This text offers a preliminary tour through the prolific and painstaking essay production of Emilia Prieto Tugores (1902-1986) during the decades of the thirties to the seventies of the twentieth century. The selected essays were published in written media of national circulation and exhibit an exquisite reflective activity on the diverse manifestations of the artistic creation and on different political-cultural chores happened in the convulsive western context of the time. From them, Prieto makes a sharp interrogation of the cultural order derived from modernity, as well as from the conditions of violence, injustice and inequality erected from that order.