La señorita etcétera

Arqueles Vela (Tapachula, 1899) was one of the main figures of the Stridentist movement. On December 14, 1922, “La novela semanal” of El Universal Ilustrado — a supplement dedicated to spreading avant-garde Mexican literature — published “La señorita Etcétera de Arqueles Vela”, one of the main representatives of avant-garde prose in Latin America. Four years later it was re-edited in the Stridentist magazine Horizonte, with the subtitle “Novels” along with the short stories El Café de Nadie and Un crimen provisional.

These stories — of the first experimental ones in Latin America — sought to express the momentum of post-revolutionary modernity: the hustle and bustle of the city, the speed of cars, trams, and railways; the lights, music, and noise of the cities contrasting with the rural and traditional world, while proposing the vision of a disintegrated, illogical and absurd world. The three texts are articulated around the idea of incommunication and alienation from society: “Miss Etcetera“, wrote Arqueles Vela, “is the literary realization of the disorder caused by the Revolution. The Revolution dispersed us materially; that also means an inner dispersion.“

“I did not feel I was living in the hotel but when she stepped, with her measured steps, into the lift. We were going up slowly and as unreal as the smoke that sickens the throats of chimneys… The almost mechanical life of modern cities was transforming me. My ductilized will was turning in any direction. I got used to not having the faculties to walk consciously. Locked up in a car, I would sleepwalk through the streets.“