ABSTRACT
The study of the impact of Jose Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925) in Latin America has paid little attention to the identification of Black students, professionals, and workers with the Mexican writer. Most scholars have exclusively considered Vasconcelos's ideologies of racial mixture as a strategy for whitening the nation or as a tool for assimilation. Instead, this chapter explores how intellectuals of African descent conceptualized and made political use of Vasconcelos's racial ideas. It argues that between 1930 and 1947, during the Liberal Republic in Colombia, a group of Afro-Colombian poets, musicians, painters, and writers were reading Vasconcelos's work from a Black perspective. They were particularly inspired by his ideas on recovering autochthonous artistic manifestations and the celebration of Latin American nations as mestizas. They concluded that if Colombia was characterized by the mixture of Indigenous, European, and Black people, the cultural manifestations of each of those three groups should be incorporated in the definition of the national identity. In doing so, they were able to articulate a more inclusive notion of mestizaje, one in which Black poetry, literature, music, and dance were crucial to the nation.
