Multicultural Vasconcelos: The optimistic, and at times willful, misreading of La Raza Cósmica

This essay answers the following question: How did Vasconcelos’s 1925 theory of la raza cósmica , a product of Mexico’s nation-building project after the revolution, find its way into the contemporary US debate over the meaning of racial mixing and multiculturalism? To answer this question, I trace the intellectual genealogy of a widespread misreading of Vasconcelos’s raza cósmica as a theory of harmonious mestizaje that US Latinos can use to undo racial divisions and promote multiculturalism. I argue that the portrayal of Vasconcelos as a multicultural theorist was not first proposed by Chicanos, as it is often argued, but by Euro-American intellectuals.