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
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