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Revista Hispánica Moderna, Volume 68, Number 1, June 2015, pp.

77-91 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/rhm.2015.0007

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Orientalizing Mexico: Estudios indostánicos and the Place
of India in José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica

laura j. torres-rodrı́guez
new york university



O n July 9, 1922, José Vasconcelos asserted, in his inaugural speech for the
Secretariat of Education in Mexico, that the site was the ‘‘building-symbol’’
of the mature revolution (Discursos 41). In his exposition, the first federal Secre-
tary of Education described the four carved reliefs in the interior courtyard,
which he considered to represent the four symbolic pillars of Mexican national
culture: the young Greek muse, the Spanish caravel, Quetzalcoatl, and ‘‘final-
mente . . . el Buda envuelto en su flor de loto, como una sugestión de que en esta
tierra y en esta estirpe indoibérica se han de juntar el Oriente y el Occidente, el
Norte y el Sur, no para chocar y destruirse, sino para combinarse y confundirse
en una cultura amorosa y estética’’ (39–40).1 While the first three elements of
the set may have been inscribed within the ideological coordinates competing
to define a national culture in the 1920s—ateneı́stas, hispanists, indigenists, and
defenders of mestizaje—the inclusion of Buddha in the postrevolutionary creole
pantheon exceeded the traditional models of cultural definition.
This article interrogates the intellectual trajectory that made the presence of
India possible in the official symbols of Mexican nationalism and in the cultural
legacy of José Vasconcelos based on three observations. First, I consider the
numerous references to India in Vasconcelos’s philosophical production as a
seminal element, rather than as an accessory, in his thoughts on culture. Impor-
tant Vasconcelos critics—such as Enrique Krauze and Christopher Domı́nguez
Michael—have interpreted his interest in India as a challenge to or an eccentric
deviation from the philosophical Occidentalism of the Ateneo de la Juventud. I
explore the implications of this preference for Asia. Second, I study the refer-
ences to India using the critical methodology proposed by Edward Said in Orien-
talism (1978), keeping in mind the historical and geographical specificities of

1
Vasconcelos recalls this 1922 exegesis at the end of La raza cósmica. The quotation demon-
strates the importance of these four cultural paradigms in his later works: ‘‘Para expresar
todas estas ideas que hoy procuro exponer en rápida sı́ntesis, hace algunos años, cuando
todavı́a no se hallaban bien definidas, procuré darles signos en el nuevo Palacio de la
Educación Pública de México. . . . En los tableros de los cuatro ángulos del patio interior
hice labrar alegorı́as de España, de México, Grecia y la India, las cuatro civilizaciones particu-
lares que más tienen que contribuir a la formación de la América Latina’’ (La raza cósmica
35).

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78  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
Mexico.2 Third, by analyzing Vasconcelos’s application of stereotypes about
South Asia to postrevolutionary Mexico, I assert that his nationalist thinking was
modulated, in part, through his Orientalist ideas about colonial India.
The study of Orientalism in Vasconcelos intervenes in the field of Mexican
Studies that has linked culturalist discourses with revolutionary nationalism. The
latter has been interpreted as the ideological product of the Partido Revolucio-
nario Institucional (PRI). Critics such as Roger Bartra have defended the neces-
sity of overcoming the limits of political and cultural representation inherent in
identity-based discourses about lo mexicano. Bartra associates these discourses
with different forms of cultural domination by the State (16). Although Vas-
concelos’s administration precedes the formation of the PRI, he played an
important role in the consolidation of a philosophical tradition dedicated to the
study of lo mexicano, as well as in designing the institutional project for the cul-
ture that, as Blanco aptly notes, the State would adopt in later years (79).
According to Ignacio Sánchez Prado, 1917 to 1925 represents the formative
period of postrevolutionary Mexican national culture (Naciones intelectuales 16).
These years coincide not only with Vasconcelos’s most productive intellectual
activity, but also with his progressive ascension to State power. His most impor-
tant Orientalist text—Estudios indóstanicos (1920)—coincides precisely with this
period of direct participation in the consolidation of cultural hegemony in
Mexico. As Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo argues, Mexico’s obsession with Asia during
the 1920s coincided with ‘‘a sort of self-exoticism . . . that aimed at creating a
particular world cultural product (Mexicanness)’’ (279). Consequently,
Vasoncelos’s Orientalist activity can be considered a complementary practice to
his nationalist work. My aim is to uncover Orientalist elements at the very heart
of the ideas about lo mexicano that were later promoted by cultural institutions.
To support this claim, I begin by analyzing Estudios indostánicos—Vasconcelos’s
study of Asia’s philosophical systems—as a rehearsal for the intellectual project
that would later be articulated as a Latin American theory in La raza cósmica
(1925). Through this analysis, ‘‘the Orient’’ is framed within the central tradi-
tion of Latin American thought. I then move on to examine the specific influ-
ence of Indian intellectual elites on the development of Vasconcelos’s ideas
about mestizaje, whose peculiarity lies in linking race with spiritualist notions.
Tenorio-Trillo has mentioned the influence of figures such as Rabindranath
Tagore in Vasconcelos’s ‘‘somehow racial ethos with spiritual superiority’’ (261).
To explore this further, I argue that Indian religious discourses also proposed an
idea of modernity founded on spirituality as a strategy for cultural decoloniza-
tion. This perspective allows us to connect Latin American intellectual history
with that of other traditions influenced by colonialism. To conclude, I will discuss
a concrete component of Vasconcelos’s Orientalist practice in the context of one
of the platforms that characterized his cultural administration as secretary of

2
Hernán G. H. Taboada studies the transformations that Vasconcelos’s vision of ‘‘the
Orient’’ undergoes throughout his political career: he moves from exaltation of India in the
1920s—during his nationalist phase—to rejecting Islam from the 1930s on. These years
coincide with Vasconcelos’s increasingly conservative and Hispanophilic positions.

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 torres-rodrı́guez, Orientalizing Mexico  79
education: the literacy campaigns. Vasconcelos includes Indian religious prac-
tices such as yoga in his educational policies, thus implementing Orientalist views
in the process of creating the cultural institutions of the new State.
Many scholars believe that Estudios indostánicos was strongly influenced by the
ideological debates taking place in Mexico in the aftermath of the Revolution
(Blanco 71; Taboada 110; Tenorio-Trillo 261).3 In fact, the relationship between
Estudios indostánicos and the imaginary of the Mexican Revolution is evident from
the first chapters of the text. Vasconcelos begins his study by linking his research
on India with the comments of Francisco I. Madero on the Bhagavad Gita, which
were published from 1912 to 1913 in the spiritualist magazine Helios. In doing
so, Vasconcelos establishes an Orientalist intellectual genealogy.4 The Bhagavad
Gita—collected within the Mahabharata—is a dialogue between the warrior
Arjuna and the god Krishna in the face of an imminent battle between clans.
Arjuna, upon seeing the enemy, faces a moral dilemma for having to battle his
own relatives. Krishna explains to him his duties as a warrior and a prince, with
examples and analogies from yogic and Vedantic philosophies. As José Ricardo
Chaves points out, Madero’s text functions perfectly as a metaphor for a leader
who seeks to convince himself that his political actions coincide with a divine
plan (76). The analogy between Arjuna’s battle and the Mexican Revolution
becomes obvious when Vasconcelos writes, ‘‘[i]mpresionante resulta imaginar
los pensamientos de Madero, cuando llegó a encontrarse en los campos mexi-
canos, en la situación de Arjuna, dispuesto a combatir un ejército de enemigos
que no odiaba, pero que era su deber destruir. Venció a eso enemigos, el Arjuna
de México’’ (Estudios indostánicos 106). By Orientalizing the Revolution and sup-
porting the myth that Madero built for himself—Arjuna was one of his favorite
pseudonyms—Vasconcelos seeks to make India a point of reference in the cul-
tural and political landscape of Mexico.
In his essay, Chaves argues that the personal admiration that Vasconcelos had
for Madero’s commentaries contradicts the purpose and general style of Estudios
indostánicos—‘‘poner un poco de orden en la incipiente casa indostánica’’ and
‘‘superar el diletantismo [modernista]’’ of the turn-of-the-century spiritual and
theosophical Orientalism from which Madero’s texts suffered (80). However,
Chaves seems to excuse Vasconcelos from Madero’s intellectual sin, ‘‘la bien
intencionada descontextualización del texto abordado y su recontextualización
a la luz de polémicas contemporáneas’’ (79). Although Vasconcelos’s attempt at
treating the classics of Indian philosophy with the academic rigor they deserve is
unprecedented in Mexico, a close reading of the entire text reveals that he uses
India as a platform on which to articulate his own cultural plan, reflected later
in his actions as secretary of education and in his philosophical writings. Further-
more, in choosing India as an object of study (via the citation of Madero’s text),

3
The writing of Estudios indostánicos was marked by the multiple displacements that
Vasconcelos suffered during the events of the Mexican Revolution. He finished the manu-
script in the United States, in San Diego, where he had access to library resources on the
religious traditions of India (Estudios indostánicos 10).
4
For a detailed analysis of Vasconcelos’s admiration for Madero, see John A. Ochoa’s
elegant essay, in which he argues that ‘‘Madero’s heroic example, including his failure,
becomes Vasconcelos’s ideal model’’ (111).

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80  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
Vasconcelos seeks to establish a symbolic tradition for the Mexican Revolution’s
cultural legacy that is represented by a certain Orientalist mysticism.
Vasconcelos’s reference to Madero reveals the existence of a Mexican Orien-
talist tradition that, although an offshoot of the Anglo-French one, has its own
political projects.5 As noted earlier, if Mexican representations of India can be
understood within Said’s discursive framework on Orientalism,6 it is because the
knowledge about India produced by both Madero and Vasconcelos is mediated
by the Orientalist archive. As I will discuss in more detail below, Vasconcelos
reproduces most of the stereotypes that have allowed ‘‘the Orient’’ to become a
recognizable entity, even when its relationship with the actual Asian countries
may be vague and questionable. The critical approaches to the phenomenon of
Orientalism in Latin America can be organized along two main lines: the first
claims a perfect ideological correspondence between Latin American Orien-
talism and that of Anglo-French origin (Silvia Nagy-Zekmi), whereas the second
perceives a greater openness towards the ‘‘other’’ on the part of Latin America
(Julia Kushigian) or an independent relationship unmediated by European prej-
udices (Araceli Tinajero).7 In contrast to Julia Kushigian and Araceli Tinajero, I
do not believe the Mexican perspective to exceed the parameters of European
Orientalist representation, because it is greatly restricted by ‘‘the limitations to
thought’’ handed down through European archives (Said 5). At the same time,
in contrast to Nagy-Zekmi, I argue that this Orientalist archive adapts itself to the
political purposes of Mexican intellectuals, whose awareness of their ‘‘eccentric’’
5
Mexico has a rich tradition of Orientalist writings, both before and after Vasconcelos.
The connection with Asia dates back to colonial times. Between 1565 and 1815 Spanish
trading ships sailed twice a year from the ports of Acapulco to Manila. This commercial route
represented more than two centuries of direct contact between the Viceroyalty of New Spain
and the Asian continent. We have only to remember canonical texts from the colonial period
such as Infortunios de Alonso Ramı́rez (1690) by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to highlight the
way Asia has provided criollo writers with inspiration to reimagine and renegotiate their
position in imperial global cartographies. Vasconcelos’s immediate precursors, though, were
the Mexican modernistas, in particular Efrén Rebolledo and José Juan Tablada. Both men
traveled to Japan as emissaries of the Porfirian government, and effected appropriations of
Orientalist writings to rethink the process of Mexican aesthetic modernization, inspired by
the Japanese model of the Meiji restoration (Tenorio-Trillo 227). However, after the Mexican
Revolution, colonial India became the more appropriate model for national construction. In
this particular aspect, Vasconcelos’s most preeminent successor was Octavio Paz, who was
ambassador to India from 1962 to 1968. In Vislumbres de la India (1995), for example, Paz
reconstructs a cultural and political history of the postcolonial country by taking up the same
themes and concerns developed in El laberinto de la soledad, but in relation to India rather
than to Mexico. For a detailed analysis of Paz’s ‘‘peripheral Orientalism’’ in the context of
travel literature, see Irma Cantú (20–23). Other authors in this tradition include Amado
Nervo, Manuel Maples Arce, Luis Quintanilla, Lombardo Toledano, Salvador Elizondo, Elsa
Cross, Sergio Pitol, and Coral Bracho.
6
‘‘The Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations,
and connotations, and these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field
surrounding the word’’ (Said 203). In establishing his object of study to be European percep-
tions of ‘‘the Orient,’’ Said was attempting to clarify the intricate relationships between
knowledge and power in the project of European imperialism—especially the French and
English (343).
7
This critical tendency does not explain why the term Orientalism is retained, even if it
denotes a relationship that exceeds the parameters introduced by Said.

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 torres-rodrı́guez, Orientalizing Mexico  81
position relative to the centers of cultural knowledge is very keen. Therefore, I
maintain that this Mexican ‘‘Orient,’’ produced through the adaptation of Euro-
pean archives constitutes a model for identity construction and self-representa-
tion: ‘‘el Oriente aparece, para América Latina, como un mundo exótico y al
mismo tiempo equivalente al propio, en tanto espacio polı́ticamente sojuzgado
y culturalmente ‘producido’ desde los paradigmas europeos’’ (Moraña 210). In
this sense, these Orientalist texts produce their own Orient through a local net-
work of citations, as Vasconcelos’s reproduction of Madero’s text shows.
Both the adaptation of the European Orientalist archives and Mexico’s identi-
fication with ‘‘the Orient’’ are reflected in the particular reading of India’s
ancient history that Vasconcelos develops in Estudios indostánicos. In his article,
Taboada asserts that Vasconcelos ‘‘Mexicanizes’’ the Indo-European conquest of
the Indian subcontinent by establishing a series of comparisons with the Spanish
conquest in Central America (110). I claim that Vasconcelos takes these analo-
gies further by projecting his intellectual program for Mexico onto India’s his-
tory. He proceeds in three progressive stages, and debates with his European
sources—Paul Dessen and Archibald Edward Gough—about the reasons for
India’s impressive cultural development:

A través de los tres perı́odos indicados, se advierte un desarrollo pro-

gresivo y constante. . . . ¿Cuál es el secreto de este continuado pro-
greso y por qué no todas las razas lo logran? ¿Por qué entre la
multitud de las tribus y los pueblos, sólo hay una Grecia y una India?
La mayor parte de los historiadores europeos resuelven el problema
mediante la tesis, bastante obscura, de la identidad de la raza aria, a
la cual hacen descender de un tronco común situado en el centro de
Asia, bifurcado en los arios de Europa y los arios del Indostán o indio-
arios. (Estudios indostánicos 22)

Although he derives his knowledge of India from the European Orientalist

archive, he begins his book by refuting his own sources and denouncing the
racial prejudices latent in these interpretations. He challenges conventional
wisdom from his perspective as a Latin American, from which he proposes to
show that India’s originality is due to the contributions of the Dravidic peoples,
who were conquered by the Aryans: ‘‘la iniciativa y la originalidad fueron ha-
llazgo de la raza inferior, de la raza sometida’’ (28). According to Vasconcelos,
the Aryans merely provided the technical structures of Hindustani society, such
as their language, Sanskrit, and their caste system (28). The dominated peoples
contributed the main spiritual concepts: ‘‘Los dravidios aportaron . . . las ideas
sobre la inmortalidad del alma, la trasmigración y la omnipresencia de Brahma.’’
Although a provocative reading of Indian history, Vasconcelos’s take is no freer
from essentialism than his European sources, since he assigns the most ‘‘irra-
tional’’ or ‘‘intuitive’’ characteristics to the subjugated peoples.
Vasconcelos perceives a close connection between his vision of India and the
intellectual debates of postrevolutionary Mexico. He does not celebrate the supe-
riority of the colonized peoples; rather, he proposes that the cultural superiority
of India is a result of its mestizo condition: ‘‘En la India se verificó un fenómeno

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82  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
semejante: ası́ que los arios invasores de piel blanca, se mezclaron con la raza
misteriosa y sutil de los dravidios, de piel obscura, y ası́ que ambos vivieron juntos
en el nuevo medio cálido. . . . ¿Qué opinarı́an ciertas escuelas, de la tesis de que
sólo las razas mestizas son capaces de las grandes creaciones?’’ (24). Curiously,
Vasconcelos postulates India—a country whose social organization is based on a
prohibition of mixing instituted by an ancient caste system—as an example that
demonstrates the positive qualities of mestizaje. According to Taboada, ‘‘Vas-
concelos . . . formuló por primera vez su teorı́a del mestizaje no en un escrito
sobre América sino en los Estudios indostánicos, libro que estuvo trabajando
durante 1919’’ (110). Taboada associates this strategy with the cosmopolitan for-
mation of the creole intellectuals: ‘‘La formulación de 1919 [the excellence of
mixed races] no está referida a América. Posiblemente de ella [America] supiera
poco’’ (111). For my part, I argue that Vasconcelos constructs a history of India
that allows him to legitimate his vision for postrevolutionary Mexico. If for the
Ateneo de la Juventud the example of ancient civilization was Greece, Vas-
concelos sees in India a racial model more in keeping with his plan of a ‘‘brown’’
utopia for Latin America. His ‘‘proto-mestizo India’’ is thus defined as the model
of civilization that inspired his 1925 essay. ‘‘The Orient’’ becomes the textual
origin of the ‘‘raza cósmica.’’8 Viewed this way, Estudios indostánicos is a test, in a
removed context, of the ideas that will later be transplanted to Latin America.
After proclaiming the superiority of the mestizo races, Vasconcelos adds, in
this same chapter of Estudios indostánicos, that only warm climates—like the val-
leys that surround the Indus River—produce great civilizations, because people
dwelling in those regions can avoid the material limitations imposed by hostile
conditions. This idea, which later will become a central theory in La raza cósmica,
explains why the North—embodied on Vasconcelos’s geopolitical map by
England—can only produce technical civilizations. Climates that are too hot,
such as the southern Tamil regions of India, also require too much attention ‘‘al
cuerpo’’ and hinder ‘‘el ocio que es indispensable para pensar.’’ Vasconcelos
goes on to superimpose his geopolitical map of India onto America: ‘‘En la
América, la influencia del clima determina también un proceso semejante al que
se ha observado en el Asia. Los toltecas, los aztecas, los mayas, nómadas y rudos
cuando habitan las zonas frı́as del norte, tan luego como llegan a los climas
templados o cálidos de Anáhuac y de Yucatán, desarrollan civilizaciones impor-
tantes’’ (25). He privileges the valley of Mexico and the Yucatán as appropriate
centers of power over North America, home of technophilic barbarians, and
southern Mexico, home of indigenous barbarians. The valley of Mexico is like
the Indus valley, while the south, both Indian and Mexican, represents popula-
tion centers not yet redeemed by miscegenation. Vasconcelos reproduces the
8
This is why Vasconcelos undertakes the distribution of parts of his manuscript during his
tenure as secretary. For example, on March 4, 1921, Vasconcelos publishes this same passage
about mestizaje in India in the Boletı́n de la Universidad. ‘‘Un fragmento de los ‘Estudios indos-
tánicos’ ’’ appears in 1921 together with an article in the Heraldo de México titled ‘‘Una
australiana anuncia la preponderancia de las razas indo-ibéricas.’’ In an introductory
editorial note to the article, Vasconcelos explains that his ideas predate those of the
Australian Academy by two years, since he had first presented his theory on the superiority
of mixed races in Estudios indostánicos (1919). This editorial incident shows how his studies
of India are intertwined with his public actions.

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 torres-rodrı́guez, Orientalizing Mexico  83
geography of power charted in India by European Orientalist knowledge, and
transposes or transplants it to American soil. He challenges his sources by
arguing against Aryan superiority, but he does not question the racialist founda-
tions of their theories. Vasconcelos still relies on positivist suppositions that assert
that ‘‘los distintos grados de desarrollo de los pueblos han dependido de una
combinación de factores étnicos y de influencias climatéricas.’’ However, Vas-
concelos ‘‘merely inverts the terms of the debate and grants a positive value to
racial categories charged with negativity until then. In the end he is unable to
overcome the racism inherent in such thinking’’ (Spitta 336).9 Likewise,
although he values Indian peoples—like the Dravidians—devalued by the Euro-
pean Orientalist archive, he does not overcome the Orientalist perspective when
granting them a superior sensibility or spirituality based on race or territory, as
he would later do for Latin America in La raza cósmica.
Within this system of inversions, India is presented as an ‘‘anti-Europe’’
(Blanco 68). More specifically, it is epistemologically constituted as an anti-
Anglo-Saxon space. The modern England of Estudios indostánicos represents the
technical savagery of the north transformed into an imperialist machine: ‘‘el
peligro con que el norte amenaza al mundo, es el peligro de querer aplicar toda
esa maquinaria prolija y esclavizadora que le ha permitido salvarse [from a hos-
tile climate], todo ese sistema militar industrial, a pueblos y a situaciones que ni
los necesitan ni lo solicitan’’ (Vasconcelos, Estudios indostánicos 26). Vasconcelos’s
preference for India stems not only from its exemplary value as an ancestral
civilization (like Greece), but also from the fact that it shares with Latin America
the political, social, and economic problems created by a colonial experience.
Indeed, Vasconcelos concludes his account of Indian history with a call for inde-
pendence: ‘‘tarde o temprano los hijos del Indostán llegarán a ocupar el puesto
a que tienen derecho, entre los pueblos ilustres y libres del globo’’ (42). Indi-
rectly, India’s struggle for independence is linked to the threat that the United
States represents for postrevolutionary Mexico’s fragile political and economic
autonomy. Like India in relation to England, Latin America is posited in La raza
cósmica as a spiritual and cultural bastion against the United States.
India is established as a paradigm for two reasons: one is racial (its alleged
mestizo condition), and the other is political (its evocative nature as an anti-Saxon
bastion). Furthermore, it is important to discuss the philosophical originality
that the Asian colony offered to Vasconcelos’s cultural project. Critics have estab-
lished Vasconcelo’s eccentric position regarding the classicist intellectual tend-
encies of the Ateneo de la Juventud.10 His iconoclastic attitude came with a desire
9
For an interpretation of continental mestizaje—and especially that proposed by
Vasconcelos—as a problematic inversion of social Darwinism that still relies on a racist evolu-
tionary substrate, see Julie Taylor and George Yúdice (312). Alan Knight, for his part, calls
this inversion, ‘‘reverse racism’’ (87).
10
Vasconcelos is undeniably interested in classical culture, but his Greece is more Asian
than European. Christopher Domı́nguez Michael refers to Vasconcelos’s unique perspective
as ‘‘clasicismo bárbaro’’ and explains, ‘‘[e]ntre las dos versiones cabe la oposición drástica
entre la Grecia de las estatuas blancas, la de Pericles en la plaza pública —que evoca Reyes—,
y la Grecia de las estatuas rojas, la de los mitos paganos que exalta Vasconcelos. El cuento es
viejo entre los clasicistas . . . es Alejandro prevenido por los filósofos contra los magos pita-
góricos de la India, es el entorno oracular y homérico rechazado por la Razón helenı́stica’’
(1019). In effect, Vasconcelos’s books about classical philosophy are concerned more with

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84  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
to broaden the Europeanist repertoire of his companions (Taboada 105; Blanco
70–73). Krauze, for example, comments, ‘‘[a] las platónicas reuniones del
Ateneo, presididas —para disgusto de Vasconcelos— por un busto del terrenal
Goethe, acudı́a el zapoteca-asiático, con los sermones de Buda’’ (932). In
‘‘Pasado inmediato,’’ Alfonso Reyes evokes with a certain irony the other writer’s
philosophical temerity: ‘‘José Vasconcelos era el representante de la filosofı́a
antioccidental, que alguien ha llamado ‘la filosofı́a molesta’. . . . Es asiático:
tenemos en nuestro paı́s dos océanos a elección; algunos están por el Atlántico;
él, por el Pacı́fico’’ (199). Reyes links Vasconcelos’s (discomforting) preference
for ‘‘the Pacific’’ with an ‘‘anti-Western’’ position that contrasts with his own
Occidentalism, and his comment shows that the ‘‘Asian’’ philosopher’s interest
in India was interpreted by his contemporaries as a gesture of intellectual defi-
ance.
Before discussing the philosophical impact of Estudios indóstanicos on La raza
cósmica, it is necessary to review the extant bibliography on the latter text. The
philosophical uniqueness of La raza cósmica does not lie exclusively in its
emphasis on mestizaje, but rather, as Marilyn Grace Miller asserts, in the fact
that Vasconcelos’s ideas about the subject ‘‘epitomized a position which allowed
biological and aesthetic definitions of race to coexist and envisioned a dual ‘mis-
sion of ethnic and spiritual fusion of peoples’ ’’ (30). In fact, mestizaje as a
national ideology goes back to the thinkers of the Porfiriato, like Gabino Barreda,
Luis Cabrera, and Andrés Molina Enrı́quez (Lund 75–88; Lomnitz 53). However,
Vasconcelos links the idea of race to his own spiritual teleology. Contemporary
criticism has denounced and emphasized the eugenic proposal underlying the
spiritual discourse of the text—the supposed ‘‘improvement’’ of the races
through mixing, whose ultimate purpose would seem to be, according to the
‘‘aesthetic’’ valences that Vasconcelos establishes for the different races, the
‘‘whitening’’ of Latin America (Miller 44). The problematic nature of the text as
an ideological project has also been established. Some of the more notable cri-
tiques of the discourse of mestizaje have focused on the authoritarian domestica-
tion of Latin American racial diversity (Cornejo Polar 116)11 and its respective
‘‘political heterogeneities’’ (Lund 55), its role in the hegemonic consolidation
of the national projects of the creole elite of which Vasconcelos was a member
(Lienhard 189; Knight 86), and the obliteration of the colonial violence that
makes it possible due, among other things, to Vasconcelos’s defense of Hispa-
nism (Rı́os Ávila 155).12 These critical stances privilege the racial component
of Vasconcelos’s understanding of the idea of mestizaje, but other readers have

heterodox topics within the Mexican repertoire of the period: the musical theories of
Pythagoras, and Plotinus (linked to the Neoplatonic eclecticism of the School of Alexandria).
11
From a similar perspective, Ana Marı́a Alonso emphasizes the process by which an
ideology with a ‘‘contestatory’’ intention ‘‘becomes authoritative, especially when linked to
state power.’’ She calls this process ‘‘authoritative intentional hybridizations’’ (481).
12
Some critics have recently reassessed the text by highlighting the political efficacy of
mestizaje in the face of other academic concepts used by critics to describe Latin American
diversity—for example, transculturation, heterogeneity, hybridity, diglossia, etc. (Chanady
202; Sánchez Prado 383). This position underscores the performative effectiveness of
mestizaje in the creation of political and cultural consensus at both elite and grassroots levels.

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 torres-rodrı́guez, Orientalizing Mexico  85
emphasized the cultural and intellectual meaning of the term (Zea 23), and the
need to critically reconsider the spiritual component that Vasconcelos attributed
to the text. For example, Sánchez Prado argues that ‘‘la identificación del mesti-
zaje como espı́ritu es esencial para entender . . . la distancia teórica de Vas-
concelos con el positivismo y el darwinismo social’’ (‘‘El mestizaje’’ 393).
Although I believe that the spiritual element is founded in a nineteenth-century
understanding of race, it still strikes me as necessary to revisit the genealogy
that makes the spiritual discourse of the text possible in the first place. Indian
intellectuals’ religious discourses—especially that of the nationalist monk Swami
Vivekananda (1863–1902)—had a decisive influence on La raza cósmica: they
allowed Vasconcelos to articulate a racial discourse with the idea of the spirit.
This interperipheral dimension does not completely rule out the ideological
function of the essay as a criollo national project. Vasconcelos identifies with the
Bengali oligarchy thanks to a common exogenous position in relation to the
European models before which both countries must ultimately attempt to legiti-
mate themselves. That is, both intellectual imaginaries were strongly influenced
by the European cultural value systems in which they were formed. In Guru
English: South Asian Religion in Cosmopolitan Language, Srinivas Aravamudan
argues that the first modern reformers of Hinduism—Rammonhun Roy (1772–
1833), Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902),
and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)—sought to legitimate their religious tra-
dition in European eyes through a comparativist perspective (17). According to
Aravamudan, these writers—whom Vasconcelos cites in Estudios indostánicos—are
also responsible for reinterpreting and modernizing Hinduism in English based
on religious organizations with a strong tendency towards syncretism and cosmo-
politanism, such as Brahmo Samaj, theosophy, and the Ramakrishna mission
(17). These intellectuals, as Aravamudan argues, are the creators of a religious
rhetoric for global exportation (7). The modernization of Hinduism carried a
veiled Christianization of its main religious precepts (38), an almost monothe-
istic interpretation of Hinduism—primarily of Brahman (the absolute Self )—
based on the sacred texts of the Vedanta, at the expense of numerous popular
practices based on the polytheistic Hindu pantheon (26–27). The English Orien-
talists were the first to attempt this interpretation of the Vedanta, but it was
continued by the Indian philosophers, pioneers of the modernization of Hin-
duism, who promoted a pantheistic version more in tune with Christian pre-
cepts, primarily with English Unitarianism (27). This perspective allowed them
to present Hindu antiquity as a philosophical precursor of Christianity, a per-
spective that theosophy would later popularize. Thus, these Indian intellectuals
sought to ‘‘universalize’’ Hinduism by linking it with the Western religious tradi-
tions (11).
Estudios indostánicos presents a particular vision of Hindu religion that coin-
cides with the one promoted by the Bengali reformers. Three works shape Vas-
concelos’s philosophical ideology: Pitágoras: una teorı́a del ritmo (1916), El monismo
estético (1918)—devoted mostly to Plotinus—, and Estudios indostánicos. I propose
that this constitutes a trilogy where the last work reformulates the philosophical
ideas in the first two from the perspective of Hinduism. Sánchez Prado maintains
that Plotinus’s monism allows Vasconcelos to articulate ‘‘una narrativa en la cual

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86  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
seres diversos (sean almas o las razas) sustentan un movimiento hacia su reinte-
gración absoluta con el Uno (el espı́ritu)’’ (‘‘El mestizaje’’ 393). Plotinus’s
thought, according to Sánchez Prado, is the philosophical foundation of La raza
cósmica, a text that predicts the fusion of all the races of the world into a single
spiritual conglomerate. Although this is partially correct, in Estudios indostánicos
Vasconcelos asserts, following the syncretic tendencies of the Indian reformers,
that Hindu monism is the secret source both of Pythagorism and of Plotinus’s
Neoplatonic unity, and therefore one of the philosophical foundations of Chris-
tianity.13 Thus, Vasconcelos establishes an alternative model to the one intro-
duced in his previous books that precedes the philosophical sources of the
Ateneo de la Juventud.
In fact, it could be argued that Vedantic unity is a more appropriate philosoph-
ical subtext for La raza cósmica, since Vasconcelos’s study of it was closer to the
writing of his text. In Estudios indostánicos, Vasconcelos asserts, ‘‘[n]o hay en toda
la filosofı́a un monismo más radical que el monismo vedántico. . . . La tesis
fundamental de los Upanishads, interpretada rigurosamente por la escuela vedán-
tica, a través de una larga tradición, es la identidad de Brahma y de Atman. En
realidad, Brahma y Atman, son una sola y la misma cosa, la unidad absoluta’’
(251). Atman represents the inner-self or individual soul, whose mediation is
necessary to perceive exterior reality; Brahma is the transcendent self, the ulti-
mate essence of material and spiritual phenomena. ‘‘The fusion of cultures’’
which structures the narrative of La raza cósmica is directly linked to the school of
Advaita Vedanta. Advaita means the mystic revelation of this nonduality between
consciousnesses perceived as individuals and the absolute principle.
In Estudios indostáncios, Vasconcelos not only establishes his philosophical
interest in the Vedantic unity promoted by the Advaita movement, but also
emphasizes the project of religious syncretism carried out by the Indian
reformers as a program to be followed. The debt Vasconcelos owes to the Indian
thinkers is plain in passages like the following:

Los pensadores del Indostán se hallan en este momento verificando

la sı́ntesis de todas las distintas doctrinas de su raza. Las obras de
Tagore y de Vivekananda, las de Ramohum Roy y de Paramananda
comprueban que el Indostán ya no quiere estar dividido en budistas
y vedantistas o jainistas, etc., etc., sino que sus más grandes espı́ritus
están logrando fundir todas las antiguas verdades en una nueva doc-
trina universal y sublime. ¿Vamos nosotros . . . a permanecer
encerrados en nuestros preceptos? (290)

In the context of the philosophical crisis that Europe suffered after the Great
War, Vasconcelos urges Western thinkers to follow in the footsteps of these
Indian intellectuals. For him, the 1920s are a ‘‘nueva Alejandrı́a’’ (289). He
maintains that thanks to advances in scientific knowledge, East and West have
come into contact again, this time definitively. Because of this, intellectuals from

13
See the chapter titled ‘‘La influencia de la doctrinas bracmanas y budistas en la filosofı́a
europea’’ (230–38).

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 torres-rodrı́guez, Orientalizing Mexico  87
all around the world must undertake the shared task of reviewing and synthe-
sizing the existing religious knowledge. This argument in favor of the ‘‘spiritual’’
unification of the world under a single ‘‘cosmic’’ religion prefigures the argu-
ments of his famous essay of 1925. Northern science has connected the world at
the expense of its colonies, but even so, the ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘Latin America’’ will
spiritually overcome their subjugators once this interconnection has been con-
summated.
There is, then, a strong Indian influence on the teleology of reintegration of
particular races and cultures into a single spiritual conglomerate that is at the
core of La raza cósmica. It is therefore productive to compare Vasconcelos’s ideas
with the religious discourse of one of the Indian leaders noted earlier. In Estudios
indostánicos, Vasconcelos identifies in Swami Vivekananda—among the most
important precursors of the Ramakrishna-Vedanta movement—one of the prin-
cipal voices of the ‘‘Vedantic renaissance’’ in its neo-Advaita version, the branch
of Hinduism favored by the Mexican thinker. Aravamudan highlights the inter-
national impact the neo-Advaita rhetoric had on the philosophical crisis that
arose in the interwar period (57).14 He emphasizes that the international expor-
tation of the ideas of Ramakrishna-Vedanta coincided with a profoundly nation-
alist rhetoric. In Vivekananda, the close connection between universalist
cosmopolitanism and racial essentialism becomes manifest. Like Vasconcelos,
Vivekananda argues that the Hindu religion, in its Advaita version, will bring
together all the world’s creeds in a single, universal religion. However, as Arava-
mudan asserts, religious universalization in Vivekananda has as a condition of its
possibility the racialization of Hinduism (55). The following passage, which
comes from Vivekananda’s speech in Colombo, Sri Lanka, shows the surprising
similarity between his vision of India and the role that Vasconcelos will later
assign to Latin America:

Each race . . . has a peculiar bent, each race has a peculiar raison
d’être, each race has a peculiar mission to fulfill in the life of the
World. . . . Political greatness or military power is never the mission
of our race; it never was and, mark my words, never will be. But there
has been the other mission given to us, to conserve, to preserve, to
accumulate, as it were, into a dynamo, all the spiritual energy of the
race, and that concentrated energy is to pour forth in a deluge on
the World whenever circumstances are propitious. Let the Persian or
the Greek, or the Roman, or the Arab, or the Englishman march his
battalions, conquer the world, and link the different nations
together, and the philosophy and spirituality of India is ready to flow
to align the new-made channels into the veins of the nations of the
world. The calm Hindu’s brain must pour out its own quota to give
14
Among the most illustrative cases is the polemic between Romain Rolland—a writer
that Vasconcelos promoted widely through the State publishing house—and Sigmund Freud
regarding the philosophical or psychological nature of ‘‘religious sentiment.’’ Rolland refers
to this as ‘‘oceanic sentiment,’’ and is inspired by Ramakrishna’s ideas on nonduality to
demonstrate the validity of spirituality in the modern world. Freud refutes Rolland’s ideas in
Civilization and Its Discontents.

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88  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
to the sum total of human progress. India’s gift to the World is the
Light spiritual [sic]. (10–11)

In Aravamudan’s words, ‘‘to suggest that historical empires were only prepara-
tory ditch-diggers for Indian spiritual currents to flow through these channels
was a rhetorical masterstroke’’ (56). Vivekananda, like Vasconcelos, advocates a
type of inverted conquest of the world arising from a supposed spiritual or aes-
thetic superiority founded on the idea of race. It is worth bearing in mind here
the motto by which José Vasconcelos was known: ‘‘Por mi raza hablará el
espı́ritu.’’ In La raza cósmica, Vasconcelos writes:

la gente que está formando la América hispánica . . . tiene todavı́a

por delante la misión de descubrir nuevas zonas en el espı́ritu ahora
que todas las tierras están exploradas. Solamente la parte ibérica del
continente dispone de los factores espirituales, la raza y el territorio
que son necesarios para la gran empresa de iniciar la era universal de
la Humanidad. (34)

He suggests, like Vivekananda, that the white race has fulfilled its mission in the
world by creating the necessary material bridges, through conquest and tech-
nology, to interconnect humanity on a physical level. The mission of Latin
America is to use these bridges to nurture ‘‘la primera raza sı́ntesis del globo’’
(19). Vasconcelos’s writing is laced throughout with the influence of the reli-
gious discourse of Indian elites, whose goal was to propose the British colony as
a ‘‘spiritual’’ alternative to the materialistic decadence of the imperial powers.
The example of Vivekananda demonstrates the intercultural genesis of one of
the most influential discourses produced by Latin America in the 1920s: that of
the cosmic race.
Once the influence of Estudios indostánicos on the development of La raza cós-
mica has been established, the next step is to examine how the former text also
influences Vasconcelos’s practical undertakings as secretary of education. One
of the most significant parts of Estudios indostánicos is where Vasconcelos analyzes
the precepts of the Yogi School. In the section titled ‘‘El yoguismo como
higiene,’’ he describes yoga as a practical discipline for achieving the spiritual
goals of the Hindustani religions: ‘‘El arte yogui es una mezcla de higiene, de
introspección psicológica y de disciplina del carácter’’ (145). He discusses the
yogis’ dietary regimens and breathing techniques. These reflections prefigure
the disciplinary insertion of the body into his cultural project. For example, his
famous literacy campaigns included diet and health programs, incorporating
practices alien to the reigning ideology of positivism, such as breathing and med-
itation. As Claude Fell points out, these regulations operate as a social extension
of Vasconcelos’s interest in Indian philosophy (30). There is a complementary
logic between his spiritual discourse and a policy for the administration of bodies
associated with the State’s biopolitical regulation. A significant example is ‘‘Cir-
cular núm. 2,’’ whose purpose was to provide teachers with specific directions
for educating children. The circular entitled ‘‘Instrucciones sobre aseo per-
sonal’’ begins by mandating that before the lesson, each teacher must instruct

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 torres-rodrı́guez, Orientalizing Mexico  89
the students in personal hygiene (Vasconcelos, Discursos 29). The document was
intended to ‘‘prescribe’’ a series of recommendations so that personal care
instruction would be ‘‘uniform’’ throughout the nation (29). The memorandum
is divided into four sections: hygiene, breathing, management of free time, and
nutrition. Regarding regular bathing, Vasconcelos recommends that it be done
every day: ‘‘El baño es una costumbre diaria entre los japoneses, y son ellos una
de las razas más vigorosas del mundo.’’ Regarding breathing exercises, he advises
the implementation of the yogic practices discussed in Estudios indostánicos:

La sabidurı́a indostánica, que en tantos aspectos es superior a la nues-

tra, recomienda que a diario y antes de la lección o del trabajo, se
practiquen ejercicios respiratorios, que renueven de aire puro todas
las celdillas del organismo. Será conveniente que los profesores
hagan practicar a sus alumnos estos ejercicios, obligándolos a
verificar aspiraciones prolongadas de aire puro por la nariz, retenién-
dolo largamente y expulsándolo con lentitud. (Discursos 30)

The secretary of education also privileges the yogi’s dietary regimen in his nutri-
tional recommendations, published in this same memo. He recommends a
mainly vegetarian diet, defends the practice of fasting, and highlights the impor-
tance of not confusing hunger with appetite (31). These guidelines are also out-
lined in Yogi Ramacharaka’s article translated as ‘‘El bienestar fı́sico: los
alimentos,’’ published by Vasconcelos in El Maestro—a journal dedicated to
informing the nation’s teachers—in 1923.15 However, their cultural and political
benefits were first presented in Estudios indostánicos. Indian vegetarianism is pro-
posed as an anti-Anglo Saxon practice as well as a means towards fostering
workers’ productivity: ‘‘los campesinos de Oriente alimentados con arroz y vege-
tales son más fuertes fı́sicamente, resisten mejor el trabajo continuado, que los
carnı́voros sajones’’ (153). The emphasis on production suggests that the adop-
tion of Indian ‘‘spiritual’’ practices operates within the State imperatives of devel-
opment and modernization. The Orientalist discourses merged with the social
experiments associated with the Mexican Revolution.
At the beginning of this article, I proposed that Vasconcelos uses the stereo-
types of India found in European and North American Orientalism to construct
forms of cultural self-representation for Mexico. As Tenorio-Trillo suggests, this
practice exemplifies the dialectic nature (inside–outside) through which
‘‘autochthonous’’ cultural identities are constructed (279). Nevertheless,
through an analysis of the points of agreement between Estudios indostánicos, La
raza cósmica, and Vivekananda’s thought, it appears that Vasconcelos’s writing
actively adopts the view of colonial India promoted by its own intellectuals. In
fact, Vasconcelos transplants to American soil the nationalist discourses of spiri-
tual and racial exceptionalism propounded by Indian elites to construct a mod-
ernizing cultural program. It is essential to underline the fact that Latin
15
Yogi Ramacharaka is a pseudonym for William Walker Atkinson, an attorney from
Baltimore (1862–1932). Vasconcelos’s promotion of an American author passing for a yogi
to further, paradoxically, an anti-Anglo Saxon cultural program shows how Latin America’s
access to Indian sources was heavily mediated by hemispheric orientalism.

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90  Revista Hispánica Moderna 68.1 (2015)
American discourses not only responded to imaginaries of European self-percep-
tion, but that they also engaged in dialogue with subjectivities and traditions
mediated by the impact of colonialism. By highlighting the way in which notions
of cultural identity are articulated relationally by similar geopolitical power struc-
tures, we can offer a critique of coloniality—the living legacy of colonialism in
contemporary societies—as intrinsic to the development, consolidation, and
reproduction of global modernity.

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