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Dispatch: From "La Raza Cosmica" to Decolonization! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: You must excuse me.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: We interrupt this program for a special news volunteer.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to another dispatch from Aslantis.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Ruben Ariano Tlagatega, and I'm going to talk about a holiday that people might have heard about but may not know too much of, and that is El Día de la Rasa.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is a topic that I've been wanting to do for a while, and so I finally got around to working on it.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: As we will see, El Día de la Rasa has been around for quite some time, but it received significant criticism in the early 1990s when various countries in the Western Hemisphere began exploring how to address the 500-year anniversary of the so-called discovery of America.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: This event is also sometimes referred to as the quincentennial celebration of the discovery.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thus I'm calling this episode from La Rasa Cosmica to Decolonization because I hope to briefly explain the historical evolution and ideological shifts of this holiday since its inception at the turn of the 20th century until now.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: For centuries across Europe and the Americas, October 12th was celebrated primarily as an epicalestone of European exploration, divine providence, or imperial Spanish civilization.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: However, as independent American republics struggled throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to reconstruct cohesive national identities out of the post-colonial social fabrics marked by deep racial hierarchies, the Freemen of October 12 underwent a radical transformation.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than honoring a single Genoese navigator or the triumph of Spanish monarchy, intellectuals across Indigenous America reframed the date as El Dia de la Raza or the Day of the People.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: The holiday emerged not merely as a festive date on the civic calendar, but as a complex social, political, and ideological project designed to forge solidarity across Spanish-speaking nations while constructing a unified myth of origin.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Nowhere was this ideological transformation more distinct or influential than in post-revolutionary Mexico, where El Día de la Rasa became inextricably linked with the state-sponsored mestizaje, the deliberate cultural and biological synthesis of indigenous and European ancestries.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yet as the 20th century yielded to the 21st, the foundational premises of El Día de la Rasa came under intense critical scrutiny.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Once viewed as an inclusive alternative to colonial Eurocentrism, the ideology of Mestizaje became increasingly critiqued by indigenous activists and modern historians as an assimilationist myth that erased indigenous sovereignty and obscured structural inequalities.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the purpose of this episode is to examine the social, political, and ideological roots of El Día de la Rasa, focusing on its specific trajectory in Mexico and its contemporary transformations across the Americas.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I also will offer a comparative critical analysis of El Día de la Rasa alongside its North American counterparts towards the end, meaning those of Columbus Day and Indigenous People's Day, you know, just to kind of see how they compare.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The purpose of which is to observe how a single date has served as an arena for competing projects of state building, racial theory, anti-imperialism, and of course decolonial resistance, and by extension, anti-colonial as well.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And to begin, I offer a quote from our favorite guy, Jose Vasconcelos, from his book La Rasa Cosmica from 1925.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Quote: The white race has brought the world to a state in which all human types and cultures will be able to fuse with each other.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: The Iberian portion of the American continent has the territorial, racial, and spiritual factors necessary to initiate the universal era of humanity.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: End quote.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I won't go into it here, but we've covered Vasconcelos and his book in season 5, Episode 79, entitled A Hundred Years of Cosmic Racism.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I encourage everyone to go back and listen to that if you haven't already done so.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: To understand the origins of El Día de la Raza, we must first examine the geopolitical landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Following the Spanish American War of 1898, in which the United States decisively defeated Spain and annexed Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam while establishing a protectorate over Cuba, a wave of apprehension swept through American intellectual circles.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Scholars and statesmen across indigenous America feared that the military and economic expansionism of Anglo-Saxon North America presented an existential threat to the cultural autonomy and territorial sovereignty of the rest of the Americas.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: In response, thinkers such as Uruguay's Jose Enrique Rodo, in his influential treatise entitled Ariel from 1900, advocated for a renewed sense of Hispanismo or Hispanoamericanismo, which was a shared cultural and spiritual identity that was rooted in Hispanic language, religion, and heritage and served as a counterweight against North American utilitarianism and materialism.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was within this context of anti-imperialist solidarity that Faustino Rodriguez San Pedro, a Spanish politician and president of the Union Iberoamericana, officially proposed the celebration of El Dia de la Raza in 1913.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: First celebrated in Spain in 1914 and officially decreed in 1918, the holiday was conceived as a transatlantic bridge linking Spain with its former American colonies.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: The term raza in this early 20th century context did not carry the strictly biological or scientific racism of 19th century social Darwinism.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, it drew upon the broader tradition of La Raza as a linguistic, cultural, and spiritual collective.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I should also mention here that La Raza predates Jose Vasconcelos' usage in La Rasa Cosmica and even Faustino's usage here for El Día de la Rasa.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It goes back to the late 19th century and it was already being employed by Mexican Americans along the border to refer to the unified collective cultural tradition of people on both sides of the border, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's got a longer tradition than that.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, in intellectual circles, this was interpreted as a shared historical community bound by the Spanish language and the deep ties to Spanish colonization, and hence privileging the European over the indigenous.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: However, as the holidays spread across indigenous America, individual nations adapted its political meaning to serve domestic state building projects.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: While conservative elites in Spain and South America emphasized Hispanismo and gratitude toward the Madre Patria or Motherland, a post-revolutionary state sought to reconcile the historic rupture between European colonizers and native populations.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the concept of La Raza was reframed not as a European heritage that had been transplanted overseas, but as an entirely new human synthesis born out of the encounter between old and new worlds.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is where Jose Vasconcelos' framework begins to emerge.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: In no country did El Día de la Raz acquire greater ideological importance than in Mexico.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Following the tumultuous violence of the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920, the state faced the monumental task of unifying a fragmented nation divided by regionalism, class struggle, and profound ethnic fractures.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: The post-revolutionary government recognized that creating a stable nation-state required a unifying national myth that could bridge the deep divide between Mexico's Spanish colonial heritage and its vast indigenous populations.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: The official institution of El Día de la Raza in Mexico was spearheaded in the 1920s by Jose Vasconcelos, the controversial Secretary of Public Education under President Álvaro Obregón.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Vasconcelos rejected both Anglo-American racial segregation and traditional Spanish Eurocentrism.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: In his 1925 essay La Rasa Cosmica, the Cosmic People, Vasconcelos posited that the historical encounter in the Americas had initiated a synthesis of the world's major human groups, European, Indigenous, African, and Asian.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: He argued that Latin America, through its tradition of intermarrying across racial lines, was destined to forge a fifth superior race, a cosmic race, that would transcend the provincialism and racial purity doctrines of the Western world.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 1928, during the presidency of Plutarco Elias Calles, Mexico officially established the October 12 as a national civic holiday under the name Dia de la Raza y Aniversario del Descubrimiento de America.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Under Vasconcelos's educational regime, October 12th was utilized as a pedagogical instrument.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Public schools across Mexico staged elaborate pageants where children dressed in traditional indigenous and Spanish attire held hands around statues of Christopher Columbus or Cuatemo and thus symbolizing the harmony of Mestizaje.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Through art, public murals by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros and national textbooks, the Mexican state promoted the myth that modern Mexico was the direct heir to both the Aztec Empire and Spanish civilization, welded together through the historic encounter of 1492.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: While Mexico codified El Dia de la Raza as a celebration of post-revolutionary mestizaje, other nations across the Americas adopted distinct interpretations tailored to their unique demographic, social, and political contexts.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: In Argentina, where the late 19th and early 20th century European immigration drastically altered the country's demographic profile, El Día de la Raza was officially recognized in 1918 under President Hippolyto Irigoyen.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Argentine holiday initially placed heavy emphasis on the nation's Spanish heritage and its historic ties to Europe, operating as a mechanism of social cohesion for millions of newly arrived European immigrants.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: However, in 2010, under the presidency of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Argentina officially renamed the holiday Dia del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural, Day of Respect for Cultural Diversity, shifting the focus away from conquest and race toward human rights and multiculturalism.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: In Venezuela, October 12 was celebrated as Dia de la Raza from 1921 until the turn of the 21st century.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: In 2002, under President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan government dramatically transformed the holiday by decree, renaming it Dia de la Resistencia Indígena, Day of Indigenous Resistance.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: This change reflected a radical political shift that explicitly repudiated the legacy of European colonialism and celebrated the historic resistance of indigenous leaders like Guaycaipuro against Spanish conquest.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: In a famous symbolic act in 2004, activists in Caracas toppled a prominent statue of Christopher Columbus, mirroring the state's official anti-imperialist discourse.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: In Costa Rica, the holiday was established as Dia de la Raza in 1968, but in 1994 it was transformed into Dia de las Culturas, Day of the Cultures, to explicitly acknowledge the triethnic contributions of indigenous European and Afro-Caribbean populations to Costa Rican society.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, in Spain, the designation evolved from Dia de la Rasa to Dia de la Hispanidad in 1958 under the Franco regime, before being codified in 1987 as the Fiesta Nacional de España, reflecting Spain's modern constitutional monarchy and its ongoing ties to the Ibero-American community.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so now to do a little bit of deconstructing and analysis here in this next section.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Despite its initial intention to serve as an inclusive counter-narrative to Eurocentric histories, El Dia de la Raza and its underlying ideology of Mestizaje faced rigorous critique from scholars, indigenous movements, and human rights advocates in the late 20th century.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: The primary conceptual flaw of state-sponsored mestizaje lay in its latent assimilationist agenda.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: By celebrating a homogeneous, blended race, the state implicitly required indigenous populations to abandon their distinct languages, traditional dress, land tenure systems, and political autonomy in order to integrate into the modern nation state.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Far from granting equal status to indigenous peoples, the ideology of Mestizange often operated as a nation-building myth that valorized the indigenous past while marginalizing living indigenous communities.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: In Mexico, this phenomenon was famously described as indigenismo sin indigenas, meaning indigenous without indigenous people.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: This was a cultural policy that glorified historical figures like Huatemoc and built grand anthropological museums, yet kept contemporary indigenous populations economically impoverished and politically disenfranchised.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: The 1992 quincenary of Columbus's landfall served as a global watershed moment for this critical reevaluation.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Across the Americas, indigenous groups organized massive counter-demonstrations under the banner of 500 years of indigenous resistance.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than celebrating a discovery or an encounter of two worlds, indigenous leaders exposed the historical realities of genocide, forced labor, land dispossession, and cultural destruction that followed 1492.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: During her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance and lecture on December 10th of 1992, the eminent Guatemalan indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchu Tum offered this still salient sentiment.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: At a time when commemoration of the 5th centenary of the arrival of Columbus in America has repercussions all over the world, the revival of hope for the oppressed indigenous peoples demands that we reassert our existence to the world and the value of our cultural identity.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: It demands that we endeavor to actively participate in the decisions that concern our destiny in the building up of our countries and nations.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then, two years later in Mexico, the 1994 uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or the EZLN in Chiapas directly challenged the post-revolutionary state's myth of a unified mestizo nation, demanding constitutional recognition of indigenous autonomy and rights.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: The following are a few of the EZLN's stated motivations for their uprising delivered in a communique in March of 1994.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The reason and causes of our armed movement are the following problems to which the government has never offered any real solution.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: The hunger, misery, and marginalization that we have always suffered.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: The total lack of land on which to work in order to survive.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: The repression, eviction, imprisonment, torture, and murder with which the government responds to our fair demands.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: The unbearable injustices and violations of our human rights as indigenous people and impoverished campesinos.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, these are just but a few that I selected for this dispatch, but you can find this communique online by doing a simple search.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Responding to decades of indigenous pressure and activist mobilization, the Mexican government gradually altered its official stance.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: In 2020, the Mexican Senate approved a historic reform, renaming October 12 as the Dia de la Nacion Pluricultural, Day of the Pluricultural Nation.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: This statutory change officially dismantled the paradigm of El Dia de la Raza, replacing the 19th century myth of biological blending with a constitutional commitment to recognizing Mexico as a multi-ethnic, pluricultural, or diverse democracy.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: So now for a little bit of a comparison between El Dia de la Raz, Columbus Day, and Indigenous People's Day.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: A comparative examination of how October 12 is commemorated across North and South America reveals fundamental differences in national memory, race relations, and state formation.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: So for instance, Columbus Day in the United States, October 12 was designated a federal holiday in 1937 under President Franklin D.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Roosevelt.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: The origin of Columbus Day was tied to the struggles of 19th and 20th century Italian American and Roman Catholic immigrants, facing widespread discrimination, xenophobia, and anti-Catholic bias.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Groups like the Knights of Columbus championed the Genoese Navigator as a symbol of patriotic belonging, arguing that America's very origin was indebted to an Italian Catholic.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thus, Columbus Day functioned primarily as an ethnic civil rights vehicle for European immigrant assimilation.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: However, its narrative was inherently Eurocentric, resting upon the colonial concept of the doctrine of discovery and the myth of an empty wilderness awaiting European civilization.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: So from the very beginning, Columbus Day was already problematic.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Indigenous People's Day.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: In stark contrast, Indigenous People's Day emerged out of the International NGO Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas held at the United Nations in Geneva in 1977, so roughly almost 50 years ago.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: First adopted by Berkeley, California in 1992 to counter the quincentennial celebrations, Indigenous People's Day centers the historical experience, survival, and sovereign rights of Indigenous Americans.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: It explicitly refutes the doctrine of discovery, shifting the historical framing from European heroic discovery to colonial invasion and native survival.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: In recent years, dozens of U.S.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: states and hundreds of municipalities have formally replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day, and I'm glad to say that here in Dallas, this was done several years ago, and uh that's one of the things that I'm proud of of my city.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, when placed alongside these North American paradigms, El Dia de la Raza occupies an intermediate and complex ideological space.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike Columbus Day, El Día de la Raza historically refused to center Columbus as a sole heroic figure, focusing instead on the collective birth of a new population, La Raza or Mestizaje.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And also, unlike Indigenous People's Day, traditional Día de la Raza celebrations did not center indigenous sovereignty or distinct tribal identities, but rather subsumed indigenous identity into the broad framework of Mestizaje.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thus, while Columbus Day represents an exclusionary Eurocentric narrative, and Indigenous People's Day represents a decolonial restorative narrative, El Dia de la Raza historically represented an integrative nationalist narrative.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: As Indigenous American nations of the South now transition toward titles like Dia de la Nacion Pluricultural and Dia de la Resistencia Indígena, they are aligning their public memory closer to the decolonial framework of Indigenous Peoples Day.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so in conclusion, the evolution of El Dia de la Raza over the past century offers a window into the dynamic relationship between public history, national identity, and state power.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: Born out of an anti-imperialist desire to unite Spanish-speaking nations against northern encroachment, the holiday was transformed by post-revolutionary Mexico into a totalizing ideology of state-sponsored mestizaje.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Through the vision of intellectuals like Josepas Concelos, October 12th was reimagined as the dawn of La Rasa Cosmica, a celebration of the biological and cultural fusion that privileged the European background.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: However, as the 21st century has demonstrated, national myths that demand assimilation at the expense of indigenous recognition are unsustainable in diverse democratic societies.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: The transformation of El Día de la Raza into the Dia de la Nación Pluricultural in Mexico, alongside similar shifts across Latin America and the rise of Indigenous People's Day in the United States signals a global paradigm shift.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Public memory is no longer satisfied with romanticized narratives of discovery or harmonious synthesis that obscure historical injustices.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: By confronting the complex legacy of October 12, acknowledging both the devastating violence of conquest and the enduring resilience of indigenous nations, contemporary societies move closer to an honest accounting of their shared past.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: In doing so, the commemoration of October 12 evolves from a tool of state sponsored identity building into a platform for genuine multicultural respect and a move towards historic justice.