José Vasconcelos

Not to be confused with José Mauro de Vasconcelos.

José Vasconcelos
Vasconcelos c. 1920
6th Rector of the National University of Mexico
In office June 9, 1920 – October 12, 1921
Preceded by	Balbino Dávalos Balkim
Succeeded by	Mariano Silva y Aceves
1st Secretary of Public Education
In office October 1, 1921 – July 27, 1924
President	Álvaro Obregón
Preceded by	Office created
Succeeded by	Bernardo Gastélum
Secretary of Public Instruction of Mexico
In office November 6, 1914 – January 16, 1915
President	Eulalio Gutiérrez Ortiz
Preceded by	Rubén Valenti
Succeeded by	Félix Fulgencio Palavicini
Personal details
Born	February 27, 1882 Oaxaca, Mexico
Died	June 30, 1959 (aged 77) Mexico City, Mexico
Resting place	Panteón Jardín
Children	Héctor Vasconcelos
Parent(s)	Carmen Calderón Conde Ignacio Vasconcelos Varela
Occupation	Lawyer, politician, writer, educator, public official, philosopher, rector

José Vasconcelos Calderón (Oaxaca, February 27, 1882 – Mexico City, June 30, 1959) was a Mexican lawyer, politician, writer, educator, public official, pedagogue and philosopher. He was the author of a series of autobiographical accounts that portray singular details of the long process of decomposition of the Porfiriato, of the development and triumph of the Mexican Revolution, and of the beginning of the stage of the Mexican post-revolutionary regime that was called the period "of institution building".

He was appointed the country's first Secretary of Public Education and rector of the National University, and was awarded an Honoris Causa Doctorate by that same institution and by those of Chile, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. He was also a member of El Colegio Nacional and of the Mexican Academy of Language.

Origins

Born in Oaxaca, capital city of the state of the same name, on February 27, 1882, he was the second of the nine children of Carmen Calderón Conde and Ignacio Vasconcelos Varela. Particularly important for his personal development was the opportunity he had to attend primary school in schools located on the border between the United States and Mexico, especially in Eagle Pass in Texas and Piedras Negras in Coahuila. Later, for family reasons of an economic nature, he had to continue his education at the Scientific Institute of Toluca, State of Mexico, and at the Instituto Campechano, in the city of San Francisco de Campeche, Campeche. After the premature death of his mother, he entered the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (now part of the UNAM) and later the National School of Jurisprudence, where he obtained his law degree in 1907.

Bust at the Instituto Campechano.

Two years after completing his studies, Vasconcelos took part, together with other young Mexicans critical of the excesses of the positivist education imposed by Justo Sierra, Minister of Public Instruction in the government of Porfirio Díaz, in the founding of the Ateneo de la Juventud Mexicana, later known as the Ateneo de México. The novelty of the Ateneo did not lie in its willingness to criticize the excesses of the Porfiriato, but in the quality of the shrewd criticisms that came from the generation of young intellectuals who gave it life. The most important of these concerns the rejection of the determinism and mechanism of Comtean and Spencerian positivism, and the call to give education a broader vision, one that would reject the biological determinism of racism and find a solution to the problem of the costs of the social adjustments generated by great processes of change such as industrialization or urban concentration.

In addition, in opposition to the official approach of Sierra and the officials of the Porfiriato, called "los Científicos", of promoting a single vision of philosophical thought (positivist and determinist), Vasconcelos and the Ateneo generation proposed academic freedom, freedom of thought and, above all, the reaffirmation of the cultural, ethical and aesthetic values in which Latin America emerged as a social and political reality with its own identity. Here it is important to point out that one of the characteristics of the Porfiriato, for some its dark side, is precisely a certain disdain for what was nationally Mexican, its fascination with the European, the French, the German or, if none of that was possible, with the American, as a viable alternative for achieving progress.

Vasconcelos and the Ateneo generation laid the foundations for an ambitious recovery of what was nationally Mexican and of what was Latin American as an identity that, besides being real, would be viable in the future, and above all would not depend on the foreign for sustained progress, as in fact happened with the economic model of the Porfiriato and other similar Latin American experiments, such as the República de los Coroneles in Brazil, Mexico and the United States.

First steps in politics

José Vasconcelos (left) with José Urquidi, Rafael Zubirán and Peredo.

Invited by Francisco I. Madero in 1909, he joined the presidential campaign of the native of Coahuila. Thanks to his command of English, he represented the then Anti-Reelectionist Club before the government of the United States. A year later, the Club became the National Anti-Reelectionist Party, with Madero as presidential candidate and Francisco Vázquez Gómez as vice-presidential candidate. Madero and Vázquez Gómez faced Porfirio Díaz and Ramón Corral in the much-disputed presidential election of 1910. When it ended in a scandalous fraud, Madero called for a political-military uprising with the so-called Plan of San Luis, which began the Revolution of 1910.

It is from this first period of Vasconcelos's public life that the idea has arisen, as a kind of legend, that it was he who coined the most famous slogan of Maderismo: "Effective Suffrage, No Reelection". This slogan, which to this day appears on the official documents signed by officials of the Mexican federal government, nevertheless has its origin in the Plan of La Noria, led by Porfirio Díaz against Benito Juárez in 1871. Vasconcelos's genius lay, however, in having rescued that phrase, originally wielded by the young Porfirio as a battering ram against the elderly Juárez when the latter insisted on prolonging his stay in power.

Once the official result of that election was known, sympathy for the Plan of San Luis multiplied. This made it clear to the aged caudillo that he was in no position to remain at the head of the government, unless he wished to lead Mexico down the path of civil war or at the mercy of the already demonstrated American ambitions of once again endangering the national territory. Díaz resigned, and the provisional government installed for that purpose called new presidential elections, in which Madero triumphed in 1911.

Revolution

After the coup d'état of Victoriano Huerta and Félix Díaz, Vasconcelos had to go into exile in the United States, where he was entrusted by the Governor of Coahuila and First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army, Venustiano Carranza, with seeking, as a confidential agent, the recognition of England, France and other European powers, while preventing Huerta from being recognized or obtaining economic support. When Vasconcelos achieved the recognition of Carranza as de facto President, the latter once again appointed Vasconcelos director of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. But political disagreements with Carranza once more led Vasconcelos into exile, from which he returned to take the portfolio of Public Instruction during the brief tenure of Eulalio Gutiérrez Ortiz as President of the National Convention. During this period, Vasconcelos was not really able to develop his ideas on public education, since the internal struggles of the revolutionaries of the Convention of Aguascalientes and the defeat of Francisco Villa by Álvaro Obregón made any exercise of government functions impossible.

When the Plan of Agua Prieta was proclaimed in 1920, Vasconcelos sided with Álvaro Obregón against Carranza. After Carranza's death, interim President Adolfo de la Huerta entrusted him with the University and Fine Arts Department, a post that included the rectorship of the National University of Mexico.

Rector of the National University

After five years of exile, Vasconcelos returned to Mexico City together with General Obregón. Interim President Adolfo de la Huerta (1920) appointed him rector of the National University of Mexico, a post he held from June 9, 1920 to October 12, 1921.

According to Vasconcelos's ideals, the University had the mission of imparting teaching and preparing a generation of technicians and humanists who would work and collaborate with society.

Upon being appointed rector of the National University he said, "I do not come to work for the University but to ask the University to work for the people"; this was his purpose as rector.

The reason José Vasconcelos wanted to prepare university students was that Mexico had just come out of the Mexican Revolution, and for Vasconcelos the restoration of Mexico could only be achieved through education and social action.

The actions he carried out as rector of the university were basically aimed at disseminating the classics (literature, music, architecture, etc.). He began projects intended to humanize the university community.

His Ibero-American spirit, expressed in his literary work, is also reflected in his proposal to the University Council, in April 1921, of the coat of arms that the present-day UNAM bears to this day, and in which he expressed his conviction that Mexicans should spread their own homeland together with the great Hispanic American homeland as a new expression of human destinies. The motto he proposed for that coat of arms remains to this day the motto of the National University: "Por mi raza hablará el espíritu" ("The spirit shall speak for my race").

"Apostle of education"

During the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, Vasconcelos was appointed Secretary of Public Instruction. In this post he carried out the first educational reform, which he devised from the University and which had repercussions throughout the Mexican Republic, and from that position he launched an ambitious project of cultural dissemination in the country, with programs of popular instruction, rural schools, book publishing and the promotion of art and culture. The goal was to integrate Mexico more broadly into the great transformations that followed the end of the First World War. Vasconcelos, a charismatic figure capable of inspiring enthusiasm in his collaborators, turned the teachers of the rural schools into an army of peace, and each teacher, according to his own metaphor of Catholic roots, inspired by the sacrifice of the missionaries of the viceregal period, into an "apostle of education". To the work of the rural teachers he added the support, never before seen in Mexico, of the mass publication of some of the greatest works of European and Western thought, which were distributed to every corner of the country in what Vasconcelos did not hesitate to call Cultural Missions.

In addition, he launched an ambitious program of educational and cultural exchange with other American countries, the so-called "cultural embassies", which brought some of the most brilliant Mexican students of the time into contact, at an early age, with their peers in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and other countries of Latin America.

He also supported a multitude of artists and intellectuals. He persuaded some of them to settle in Mexico and, with them, devised new formulas of mass artistic expression which, despite their political and propagandistic overtones, have an aesthetic value beyond doubt. Such was the case of muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. The support of Vasconcelos's Secretariat of Public Instruction was not limited, however, to Mexican artists, as shown by his relationship with the Chilean Gabriela Mistral and with the Venezuelan poet and writer Humberto Tejera, nor to the artistic field; one example among many others is his relationship with the Peruvian politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre.

As Secretary of Public Education, in 1922 Vasconcelos supported Rafael Alducin, director of the newspaper Excélsior, in a campaign to promote Mother's Day and to counteract the ideas of women's education and liberation that were being discussed in Yucatán.

Background of education in Mexico

In 1867, during the Restored Republic, Mexican education still retained the old viceregal form of teaching; the clergy and private individuals provided education at the primary, secondary and professional levels, and education between 1867 and 1911 had been relegated to the background.

Builder of institutions

Statue of José Vasconcelos on San Ildefonso Street.

A key aspect of his tenure was the reconstruction or construction of buildings for public use for the dissemination of culture, such as the National Stadium, public schools of different levels, libraries and, more generally, the buildings intended to house the bureaucratic apparatus of the educational system throughout the length and breadth of the nation.

Vasconcelos, however, found it difficult to reconcile his status as an independent thinker with the demands of the government posts he held. Moreover, his relationship with Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles was always mediated by the distrust that Mexicans from the north of the republic inspired in him. Skilled at coining pungent aphorisms and famous phrases, or at ridiculing his adversaries in debates or in exchanges of letters, on more than one occasion he stated, with a touch of disdain, that in Mexico civilization ended where the eating of carne asada began, an obvious reference to the northern regions of Mexico, where Obregón and Calles came from.

That is why, after his brilliant start as a public official, Vasconcelos decided to withdraw from holding public office in order to devote himself to satisfying his passion for writing, philosophical analysis and polemics. Despite this, he played a most prominent part in the struggles to obtain the autonomy of the National University, alongside Antonio Caso, Manuel Gómez Morín and other prominent figures of the 1920s.

In his philosophy as an educator he proposed: To feel the mestizo culture as the basis of the concept of Mexicanness. To Mexicanize knowledge, that is, to make the anthropology and the natural environment of the country objects of study. To make Latin America the center of a great human synthesis. To employ the sense of service and the fraternal love of the human being as a means of helping the most unprotected, and to make use of industrialism—as a mere means, never as an end—to promote the progress of the nation.

Presidential candidate

Not only that: aware of the excesses of which Plutarco Elías Calles was capable on matters as delicate as Church–State relations, which prefigured the development of the Maximato and one of its precursors, the so-called Cristero War, in 1929 he decided to run as a candidate for the presidency of the republic. This would lead him to confront Calles's candidate, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, in an unequal campaign that reminded many of the one Madero waged in 1909 against Porfirio Díaz, not only because of the support of the State apparatus for the candidate Ortiz Rubio, but also because of the violence that many Vasconcelistas had to suffer in their own flesh.

Supported by some of the most lucid intellectuals and artists of the time, such as Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Gabriela Mistral, Manuel Gómez Morin, Alberto Vásquez del Mercado and Miguel Palacios Macedo, Vasconcelos waged an ambitious electoral campaign that raised the hopes of many.

During the campaign, Vasconcelista leaders were murdered by deputies and hired killers disguised as policemen; Vasconcelos himself survived several attempts on his life. On election day itself, fire was opened on voters in various towns of the country.

The official results of the election gave 93 percent of the votes to Pascual Ortiz Rubio and the rest to Vasconcelos and others. The results, of no value whatsoever for most historians of the period, nevertheless revealed the clear message that Calles and his group were sending Vasconcelos: democratic elections would not be respected, but rather a presidential succession previously agreed upon by the head of State, which became the Mexican political model regarding presidential succession throughout the 20th century.

For many of his followers, such as Miguel Palacios Macedo, José Vasconcelos would be remembered as "the greatest politician of Mexico".

In the face of the results, Vasconcelos sought to reproduce the pattern followed by Madero 20 years earlier, inviting the population to join a revolution through the Plan of Guaymas, which, upon triumphing, would call him to take the place he deserved, since he was going into exile in the U.S. The call to insurrection went unheeded by a Mexican society weary of little more than 10 years of civil wars (seven of the Mexican Revolution and three of the Cristiada) and bought off by a forced stability, with the added burden of facing the devastating effects of the global crisis of 1929. Not only that: for Vasconcelos it meant the beginning of a painful, but highly productive, exile in the United States and Europe, which allowed him to devote himself fully to philosophical analysis (which allowed him to delve into the analysis of Hindu philosophical thought), to write his monumental autobiography, an obligatory reference for understanding 20th-century Mexico, and a series of articles and commentaries on various subjects. During his time in the United States, Vasconcelos became a "star" of the then nascent circuit of prominent speakers whom American universities invite to report on what is happening in other countries, which on the other hand also allowed Vasconcelos to meet his most basic economic needs, since he had not accumulated wealth during his time in public service.

Once the Second World War was over, Vasconcelos continued as director of the National Library, a post he combined with an active career as a university professor and polemicist. Fate, however, had one last satisfaction in store for him: in December 1958 he would see one of his disciples and the organizer of his 1929 presidential campaign, Adolfo López Mateos, a native of the State of Mexico, become President of Mexico.

He was elected a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Language in 1939, and years later a full member, taking possession of chair V on June 12, 1953. He was appointed the institution's 4th librarian-archivist. His acceptance speech was answered by Genaro Fernández MacGregor, who referred to Vasconcelos as "the most illustrious Mexican since independence". In 1943 he was a founding member of El Colegio Nacional.

He died in the neighborhood of Tacubaya, in Mexico City, on June 30, 1959. His body was found reclining over the desk at which he was working on one of his last literary works: Letanías del atardecer, published unfinished posthumously. For his qualities as a pedagogue and his determined support for Latin American culture, he earned the title of Teacher of the Youth of America from the Federation of Students of Colombia, a title often abbreviated as "teacher of America".

Pro-Nazism controversy

After the fraud of '29, his political disillusionment and his deep enmity with the PNR (self-proclaimed "revolutionary" and which, in later years, would lean closer to some socialist ideas), which had persecuted him, made attempts on his life and pushed him into exile, led him to shift ideologically toward the Mexican political right; he became an anti-communist who disowned every "revolutionary or leftist" movement.

During the first years of Adolf Hitler's power over Germany, the remarkable and rapid economic recovery and geopolitical empowerment experienced by the German country were viewed with admiration by broad sectors of opinion in many Latin American countries. This Latin American Germanophilia admired the propagandistic representations of the Nazi regime as a new paternalistic proposal of corporate economy based on an energetic and ambitious State nationalism, which sought the prosperity of the national people against foreign interests, and which could be seen, in Mexico, as an alternative to the powerful attraction that the socialist model of the Soviet Union exerted on the urban working classes, which moreover enjoyed good relations with the Mexican political class. Vasconcelos admired the fascist regimes for their capacity to mobilize and organize large groups of citizens who would otherwise have been sunk in deep crises that reminded him of the situation Mexico was living through. Perhaps this explains the paradox whereby a consummate anti-racist, the very champion of mestizaje, author of La raza cósmica, would support a racist regime: Vasconcelos's affinity for Italian fascism (of low racist content, before being influenced by Germany) and for Hitler's Germany was not founded on ideas of racial supremacism, but on its spirit of national elevation through the unity of the people along a path then perceived as progressive.

This position was far from exclusive to Vasconcelos, as attested by the editions of various newspapers of the capital of the republic, especially the evening editions of the newspaper Excélsior, called Últimas Noticias de la Mañana and Últimas Noticias de la Tarde, which openly expressed their sympathies for Nazi Germany.

Throughout Latin America, above all in the Southern Cone, there is a great deal of Germanophilia in those years, Argentina, in Chile, and there were many figures who did not clearly see the terrible, unheard-of poison that National Socialism meant, and so they viewed with sympathy, above all at the beginning of the 1930s, what was developing in Germany

In this context, his enmity with the left and his nationalist ideology led Vasconcelos to show affinity for Germany, as a rival of the models of "false bourgeois democracy", of the North American imperialism that had historically done so much harm to the sovereignty of the Latin American countries, and in opposition to Soviet communism, which he repudiated.

In 1940, the war in Europe and the policy of national reconciliation pursued by Manuel Ávila Camacho allowed him to return to Mexico, where he was appointed director of the National Library. There are those who consider that it was these fascist sympathies that prevented him from remaining in the United States and forced him to return to Mexico.

In that same year, already repatriated, Vasconcelos directed the publication of the magazine Timón, financed by an official of the German embassy in Mexico, Arthur Dietrich, in which he showed an open and clear position of sympathy and admiration for Nazi Germany, through contents of very diverse kinds, ranging from fragments of classic novels, family advice and articles on German technology and culture, to war posters.

[...] the weekly Timón published diatribes against the Allied powers and the world power of Jewish money, as well as Nazi propaganda coming straight out of Goebbels's office: Germany's advance on all fronts and the imminent victory of the Third Reich.

But the Timón experience was very brief. With the taking of Paris by the German army on June 15, 1940, Mexico's Secretariat of the Interior confiscated all the issues and ordered the magazine closed for good.

During the Second World War, Vasconcelos argued for the need for the Allies to be defeated by Germany. A lifelong anti-Yankee, Vasconcelos considered that a German victory in the war would provide a desirable counterweight to the North American imperialist control that the great majority of the Latin American intelligentsia recognized as chiefly responsible for the misery, backwardness and economic and cultural subjugation of their countries.

Vasconcelos would vigorously repudiate the policy of extermination, which was unknown in other parts of the world until the middle of the war. Vasconcelos argued that, in America, news of the atrocities of the Holocaust only began to arrive after 1942, and that "back then, news took months to arrive". Vasconcelos added that, in wartime, this news was regarded by many, himself included, as deceptive North American propaganda, not at all trustworthy. Vasconcelos would say that it was only when the evidence (photographic and filmed) of the genocidal horror, the concentration camps and the other Nazi atrocities reached Mexico at the end of the war, in 1945, that he definitively and publicly repudiated and rejected the National Socialist regime and Italian fascism. He never again devoted energy to the subject.

Héctor Vasconcelos would attempt to rehabilitate his father's legacy with respect to this "dark period" in the following terms:

I believe that after the 1929 campaign (when he was a presidential candidate) he went into a very deep psychological crisis in the face of the way he was fought by the regime of the nascent National Revolutionary Party (PNR) [...] He developed a deep aversion to everything that was revolutionary and leftist movements, in quotation marks, and that is where he begins to shift to the right, which to me seems the worst tragedy of his life [...]. Besides affection, I feel immense admiration for the Vasconcelos before 1930, but I intensely deplore his conservative turn of the 1930s.

[...] my father, after the 1929 campaign for the presidency, yes, had a psychological turn, I believe more than anything toward the right, and then he began to do things completely contradictory to what he had done in his great period, in his youth and maturity; as I say, many people credit him with the rescue of the aboriginal, primary, essential Mexican cultures, the pride in the racial mixture that is Mexico; well, these are attitudes opposed to any kind of racism.

Philosophy

He was one of the most prominent exponents of Philosophy in Mexico; his philosophy covers many fields: metaphysics, aesthetics, the philosophy of the Mexican. Close to Arthur Schopenhauer and Miguel de Unamuno, he was influenced by numerous authors and currents such as Henri Bergson, Pythagoras and Nietzsche, as well as Christianity and mysticism, among others. Vasconcelos developed an eclectic philosophy in which, starting from his own reading of various concepts, he sought to establish a metaphysical and aesthetic framework for Mexican reality. The notions of "Cosmic Race", "Indiología" and "Todología" arise from that project.

Work and legacy

José Vasconcelos Library.

His work left a deep mark on Mexican cultural life. Vasconcelista humanism has an experiential perspective in his monumental autobiographical series Ulises Criollo (1935), La tormenta (1936), El desastre (1938), El proconsulado (1939) and La Flama. Los de Arriba en la Revolución. Historia y Tragedia (1959). La Raza Cósmica (1925) puts forward the most powerful critique to date of the racism with which, since the 16th century, attempts have been made to justify the submission of the peoples of Latin America to Europe and Saxon America. Taken as a whole, it is a body of work that has been influential in shaping philosophical, humanist and political thought in Latin America, which he traveled through and cultivated intellectually, as attested in the narratives of "La raza cósmica".

His philosophy is contained in "Pitágoras, una teoría del ritmo" (1916), "El monismo estético" (1918), "Tratado de metafísica" (1929), "Ética" (1932) and "Estética" (1935), which is considered by scholars of his thought to be the best of his works; on this subject Antonio Castro Leal, in the prologue to his compilation "José Vasconcelos: Páginas Escogidas" (México, 1940, Ed. Botas), says the following: "The Estética, one of the most important books in Ibero-American philosophical literature, takes up and rectifies themes treated in the four previous books, and has that audacity of inspiration that surprised in his first essays. It is an aesthetics properly speaking and a metaphysics; it is, in reality, an aesthetic metaphysics." (cf. ibid. p. 15).

One of his main achievements is his popularizing literature, which he accomplished with "Estudios indostánicos" (1921), "Historia del pensamiento filosófico" (1937), "Manual de filosofía" (circa 1945) and "Breve historia de México" (1937). It is notable that almost all of his writings were published in first or second edition by Editorial Botas (Mexico), whose director received the manuscripts first-hand.

Vasconcelos ventured into the waters of literary fiction with works in various genres. In criticism, his Divagaciones literarias (1919) stand out; in drama, his Prometeo vencedor (1916); in short stories, there is La sonata mágica (1933), in addition to the political work that complements the autobiographical, as in the case of Cartas políticas (1959), published posthumously by the Fondo de Cultura Económica, the institution that now holds the rights to his Complete Works.

Vasconcelos edited the Revista Continental Timón, in which figures such as Dr. Atl and Andrés Henestrosa collaborated, and which circulated from February to June 1940. In that magazine, an apology was made for the political ideology and program of Nazi Germany, at a time when many intellectuals fell for the mirage of fascism.

In homage to the historical figure of José Vasconcelos, President Vicente Fox (2000–2006) launched the project of the José Vasconcelos Library, which, after several delays in its completion, finally opened its doors to the public on December 1, 2008.

Bibliography

• Acosta Rico, Fabián. El pensamiento político de José Vasconcelos. México: Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno del Estado de Jalisco, 2004. ISBN 978-970-624-376-8
• Bar Lewaw, Itzhak. Introducción Crítico-Biografía a José Vasconcelos. Madrid: Ediciones Latinoamericanas, 1965.
• ---. José Vasconcelos. México: Clásica Selecta Editora Librería, 1965.
• Carballo, Emmanuel. Diecinueve protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX. México: Empresas Editoriales, SA, 1965; see esp. 17-47.
• De Beer, Gabriela. "El ateneo y los atenistas: un examen retrospectivo". Revista Iberoamericana 148-149, Vol 55 (1989): 737-749.
• Fell, Claude, Los años del águila (1920-1925). Educación, cultura e iberoamericanismo en el México post-revolucionario, trans. by María Palomar, México, UNAM, 1989.
• Magdaleno, Mauricio, Las palabras perdidas, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1956.
• Meza Medina, Gustavo, "Las Espinas de Vasconcelos" Editorial Abrapalabra, México, 2011.
• Molloy, Sylvia. "First Memories, First Myths: Vasconcelos' Ulises criollo". In At Face Value: Autobiographical Writing in Spanish America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 186-208.
• Torres, Pilar. José Vasconcelos. Editorial Planeta. México 2006.
• Vasconcelos, José. Obras Completas, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México.
• Ward, Thomas. "José Vasconcelos y su cosmología de la raza". In La resistencia cultural: la nación en el ensayo de las Américas. Lima: Editorial Universitaria URP, 2004, pp. 246-254.
• Moreno de los Arcos, Enrique. El Pensamiento Pedagógico de José Vasconcelos

See also

• Cabinet of Álvaro Obregón