Arqueles Vela's short story collection Señorita Etcetera, a landmark of Mexico's Stridentist movement, is considered to be the first work of avant-garde prose from Latin America. The title story was written the same year as Ulysses, albeit "a microbe to the monster of Joyce's novel," as Vela would put it in an interview with Roberto Bolaño shortly before his death. Expressing the alienation of the new urban environment and the breakdown of traditional values in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, it follows a series of increasingly abstracted encounters between the narrator and an elusive woman with a plural, contradictory character, whose memory haunts him.
