La Raza Cósmica

La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race) is a Spanish-language book written and published in 1925 by Mexican philosopher, secretary of education, and 1929 presidential candidate José Vasconcelos to express the ideology of a future "fifth race" in the Americas; an agglomeration of all the races in the world with no respect to color or number to erect a new civilization: Universópolis. Claiming that social Darwinist and racialist ideologies are only created to validate, explain, and justify ethnic superiority and to repress others, Vasconcelos attempts to refute these theories and goes on to recognize his words as being an ideological effort to improve the cultural morale of a "depressed race" by offering his optimistic theory of the future development of a cosmic race. As he explains in his literary work, armies of people would then go forth around the world professing their knowledge. Vasconcelos continues to say that the people of the Iberian regions of the Americas (that is to say, the parts of the continent colonised by Portugal and Spain) have the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the "universal era of humanity". The ideas put forth in La raza cósmica are held to be rather controversial. For example, Celarent notes that many felt that the work and its author were exceedingly racist, such as when Vasconcelos' wrote “the Chinese, who under the holy counsel of Confucian morals multiply like rats."(p1000)(p19) However, when it was first written, Vasconcelos' piece was to be a reaction or refutation of Social Darwinism and biological racism, although Juárez suggests that Vasconcelos' may have added to Mexican Conservative thought by doing so.(p51) In order to refute the ideas of racial superiority, Vasconcelos conceptualized a fifth race, the cosmic race, something that is an agglomeration of all of the other races. As Palacios notes, this race is called cosmic as it suggests that humanity will become combined and reach its destiny as inferior traits are lost through synthesis and a new Spiritual Era is reached.