ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Xavier Icaza's articulation of this anti-imperialist aesthetic. It analyses how he develops it in his short novel, Panchito Chapopote, published in Mexico City in 1928, but written in Xalapa in 1926, at the height of the estridentista collaboration with Heriberto Jara. Icaza's narrative, accompanied by woodcuts by Alva de la Canal, is the first fiction piece in Mexico to deal with the oil question; and crucially, as its hybrid form makes clear, its anti-imperialist and vernacular aesthetics are not opposed to experimentation. In other words, not all cases of left, anticolonial aesthetics, even within Estridentismo, reverted to figuration or social realism once they began to collaborate with the state. The chapter also focuses on Horizonte as another kind of generic hybrid: a propaganda outlet for the Veracruz government that the estridentistas still viewed as an avant-garde publication.
