Manuel Maples Arce

Manuel Maples Arce (1900-1981), the first avant-garde poet in Mexico, led the Stridentist movement with a barrage of manifestos, promotional savvy, and three books of the era's most radical poetry. Born in Papantla, Veracruz, he studied law in thecity of Veracruz and Mexico City, where, in his early twenties, he published the first Stridentist manifesto and followed it with several poetry collections. In 1925, he returned to Xalapa to serve in the revolutionary government of Vera Cruz, and used his position to turn the city into a center of revolutionary art, attracting artists from throughout Mexico and the world. When the Vera Cruz government was deposed in 1927, his artistic community scattered and Maples entered the foreign service, serving in numerous foreign diplomatic posts. Though he later abandoned both the politics and the Stridentist poetry of his youth, his major works of the period, Andamios interiors (1922), Urbe: superpoema bolchevique en cinco cantos (1924), and Poemas interdictos (1927) remain key texts of the twentieth-century avant-garde.