This article will discuss the multiple references of Vicente Rosales y Rosales, to the poetics of French symbolism, American modernisms and the international avant-garde in order to locate his position within the ethnographic and aesthetic discourses on the relation of rhythm and race that appeared since the end of the 19th century. This seems to be especially important, though rhythmic and racial elements are both present in Rosales y Rosales’ poems analyzed here. Considering the fact that Salvadorean natives were almost completely killed during the so-called La Matanza in 1932 and that Rosales y Rosales started to rewrite his Euterpologio politonal after this incident, the apparently apolitical frame of Rosales y Rosales’ aestheticism unexpectedly turns to social compromise —a fact that requires a revalorization of his writing.