José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos was a Mexican philosopher, writer and politician who, as Mexico's first Secretary of Public Education in the early 1920s, led large literacy and mural programmes. In La raza cósmica (1925) he rejected ideals of racial purity and predicted that racial mixture in the Americas would produce a new 'cosmic race'. Critics also point to a tension in the thesis: while celebrating mixture, the book ranks Black and Indigenous peoples below mestizo populations, reproducing the very hierarchy it claims to overcome.

Key ideas

• Racial mixture (mestizaje), not racial purity, is the creative future of humanity, centred on Latin America.
• A fifth, 'cosmic' race would synthesise the existing races in a new spiritual civilisation.
• His account nonetheless ranks Black and Indigenous peoples below mestizos, a hierarchy critics see as built into the thesis.
• Mass public education and art are means of forming a national culture.

Major works

• La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925)
• Indología (1926)
• Ulises criollo (1935, first volume of his autobiography)

In the conversation

• Question Can Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica be read against its own hierarchy? Valentina Ríos · 6 replies