Mexico, as most people reading this know, is giving Columbus a pass this week, and celebrating El Dia de la Raza, Friday, October 12. Locally, this “day” is overshadowed by the massive celebration of the Virgin of Zapopan. Yet, for a great many Mexican citizens — and long-time foreign Mexico aficionados — who’ve been taught the importance of La Raza, October 12 is a useful time to reflect on the Republic’s splendidly complex and contradictory Day of the Race — which was quickly morphed into Day of the People. Those four words (in Spanish or English) inevitably call up the name of the “father” of this Republic’s modern educational system.
That would be Jose Vasconcelos, long-honored as the nation’s leading — and controversial — intellectual for his relentlessly energetic, brilliant and broad-ranging influence not only in every aspect of national education, but for nourishing a new kind of art (and artist), a national thrust to the entire sphere of music, and a determinedly new, robust re-assessment of both Mexico’s rich pre-hispanic culture and the possibilities of a new national culture. There seemed to be few aspects of Mexico’s culture that he did not touch.
His impulse to be so forcefully enterprising in so many areas where leadership and innovative thought was lacking, that sometimes — too many times, some say — that fervor led him astray. All this took place at a turbulent time when no one had any idea where Mexico was headed: on the eve and in the wake of the 1910-1923 Revolution.
Vasconcelos, born in the city of Oaxaca, February 28,1882, attended school in Eagle Pass, Texas, while living in Piedras Negras, Coahuila. He went on to graduate from Mexico City’s Escuela de Jurisprudencia in 1905. Soon after graduating, he was in Washington, D.C., representing the Anti-Reelection effort against the brutal 35-year rule of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. And, of course, Vasconcelos supported the Francisco I. Madero 1910 Revolution which toppled the dictator in 1911. When Madero was overwhelmingly elected, Vasconcelos was assigned to re-organize the National Preparatory School, which would eventually lead to his structural transformation of the entire national educational system
But even those who can’t rattle off this list of accomplishments are familiar with the words, “the cosmic race,” the title of his ambitious 1925 text, re-defining Mexican society and culture. It was from this title that the concept of “La Raza” issues. (Those two words were quickly morphed into “the people.”) Before, Mexican society was defined, and thus divided by, what were the racial distinctions inherited as a colony of Spain. There were (roughly) the españoles, the mestizos (with many subdivisions) and the indios. Vasconcelos sought to persude his countrymen into becoming a single, unique “Raza Cosmica”, which he also sometimes called “La Raza Bronce”. Thus he is considered the “father” of indigenismo philosophy. His work would soon spur other further studies regarding ethnic values as an ethic, and for the consideration of ethnic variety as, first, an aesthetic source, then embracing his belief that the mixing of races was a “natural and desirable direction for humankind” — which is developing today.His vision was of a new, “modern” mestizo people amiably embracing all classes and views of race which Mexico certainly did not accept then. Yet this concept, then and today, has been criticized because it came at the cost of a cultural assimilation. Educated indigenous leaders opposed the forfeiture of their multi-branched cultural inheritance that benefited not only indigenous people but all of Mexico — handcrafts and folk medicines (which all Mexico depended on), as well as the unacknowledged forms of “indian” Catholicism, local government and a slew of indigenous customs (also adopted by other Mexican ”races,” including “whites”).
It is what, in fact, for a very long time, characterized the United States — most obviously with its large menu of adopted food, and vocabulary, from other peoples from Europe, the Orient, and certainly from Latin America.
And while Mexico’s indigenous people vigorously resisted Vasconcelos’ shearing away of large parts of their culture, his research, especially prominent in “La Raza Cosmica,” and a later text, “Metafisicia,” regarding Mexico’s modern identity had a profound influence on young writers, poets, anthropologists, philosophers, academics of almost every persuasion, and in many other countries.
Octavio Paz — Mexican author, cultural analyst, poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — in conversations concerning indigenismo, especially after the 1961 publication in English of his unequalled analysis of Mexican culture, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” would often speak of Vasconcelos’ influence on him, and call him “the teacher,” to emphasize the impact of his lectures in Central and South America and the United States.
Yet criticism voiced by his countrymen, both at home and especially later in the U.S., because of his philosophy’s negative implications regarding indigenous people, never seemed to retreat. Nor did he find a way to reconcile that conflict.
At this point it is well to remember: “Mexico has never really come up with a good answer to the question ‘What does being Indian mean?’” points out one of Mexico’s highly-regarded political scientists, Jorge G. Castañeda. That’s despite the fact that Mexico’s Census Bureau and its not-highly regarded Statistical Institution insist the government knows what it has never been able to explain convincingly to rational cultural observers. Government no longer counts this category, or that of mestizos. This is the bureaucracy saying that race in Mexico no longer is counted because it doesn’t count. Thus, the official grin over the fact that the word “raza” now does not mean what Spanish dictionaries say it does — “race.” Instead, with a flourish of political correctness. it means “people.” This is actually a dodge obscuring the fact that “indio” quickly became in New Spain the ultimate pejorative among Spanish occupiers, their offspring, later arrivals from Ibera, and anyone with skin light enough to allow them to pass as a non-indio. The word is still used today, notes Castañeda, in the often-heard despicable, racist insult, “pinche indio.” He explains, “We are a long way from ... the American predilection for political correctness.” Pinche in Mexico means something like “asshole” and is a serious insult, particularly coming from a stranger.
But the inequality of Mexican society that often impacts race, really targets class, which means money, which, in the minds of a great many Mexicans, means corruption, despite their possible envy. Yet “inequality isn’t simply economic,” Castadeñda maintains “It is also social.” “A government undersecretary (one level down from the top echelon of public service) earns (vastly more) than his chauffeur (provided by the government, of course), who earns much, much less. “The official addresses the employee with the familiar tu, while the chauffeur must speak to the official with the respectful usted. The official and his peers in the business and intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (though there are exceptions), well-educated and well traveled abroad. They send their two children to private schools, removed from the world of the employee. The employee and his peers tend to be obviously mestizo, many with little education, and they have four to five children,” most of whom may be able to attend school without problems only through the sixth grade, though today increasingly through secundaria (junior high school). University can mean a lot of time-consuming jumping through bureaucratic hoops unless the parents have “connections.” It also means a lot of expenses. Sending all five children to university can be inconceivable. As Mexico’s noisily reported corrupt July 1 presidential election demonstrated, the present brand of indigenismo doesn’t quite heal all national woes, especially those that have become institutionalized. The U.S. should take note.