Crónica de encuentro con el \" Pulgarcito de América \"

Abstract/Prologue: Hundreds of quotes repeat that “…El Salvador, Tom Thumb of America…”, literary name of the Central American country,  is coined by the first Latin American writer to re-ceive the Nobel Prize of Literature, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957).  Nonetheless, even academic and research publications obliterate to mention the original document in which she baptiz-es the country that she visits in September/October 1931.  The historical source that justifies her authorship is found in a belated collage book written by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton (1935-1975): Historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito (Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb, 1974).  Lacking an original Mistralian essay,  in the style of a chronicle, the article narrates the search and discovery of the origi-nal poetic document, which validates the epithet: “El Salvador, Pulgarcito de América (El Salvador, Tom Thumb of America, 1938/9-1946)” by Julio Enrique Ávila (1892-1968).  As the 1932 events that Mistral and her Salvadoran hosts observe in silence, the current celebration of the literary name of the country derives from a belated consciousness, which recreates facts from a distance.  It re-mains as a lesson that history falsifies forgotten archives and replaces classic authors that the mod-ern naïf reader considers real and authentic.  The proposal exhumes original documents buried for years due to a lack of Salvadoran literary historiography.  Among the primary sources the research collects the visit of Mistral to El Salvador, the central role of Ávila during the stay of he Chilean poet and, before her arrival, of the Mexican José Vasconcelos (18 November 1930), the conservative turn of positions judged as radical politics (anti-imperialism, Sandinismo, and indigenismo) which do not support the 1932 revolt, as well as the authorial confusion that Dalton inherits to his current critics.