La Raza Cosmica Sparknotes

Jose Vasconcelos’s “La Raza Cosmica” is definitely not what I expected. It took me multiple reads to understand what José Vasconcelos is was trying to imply. Turns out, it's pretty racist, and his meanings are buried under explanations and reasoning hard to comprehend. In my opinion Jose Vasconcelo gets too caught up in metaphors that detract from his true meaning and theories. “La Raza Cosmica” reads more like a science fiction than a call to unity or nationalism. If Jose Vasconcelo had published this book as a work of fiction with the current title, I believe he would have accomplished both his goal of writing the book and explaining his theories to the general public as George Orwell had done with the novella “Animal Farm”. I understand
Vasconcelos would be forced to leave Mexico and hide in France and ultimately live in the United States which he had much disdain for. Upon the election of General Alvaro Obregon as President of Mexico in 1920, Mexico would undergo reconstruction efforts through intellectual cultural and materialism ideals. Jose Vasconcelos would return to Mexico as an education administrator for the University of Mexico and later as the Minister of Public Education. These jobs would allow him the freedom to gather artists and intellectuals to contribute to Mexico’s nationalist movements. Vasconcelos would look to the leaders of Latin American independence for inspiration and although this seemed like a novel idea, it was an unoriginal idea, taken directly out of the Medici “Renaissance” movement. This agenda would allow the people of Mexico to be inculcated with literacy, art and a social movement. Although Vasconcelos was an indigenist and a promoter of murals in public places, His muralist movement would flourish through the Mexican art on public buildings with the native tradition of Mexico’s ancient civilizations and indigenous culture. The murals and arts depicted a Mexican history, idealizing pre European era. The paintings showcased Indians, mestizos,
Vasconcelos was greatly inspired by early works in Mayans, and like the previous intellectuals, attempted to establish that all known ancient civilizations were descended from Atlantis, which he saw as a technologically sophisticated, more advanced culture. Vasconcelos would piggy back on this claim and further tie his concept of mestizaje (miscegenation) to the ancient civilizations of the Greeks, Romans, Mayans, Quechuan, and Toltecans. Arguing that Latin America had origins in the legendary continent of Atlantis, which created the early humans, which eventually migrated outward and formed the four genetic trunks of our current societies of: The blacks, whites, Asians and Indians. Vasconcelos further argues that Indians are direct descendants of the Atlantis ancestors. The four trunks progressed separately in Africa, Asia, Europe and Americas with little or no contact between the each other. By using Atlantis as the nucleus of his theory, it allowed him to correlate the origins of Latin Americans with other ancient civilizations. He explains that the Atlantis people withdrew from civilizations and declined until it was ultimately assimilated by the Aztecs and