Josè Vasconcelos
ISBN: 9780813551043
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Rutgers University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Cosmology.; Mestizaje.; Mestizos.;

Mexican educator and thinker Jose Vasconcelos is to Latinos what W.E.B. Du Bois is to African Americans a controversial scholar who fostered an alternative view of the future. In Josè Vasconcelos: The Prophet of Race , his influential 1925 essay, "Mestizaje" key to understanding the role he played in the shaping of multiethnic America--is for the first time showcased and properly analyzed. Freshly translated here by John H. R. Polt, "Mestizaje" suggested that the Brown Race from Latin America was called to dominate the world, a thesis embraced by activists and scholars north and south of the Rio Grande. Ilan Stavans insightfully and comprehensively examines the essay in biographical and historical context, and considers how many in the United States, especially Chicanos during the civil rights era, used it as a platform for their political agenda. The volume also includes Vasconcelos's long-forgotten 1926 Harris Foundation Lecture at the University of Chicago, "The Race Problem in Latin America," where he cautioned the United States that rejecting mestizaje in our own midst will ultimately bankrupt the nation.

Ilan Stavans (born Ilan Stavchansky on April 7, 1961, in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American, essayist. He is the author of "The Hispanic Condition", "The Riddle of Cantinflas", and "The One-Handed Pianist & Other Stories" as well as the editor of "The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories" and a dictionary of Spanglish, among other volumes. He has been a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Latino Literature Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Amherst College.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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