Abstract
The artistic movements that emerged in various Latin American countries, starting in the mid1910s but more prominently in the 1920s until their relative waning in the 1930s, represented a renewed investment and resignification of the project of modernity, which the variously affiliated vanguardistas advocated for and wanted to see fulfilled. Avant‐garde European writers and artists also appealed to various expressions of non‐Western imagination in order to question bourgeois values and rationality – an intellectual proclivity usually known as primitivism. The cultural formation that would bring the national form into its own is still pending for Mariátegui, who locates the colony as lingering in the present. Vallejo, Mariátegui, Mário de Andrade, Jorge Luis Borges, and other writers associated with the vanguards all subscribed to a sense of demise of the West, and all of them invited in one way or another a different future.