986)¹ described the adolescent frustration she experienced while seeking the “state of mind” of a writer: “I would throw myself on the floor and resting my elbows on the rug . . . I would . . . scrutinize the poses of my protagonist” (45). This portrait of the artist in a bodily quest for a writer’s disposition echoes the inaugural appearance of the narrator in Campobello’s first successful prose work,Cartucho(1931), the only novel of...

In the final weeks of her short life and from a self-imposed exile in Bordeaux, France, Antonieta Rivas Mercado (1900–1931) wrote four chapters of the novelEl que huía(The fugitive). Here the Mexican novelist Esteban Malo decides to end his voluntary Parisian exile and react “in real life” to the problems facing his country in the early 1930s (Obras completas, 466). In her Bordeaux diary, Rivas Mercado described the chronicle of the José Vasconcelos presidential campaign that she was also writing as a comparable confrontation, a chance to “settle up with Mexico like a man” (Obras completas, 443)....

In 1929 the young Cuban feminist Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta published a novel,La vida manda(Life commands), which soon became a two-edition best-seller. The story of the novel’s ill-fated protagonist, Gertrudis, encompasses the experiences attributed to emancipated women by Cuban feminist debates in the 1920s. She works in an office, seeks economic independence, has open love affairs while unmarried, hand-picks a man to father her out-of-wedlock child, and reads to improve her mind. She also joins atertuliaof literary types and political activists, and in one of the novel’s early scenes, on the street she encounters Enrique José Varona,...

In a 1929 review of Magda Portal’s essay on vanguard poetry, a contributor to José Carlos Mariátegui’s renowned Lima magazineAmauta(1926–1930) said little about the work itself but waxed ecstatic about its author.¹ Calling her his “belligerent comrade” and “the purest feminine revolutionary ferment” of her time, the reviewer consecrated Portal as Peru’s New Woman, a combative muse who could motivate the journal’s radical cultural and political mission. She was, he proclaimed, “the woman who goes to the barricades with her unrest at her waist and a cartridge belt with incendiary metaphors . . . the agile woman...

In a lecture on modern art for the March 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna at São Paulo’s Municipal Theatre, a founding moment for the Brazilian vanguard movementmodernismo,¹ Paulo Menotti del Picchia proclaimed that the new era demanded a new muse. “We want an active Eve,” he declared, “beautiful, practical, useful in the house and on the street, dancing a tango and typing a counter current; cheering at a futurist soirée . . . Down with the tubercular and lyrical woman!” (291). The modern woman of this vanguard fantasy moves with extraordinary dexterity from private to public, a sanguine image...