Jose Vasconcelos Biography

José Vasconcelos

(José Vasconcelos Calderón; Oaxaca, 1882-Mexico City, 1959) Mexican politician, thinker and writer.He was the founder of the Ministry of Education in his country, from which he developed a fruitful and extraordinary work, which earned him the nickname of The teacher of the youth of America .

José Vasconcelos

Graduated in law from the National School of Jurisprudence in 1907, in 1909 he presided over the Athenaeum of Youth, of which he was founder.José Vasconcelos was a supporter of the Mexican Revolution since its inception, since he participated in the Maderista movement as one of the four secretaries of the Anti-reelectionist Center of Mexico.He was appointed co-editor of the newspaper El Antirreeleccionista by Félix F.Palavicini.In the 1910-11 insurrection he was secretary and substitute for Francisco Vázquez Gómez, Francisco I.Madero's confidential agent in Washington, and founder of the Progressive Constitutionalist Party.

This program of regeneration of the Homeland, and of the entire America, has in the defense of the truth, even at the cost of the sacrifice of life, exile or prison, the north that guides, in its His own words, his prophetic action: "To proclaim the truth in the face of those who support their dominance in lies, is the function of the prophet, even more than that of the hero.Woe to him who seeks to please the wicked instead of denouncing him! Blessed is he who sees his boat sink in seas of treachery and cowardice, and does not give up condemning injustice, error, deception!...Thrown into the fray, the truth cannot be serene, it must be agitated like the storm and luminous like lightning, firm like the lightning that knocks down the towers of the world's pride."

The great admirer of colonizing Spain and Hernán Cortés, and a great scourger of what he considers vices of his country , with regenerative purposes parallel to those of the Spanish generation of '98, never bit his tongue, as The Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno bit it: both were philosophers, individualists, donquixotic and brilliant.

The illustrious Mexican thinker highlighted the alternatives that, in his understanding, the continent can consider in his essay What is communism? (1937), where it ends, without However, publicly confessing his Catholic faith even without renouncing his first intellectual influences and without being scandalized, in the campaign he carried out against Western imperialism when the Second World War was in its beginnings (1939-1940), the coincidences that in his thought can be found with Marxist-Leninist theses.