The Cosmic Race / La Raza Cósmica

The Cosmic Race / La Raza Cósmica

Johns Hopkins University Press
1997 (originally published in 1925)
160 pages
Paperback: 9780801856556

José Vasconcelos
translated, with an introduction, by Didier T. Jaén
afterword by Joseba Gabilondo

“The days of the pure whites, the victors of today, are as numbered as were the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for the new period: The period of the fusion and the mixing of all peoples.” — from The Cosmic Race

In this influential 1925 essay, presented here in Spanish and English, José Vasconcelos predicted the coming of a new age, the Aesthetic Era, in which joy, love, fantasy, and creativity would prevail over the rationalism he saw as dominating the present age. In this new age, marriages would no longer be dictated by necessity or convenience, but by love and beauty; ethnic obstacles, already in the process of being broken down, especially in Latin America, would disappear altogether, giving birth to a fully mixed race, a “cosmic race,” in which all the better qualities of each race would persist by the natural selection of love.

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