Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race

Preface

Preface José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), a book explaining why mestizos are called to create a balanced, harmonious civilization that will dominate the world in the twenty-first century and beyond, remains enormously influential in the Spanishspeaking world as well as among Latinos in the United States. Since its original publication in 1925, it has been copiously debated by politicians and intellectuals alike. Vasconcelos (1882–1959) was an educator and intellectual , Mexico’s secretary of education, the first chancellor of the most important public institution of higher learning in Latin America, and also a candidate in the nation’s 1929 presidential election. But he is mostly known as a thinker interested in a variety of topics, from the role of emotions in human life to the junction where race, science, and politics meet. Unfortunately, he is also recurrently portrayed as a fraud—un charlatán. The accusation is not unfounded. Vasconcelos’s central argument in The Cosmic Race, using social Darwinism as his platform, is pseudoscientific, not to say spurious. His diet of biological, anthropological, and sociological sources is bizarre. And, even more dangerous, his opinions , developed in reaction to British philosopher Herbert Spencer’s views of racial purity and Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel’s theory of transmitted hereditary, have xi a Nietzschean echo that suspiciously relates them to the misguided theories on the superiority of the Aryan race advanced by Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1930s. Actually, The Cosmic Race does not appear to be much read today, at least not in its entirety. People are only interested in the essay “Mestizaje,” which constitutes about one-seventh of the book’s content and, for better or worse, has become a surrogate not only for The Cosmic Race but for Vasconcelos’s entire oeuvre. The essay served as prologue to the first edition and became the first chapter in the second edition of 1948. The rest of the book consists of impressionistic travel pieces on trips to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, all of which appear to have been inserted as fillers. Wanting to find an overall plan for Human History, which he conceives as written with capital letters, Vasconcelos argues that mixed marriages—racial miscegenation—result not in the detriment but in the improvement of society. “The mestizo and the Indian, and even the black,” he writes, “surpass the white in countless genuinely spiritual abilities.” He adds: “The Hispanic race,” which, after tracing the evolution of humankind Vasconcelos believes comes fifth as a racial group in the historical hierarchy, has ahead of it “this mission of discovering new zones of the spirit.” Vasconcelos was instrumental in the development of Mexico into a modern nation. That development was the result of his experiences in the United States, where he lived (Texas, California, and New York) during different periods of his life. His exposure to “Yankee ways,” as he calls them, left a deep impression. In his four-installment memoirs, which he composed over a period of more than twenty years (in English, the autobiography was published in 1963 in an abridged translation called A Mexican xii José Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race Ulysses), he discusses, often from an ethnic perspective, his journey from the outskirts of culture to center stage. People have tried to ignore Vasconcelos’s racial statements , which has not done much to eclipse them. He remains a vital reference, in part because of his love/hate relationship with Mexico. He was an inspiration for the student upheaval of the 1960s in Mexico that resulted in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. He also served as an ideological standard-bearer for the Chicano movement that began in that same decade, and for pan-Latino thinkers through the 1990s. My purposes in the present volume are multiple. Vasconcelos remains an elusive intellectual reference, constantly mentioned but seldom read. For years the only available English translation of “Mestizaje” was by Didier T. Jaén, published in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at California State University in Los Angeles. In 1997, Johns Hopkins University Press reprinted it in the book series Race in the Americas, edited by Robert Ried-Pharr. This version included an afterword by Joseba Gabilondo, a scholar specializing in Basque culture. The rendition of “Mestizaje” by John H. R. Polt, emeritus professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, captures the essay’s crispness, highlighting its raw...