La raza cósmica / The Cosmic Race edited by José …

1 La raza c smica / The Cosmic Race edited by Jos Vasconselos A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography by Jos VasconcelosLa raza c smica / The Cosmic Race by Jos Vasconselos; A Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiographyby Jos VasconcelosReview by: Barbara CelarentAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 120, No. 3 (November 2014), pp. 998-1004 Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: .Accessed: 27/03/2015 17:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at ..JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive.

2 We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact .The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Journal of This content downloaded from on Fri, 27 Mar 2015 17:35:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsLa raza c smica / The Cosmic Race, bilingual ed. By Jos by Didier T. Jaen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1997. Pp. Mexican Ulysses: An Autobiography. By Jos Vasconcelos. Abridged andtranslated by W.

3 Rex Crawford. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, Celarent*University of AtlantisSocial reflection outside the metropolis has often come from activists whofound themselves in a quiet moment foreign study, exile, prison, house ar-rest. Sarmiento sFacundocame at one such low point, as did Kenyatta sFacing Mount Kenyaand much of the work of Ali Shari wrotein the heat of active political engagement Ramabai, Fukuzawa, and daCunha, for example. But few wrote important works of social thought inthe process of interpreting their own lives. One such was Jos played an important and complex role in Mexican politics forthe 20 years between the fall of the dictator Porfirio D az and the failureof his own bid for the presidency in 1929.

4 In the same period, he wrotefivesizable monographs on Pythagoras, Hindustani thought, metaphysics, race,and native culture in the Americas and pursued an erotic life of consider-able complexity. While his most famous work isLa raza c smicaof 1925,his autobiography illustrates his theory more effectively. For it is pervadedby a sensual aesthetic of individual life that is Vasconcelos smoststrikingcontribution to social Vasconcelos was born in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca in1882, but his family moved almost immediately to Sasabe on the northernborder. Vasconcelos s father was a minor customs official.

5 His mother, wholoomed large in his life, was the progenitrix, organizer, and sustainer of alarge family. Some of Vasconcelos s early schooling was across the border,and he learned early both the English language and the hostile attitudes oftheyanquis. In search of better schools, the family moved to Campeche,where Vasconcelos went to high school and was recruited to teach Englishto the pretty daughter of the principal, who became thefirst of his manyerotic attachments. Vasconcelosfinished preparatory school in Mexico City,attended law school, and became a practicing lawyer in 1905. In 1906 hemarried a hometown girl from Oaxaca, who had been his comforter at hismother s early death and whose ambiguous position in his multivalent liferesurfaces often in his autobiography.

6 *Another review from 2053 to share withAJSreaders. Journal of Sociology998 This content downloaded from on Fri, 27 Mar 2015 17:35:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsVasconcelos became associated with Francisco I. Madero s reform move-ment almost as soon as he took up the law. After thefirst of many exiles hereturned to Mexico City when Madero took over from D az in 1911. Shortlyafter the battle of Ciudad Ju rez, he met the founder of the Mexican WhiteCross, Elena Arizmendi, who needed legal services because of internaltroubles in the organization and had been referred to Vasconcelos by Ma-dero.

7 Arizmendi was smart and beautiful, an aristocrat but trained as anurse, a supporter of the revolution but a lover of old regime niceties. Herfirst marriage had dissolved years before. She and Vasconcelos became lov-ers almost s assassination in 1913 sent Vasconcelos and Arizmendi intoexile. From abroad he helped mobilize constitutionalists against the Huertaregime, then returned to Mexico in 1914 as minister of education in the Gov-ernment of the Convention. The forces of Venustiano Carranza soon over-threw that government, and Vasconcelos again left Mexico, this time forfiveyears. He spent most of this time in the United States, where he made aliving as a writer and an international lawyer his earlier legal career hadbeen as a representative of a New Yorkfirm in Mexico City and preparedfor the inevitable turn of the Mexicankaleidoscope.

8 After numerous tem-porary separations, he and Arizmendi parted for good in 1916. Vasconselosmaintained his wife and children in San Antonio throughout most of thisperiod; his daughter was conceived about when the Arizmendi affair wasbeginning. Carranza fell in 1920, and Vasconcelos returned to Mexico aspresident of the National University. Soon afterwards, he became ministerof education. Afire with transforming zeal, he built schools and librariesthroughout the country, worked forliteracy among the masses and the In-dians, and sponsored the arts particularly the folk arts and the spectacularmurals that remain world famous more than a century later.

9 In 1924 he ranfor governor of his native Oaxaca, was defeated probably by force and chi-canery , and again left the country. He returned in 1928 to run for presidentafter lvaro Obreg n the president-elect and one of the great strongmenof the 1920s had been assassinated. In an election almost certainly managedby fraud and violence Vasconcelos was defeated, and the Partido NacionalRevolucionario consolidated its one party rule, which would endure un-der various names until 2000. During the election Vasconcelos took a newmistress, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, the estranged wife of an American briefly awaited a popular uprising with which to claim theelection that had been taken from him, but it never came.

10 An embittered man,he againfled the country, for the United States, Panama, and then Paris,where Rivas Mercado unwilling to countenance Vasconcelos s contin-ued marriage killed herself at the altar of Notre Dame Cathedral. Vas-concelos left Paris in 1933, wandering to Argentina and the United StatesBook Reviews999 This content downloaded from on Fri, 27 Mar 2015 17:35:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsand writing his memoirs in a voice that rapidly became both pessimis-tic and conservative. In 1939 he returned to a Mexico in which he was nolonger an important politician. His long-suffering wife died in 1941, andhe remarried.