José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos José Vasconcelos was a philosopher, politician, and educator who, as Mexico's first Secretary of Public Education (1921–1924), launched one of the most ambitious literacy and cultural campaigns in Latin American history. He commissioned the great muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros and championed universal public education as the bedrock of national identity. His philosophical essay La raza cósmica (1925) articulated a vision of a mixed-race "cosmic race" as the spiritual synthesis of humanity.