Arqueles Vela, Señorita Etcetera

Los Angeles, Insert Press, 2025

Señorita Etcetera, cover, with permission of Insert Press. See: https://insert.press/products/senorita-etcetera

The three stories by Arqueles Vela from the 1920s that appear in this volume are considered the first Latin American avant-garde prose writings. In a new translation by Julianna Neuhouser, each one is a formal and thematic gem of experimental modern fiction. The dual-language edition puts the original and translation side by side for comparison and though I can’t judge the translation in relation to the original, my Spanish is inadequate for the task, the English sentences are utterly fantastic in their unfolding complexity.

The stories are thematically well within the frame of “modern” literary writing. They feature café culture, a female prostitute, a dissolute and rather pointless social realm with people doing very little except posturing, making arch remarks about nothing in particular, or drifting into and out of each other’s orbits. Reading these stories is a bit like time travelling to a world I once imagined I would inhabit, of idle afternoons and smoky evenings spent among the literati. We read those tales of French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud engaged in conversation at a small table in a crowded room with mirrored walls and saw ourselves (in our adolescent years) playing similar parts in scenes that resembled the paintings of French artists depicting absinthe drinkers and others absorbed in their reveries and flirtations. Now, a century separates us from the time of the events portrayed in Vela’s vivid texts and the shifts of social modes register as clearly as the differences in costume would if we were looking at photos from the era.

But the immediacy of the stories collapses that distance making the scenes of streets and rooms fully present. Above all we are immersed in the compelling zone of ambiguity that erases the line between psychological interiority and external conditions. Spaces and perceptions are described metaphorically so that observations of actual details are transformed into symbols and signs of interior life. For instance, the first story, “Nobody’s Café,” tracks the comings and goings of two regulars who occupy the same booth every time in a scene that is as much a projection of mental state into space as it is a physical place. Take this description of activity following the departure of the regulars:

“The waiters take out their table brushes and sweep up pulverized crumbs of impatience, napkins stained with flirtations and incongruous phrases crossed with smiles.” (7)

Veka Duncan’s helpful introduction supplies crucial information about Vela and his circumstances, including his arrival into Mexico’s literary circles after crossing the border from Guatemala in 1919. His literary debut was a publication in the pages of El Universal Illustrato, described as the “cultural supplement” for the newspaper, El Universal. The editor, Noriega Hope, had gathered a talented staff and cohort of young writers, mostly in their twenties, whose contributions were marked by a conspicuous modernity. Vela joined the publication staff in 1923, having already published “Señorita Etcetera” a year before in a collection also edited by Hope. All of this information is taken from Duncan’s text, as is this observation about its reception, “Vela was consecrated as one of the first Latin American writers to embrace the literary innovations of the avant-garde.”

But what did avant-garde mean in that situation and moment? A movement titled “Stridentism” had been created in Mexico in the post-revolutionary years, and apparently, according to Duncan, a poem by Manuel Maples Arce with the conspicuously derivative title, “Wireless Telegraphy,” had been read in one of the first radio broadcasts ever to take place in Mexico in the early 1920s. Arce was a highly visible figure, according to Duncan, who notes that he rode through Mexico City on a motorcycle in and around the neighborhood where the establishment that served as inspiration for “Nobody’s Café” was located. The title is clearly a paraphrase of the Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti’s manifesto of “Wireless Imagination,” and the Mexican movement was indebted to the work of European artists and writers who had begun their activities a decade earlier. By the early 1920s, Futurism had gone out of vogue in Europe, discredited in part by its affiliations with militarism and then fascism. Marinetti’s own allegiance to Mussolini is well known and documented.

But by the 1920s period that Duncan is describing, the radical irreverence of the decade’s earlier avant-garde provided provocative inspiration. The very word “strident” at the core of their self-proclaimed identity marks an interest in the urban clamor, new technologies, transformations of life and culture through mass media, high speed transportation, and other conspicuous features that had so captivated the Italian Futurists in the 1910s. Of course, many modernists had similar interests without the fascist leanings, and modernity was almost universally associated with urban life and new media. The historical context–Mexico after the Revolution–seemed to require innovation in the same way (though specific to the location) as that called for by the Russian avant-garde who believed that a radical new aesthetic was required to create a new world.

Modernity meant urbanity, but also, alienation, a fall from traditional modes and mores into a world of disjointed intensity. Duncan’s introduction is essential reading, as is the Translator’s note. Julianna Neuhouser lets us know that the original text was “difficult” for its “obscure word choices and neologism” but also for the “abstract imagery” which is created through elusive syntactical configurations. And, in fact, it is the language that is so captivating in this work.

Vela’s sentences open with the deliberate complexity of origami, their hinges taking the words into unexpected relations with each other. For instance, a sentence from the first page of “Nobody’s Café” reads:

“The curtains let go of the reverie that allowed them to survive the hypnotism of the night and thoughts that are never revealed fall from the arc lamps.”

The boundaries between interior and exterior, individual and social identities, psychic space and physical actions are all rendered ambiguous. These categories intersect and overlap in the sentence, as the imagery shifts gears at almost every pivot point of preposition, subordinate clause, and conjunction. If we begin with curtains, we do not expect to think of them in terms of mortal survival, and the agency of hypnotism does not always conjure an image of the night. And can thoughts that are not revealed be described as objects falling from a physical lamp, the new arc lamps that are part of that transformed modern urban street? Without any dream imagery or fantastic conjuring, the scene is infused with psychological dimensions.

The sentences have a palimpsestic quality, as if one image is written into and onto the ghost of another. Here, for instance, is an image of the two “regulars” who are depicted throughout:

“They smile, taking a pack of ideas from their pockets and simultaneously, synchronously lighting their customary cigarettes grooved with sentimentality or rebellion as they laze on the chaise-lounge of their recollections.”

The rhymes–of pack and cigarettes/ideas being lighted that are already marked by deep lines of either “sentimentality or rebellion”–are already dense before we turn the corner of the sentence with an “as” that shifts us into the abstract image of repose made of memories.

All three of the stories focus on female characters. Mabelina in the Café, a corpse and an elegant woman in the “A Provisional Crime,” and then the “Señorita” of the title tale. At once objectified and elusive in a manner typical of the masculinist tropes of the early 20^th-century avant-garde, the female figures galvanize the narrative. Prostitute, victim, witness, and a waitress, they are each women composed from the transactions that constitute their lives. These are acts of exchange, sexual, physical, financial—the consumption of goods or services in the bits and pieces of daily life, shifting scenes and circumstances. And always, the language,

“The street went by under our feet like an unspooling reel of film. It was that hour when everything appears to convalesce, the chloroform mask slowly, silently falling away from the face of things.” (Señorita, 109)

or,

“The first time I saw her, she was in a dark corner of the bedroom of her shyness, with the posture of a forgotten chair covered in dust, a chair nobody has ever sat in…” (117)

Carefully constructed, the three stories contrast sharply with each other. “Nobody’s Café” is a social sketch about life in the capital city. “A Provisional Crime” is a genre piece, noir detective tale (anticipating Raymond Chandler’s first stories in this mode, published in the early 1930s). And “Señorita Etcetera” is a collage portrait of a woman in images contemporary to its composition—references to celluloid, phonograph needles, silk stockings in store windows, and electric lights, “her gaze made of dissolves.” (143) Hard not to compare these stories with André Breton’s Nadja, probably the most well-known Surrealist novel, with its also elusive heroine provoking the narrator’s desire. Breton’s novel was published in 1928, some years after “Señorita” appeared in 1922, so clearly it was not an influence. Vela’s heroines are created from the material of lives they are living even as they think and act along vectors of metaphor. Where the dream-life eroticism of Breton’s Surrealism was obsessed with Nadja as an idea and ideal, capturing (and losing) her through his pursuit, Vela’s women are living their own lives. They elude their narrator–or ignore him.

Vela’s world is not a dream or a fantasy, nor is it an expression of unconscious impulses and drives. Instead, it shows the complexity of lives in which the significance of lived experience is produced in the continual intersection of perception of events and their resonance. What fractures and dissociates these women is not gender politics or male attention, but the dissonance of modern life with its noise, lights, and distractions. Their world anticipates our world in which the refractive effect of hyper-techno-saturation constantly erases the boundaries on which identity might but cannot always hold steady.