The Cosmic Race, Decolonization, and Neo-Zapatismo: Mexican Philosophical Thought on Race and Revolution

This thesis project will argue that the participation of indigenous Mexicans in the Revolution of 1910 and the EZLN uprising of 1994 forced José Vasconcelos, Leopoldo Zea, and Enrique Dussel to reflect on the legacies of Mexico’s colonial past in order to propose how such peoples would form a part of modern Mexican society and identity. Vasconcelos proposed the idea of the cosmic race to encourage indigenous assimilation. Although Zea was a decolonial thinker, he too encouraged indigenous assimilation. Dussel, for his part, was a thinker of liberation philosophy, and he cited the ideology of the Neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas as reason to recognize Mexico’s indigenous diversity. This discussion is an intellectual trajectory of how three of Mexico’s best-known philosophers have thought about the role and place of Mexico’s indigenous population.