The Cosmic Race

An essay by José Vasconcelos, philosopher and Mexico's first Secretary of Public Education after the Revolution, published after a journey to South America. Against the doctrines of racial purity then dominant in Europe and the United States, he argues that Latin America's mixture of peoples, Indigenous, European, African and Asian, is its destiny and its strength: from it will come a fifth, 'cosmic' race that synthesises all the others. He imagines a future city, Universópolis, in the Amazon, and describes history as moving through three stages, material or warlike, intellectual or political, and spiritual or aesthetic, in the last of which unions will be chosen by beauty and love rather than necessity. The essay became a manifesto for mestizaje as national identity. It also relies on racial hierarchies and eugenic language, and readers have criticised how it absorbs Indigenous and Black peoples into a Hispanic ideal.

It is the founding text of the ideology of mestizaje, and reading it critically shows how an argument against one racism can carry another within it.