Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Gracias, first and foremost, to Adi Hovav, my editor at Rutgers University Press, for commissioning this book, and to Leslie Mitchner, editor in chief at the press, for shepherding it through the editorial process. Over the years, I have discussed José Vasconcelos’s racial views in a number of a number of venues, including the Chronicle of Higher Education. My gratitude to my editor Karen Winkler for welcoming me to its pages. A number of people have been supportive at various stages: John R. H. Polt, who translated on my behalf Vasconcelos’s essay “Mestizaje” in the late 1990s. His patience throughout the years, while I embarked on other projects, has been unremitting. My friend Héctor Vasconcelos, one of José Vasconcelos’s children, whose diplomatic work in Boston allowed us to share enchanting discussions, was the first to suggest the idea that I write of a profile of his father. He pointed me in the direction of Aspects of Mexican Civilization, a volume of lectures by Vasconcelos and anthropologist Manuel Gamio, where “The Race Problem in Latin America” is featured. Thanks, too, to Harold Augenbraum at the National Book Foundation; Anna Gillis of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who is an editor at Humanities magazine, where a portion of my profile “The Prophet of 123 Race” first appeared; Reed Malcolm at the University of California Press; Julia Reidhead and Kurt Wildermuth at W. W. Norton; and Elda Rotor at Penguin Classics. For the chronology of Vasconcelos and my profile, I made use the database of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, housed in the University of Texas at Austin. I also found the following sources useful: Luis Villoro’s Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en México (1950), John H. Haddox’s Vasconcelos of Mexico: Philosopher and Prophet (1967); José Joaquín Blanco’s Se llamaba Vasconcelos : Una evocación crítica (1977); Joaquín N. Cárdenas’s José Vasconcelos: Guía y profeta (1985); Martha Robles’s Entre el poder y las letras: Vasconcelos en sus memorias (1989); and Luis A. Marentes’s José Vasconcelos and the Writings of the Mexican Revolution (2000). 124 José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race ...