Work · Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy
The Cosmic Race
Latin America’s mixing of peoples heralds a fifth, “cosmic” race and an aesthetic age of humanity – a vision of mixing that still ranks races and has been criticised for erasing Black and Indigenous peoples.
Introduction
José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s minister of education from 1921 to 1924, published the essay in 1925 as the introduction to notes on his travels in South America. He sketches a history of four races, each with its era, and prophesies that in Latin America a fifth, “cosmic” race will emerge through mixing and open an age governed by love and beauty rather than by force or reason. The vision turned the racist condemnation of mestizaje into praise and fed Mexican cultural nationalism. At the same time it ranks races and expects Indigenous and Black people to be absorbed. It was later taken up, and reworked, by Chicano writers, among them Gloria Anzaldúa. Vasconcelos himself moved to the far right from the late 1930s.
Connections
Taken up in
- Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza1987 · Gloria Anzaldúa
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