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NARRATIVAS CONTAMINADAS
TRES NOVELAS LATINOAMERICANAS:
EL TUNGSTENO, PARQUE INDUSTRIAL Y CUBAGUA
Alejandro Bruzual, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2006
This thesis examines the Latin American avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s not
through the usual focus, poetry, but through narrative fiction. I am working here with three
1930’s novels that portray profound ideological concerns that had not often been considered in
earlier Latin American avant-garde narratives. El tungsteno, by Peruvian César Vallejo, is a
mining novel that includes indigenous issues. Parque industrial, by Brazilian Patrícia Galvao, is a
gender-based novel with urban and proletarian themes. And Cubagua, by the Venezuelan
Enrique Bernardo Núñez, is an historical novel, confronting the trauma of neo/colonization with
the beginning of the populist modernization project.
The beginning of the 1930s provides an important perspective from which to focus on the
literary development of the continent. This is because it was not only a powerful world-changing
moment but also, as I argue, an opportunity for a rupture within the institutions of literature.
After the world political, social, and economic crises of 1928-1929, the Latin American avant-
garde had to search for other ideological and aesthetic tactics to participate in the debates about
national configurations in the international context, that reflect the emerge of definitive new
social forces.
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