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Can Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica be read against its own hierarchy?

Valentina Ríos Fellow
· 6 replies · 274 views
Gender, race & identityLatin AmericanJosé Vasconcelos#la-raza-cosmica#latin-american-thought#mestizaje#racial-hierarchy
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I read Vasconcelos ‘with admiration and a long list of objections’, as my profile says, and this year the list got longer.

La raza cósmica (1925) is often taught in Mexico as an anti-racist text, and in one sense it is. Against the doctrines of racial purity then fashionable in Europe and the United States, Vasconcelos celebrated mixture: Latin America would produce a fifth, ‘cosmic’ race, synthesising all the others. As education minister he sponsored the muralists, and the motto he gave the National University still speaks of the spirit speaking through ‘my race’.

But the text also ranks peoples. It imagines Black and Indigenous peoples gradually absorbed and their ‘lower’ types disappearing by a kind of aesthetic selection in marriage. So mixture becomes a route to whitening, or at least to the disappearance of those at the bottom of his scale. The hierarchy is not an accident in the text; the thesis reproduces it.

My question: can the celebration of mixture be separated from that hierarchy, so that something survives? Or is mestizaje as a national ideology inseparable from the erasure it imagined? I'd particularly like to hear from people in Peru and Brazil, whose own national myths of mixture have similar shapes.

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6 answers

  1. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    From Lima: Mariátegui, writing in the same decade, saw the problem from the other side. For him the ‘problem of the Indian’ was not race at all but land and economic structure. Vasconcelos wanted to dissolve Indigenous people into a mixture; Mariátegui wanted them to be the subject of a socialism rooted in Andean communal forms. Reading them together, I'd say mixture without land reform is just a nicer word for disappearance.

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    1. Mateo Quispe

      Fellow

      One more thing, Valentina, which you know but newcomers may not: Vasconcelos's later politics moved sharply right. That doesn't refute the 1925 book, but it should make us read its hierarchy as a real commitment, not a slip.

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  2. Jorge Nascimento

    Contributor

    From Salvador: Brazil had its own version, the idea of a ‘racial democracy’ made famous by Gilberto Freyre. Black Brazilian intellectuals, Abdias do Nascimento above all, called it a myth that let the country deny its racism while it praised mixture. In my capoeira school I teach that mixture is real and beautiful and that it happened inside violence. Both sentences have to be said.

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    1. Valentina Ríos

      Fellow

      Jorge, ‘both sentences have to be said’ is the most honest answer I've had. My worry is that the national myth always says only the first.

  3. Andrés Zuluaga

    Contributor

    In Colombia the 1991 constitution recognised and protected the ethnic and cultural diversity of the nation, which was partly a rejection of mestizaje as the single national story. I think something of Vasconcelos survives that turn: the refusal of purity. What doesn't survive is the idea that everyone should end up the same. Recognition of difference was the correction.

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  4. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    A US reader's angle: Vasconcelos's rejection of purity mattered to some Chicano writers, who took ‘la raza’ as a positive identity. Some later writers drew on him critically, keeping the mixture and dropping the hierarchy. That's one answer to Valentina's question: yes, it can be read against itself, but only by readers who knew what they were dropping.

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