ABSTRACT
Cultural nationalism and cosmopolitanism are not defined by the texts promoted but by the positions in the social and cultural field of the promoters. Criollismo and cosmopolitanism are not in opposition but collusion if a writer is endowed with the proper qualities and the proper origins. The literary construction of the suburb conies along with the adoption of metaphor as the semantic and formal nucleus of poetry. Jorge Luis Borges accomplishes the strategy of combining an ideologeme of his own invention with some of the textual procedures of Spanish ultraism, found in the writings of that cultural hero of the Argentine avant-garde, Ramon Gomez de la Serna. Borges frequently discusses Jose Hernandez's Martin Fierro, a poem that Ricardo Rojas and Leopoldo Lugones, in the previous decade, had interpreted as the epitome of Argentine tradition and as a symbol of nationality.
