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This article outlines a map of the evolution of urban poetry in Mexican estridentismo, from the explosion of the movement in 1921 until 1925, analyzing some of the key texts. The affiliation of the poetry with futurist and cubist models are explored, along with the sociopolitical context of post-revolutionary Mexico. The similarities and differences of the movement to European vanguardism are equally analyzed and their relationship within its own context conceived as a peripheral modernity. I propose a blended reading that reveals a much more ambiguous relationship with urban modernity and tecnophilia, in part owed to the social, political and economic context (post-revolutionary Mexico) incongruous with such proposals. It is exactly in the tension inherent to the project of nationalizing such vocabularies of vanguardism where we find keys with which to theorize the specificity of vanguardism, not only in Mexico, but rather in all of Latin America. [TRANSLATION]