La soledad era completa [The solitude was complete]: Avant-garde diasporic communities and the case for a history of Surrealism in Central America

This thesis interrogates the paradoxical invisibility and creative agency of Central America within the history of Surrealism and global modernisms scholarship. Taking as its threshold the Surrealist Map of the World (1929), where the isthmus vanishes beneath the continental masses of Mexico and South America, the research foregrounds how Central America has been persistently marginalised-cartographically, discursively, and institutionally-by both Eurocentric Surrealist imaginaries and dominant Latin American accounts. Thus, the study advances a history of Surrealism in Central America not as a derivative appendix, but as a liminal, generative site of negotiation between erasure, provincialism and cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 explores the region's split identities and the origin of the persistent question of whether a distinct Central American art exists or if its artists are forever consigned to extraterritorial circuits. Through figures such as Asturias or Mérida, the chapter traces the oscillation between local specificity and diasporic engagement (Hall), revealing how exile, dependency, and marginality have shaped the Central American avant-garde's forms of community and postcolonial innovation (Quijano, Wallerstein, Mbembe, Césaire). Chapter 2 examines the transnational character of the Central American avant-garde generation, focusing on how figures like Cardoza y Aragón and Asturias navigated the French and Mexican Surrealist circuits, appropriating and transforming their tenets to inscribe local imaginaries and cosmologies (Friedman, Giunta, Glissant). The analysis foregrounds the region's unique position as a corridor and cul-de-sac-simultaneously permeable and isolated, where the marvellous is both a product of historical contingency and aesthetic intention. Chapter 3 turns to the internal dynamics of what I defined as isthmic compression, addressing the region artists' own formulation of what Surrealism can be, their anxieties about identity and dependence, and the challenges of regional representation. Throughout, the thesis resists reductive taxonomies, emphasising instead the fragmentary, polycentric, ephemeral, and contested nature of Surrealism in the isthmus. It highlights the gendered exclusions of the early avant-garde diaspora and calls for further research on adjacent figures to the movement, such as Salarrué, González Feo, Benjamín Cañas, Ricardo Aguilar, and Carlos Cañas. Ultimately, the study advocates for a critically self-aware, internally generated art and cultural history-one that embraces contradiction, complexity, and the plurality of regional voices.