Free Redeemers by Enrique Krauze Page B

level of humanity, artists would discover the true landscape of Mexican life. In the year 1915, the painter Saturnino Herrán began to paint the common people and their customs, especially Indians, when he saw them in the city streets or in the villages. The historian Manuel Toussaint began to publish a series of “Colonial Sketches” of the Mexico City Cathedral, the chapel of El Pocito in Guanajuato, the houses of the sixteenth century (in the aftermath of the Conquest). The musician Manuel M. Ponce harmonized the songs he heard from the blind beggars who sang and twanged their rhythms on the jaw harp or played their harmonicas. The poet Ramón López Velarde wrote deeply moving modernist poems on life in the provinces, voices and sentiments of “a Mexico we all have lived in and did not know.”
    Years later, in 1921, in an essay titled “Fresh News of the Fatherland,” López Velarde would describe the Revolution in almost religious terms, the revelation of a fatherland very different from the Porfiriato (age of Porfirio), a “new, intimate fatherland,” “Castilian and Moorish, streaked with the Aztec.” He went on more precisely: “The material repose of the country, through thirty years of peace, supported the idea of a pompous fatherland, a nation worth many millions, honorable in the present, epic in the past. These years of suffering were needed to conceive of a fatherland less external, more modest and probably more valuable.” López Velarde died that same year (he was only thirty-three years old) when the real significance of that “Fresh News of the Fatherland” was barely emerging. It would be the creation of the most powerful myth of redemption in the first half of the Latin American twentieth century, and it would resonate far beyond the Spanish-speaking world. It was the myth of the Mexican Revolution, and its fundamental creator would be that same young newspaper editor who had written fiery articles in favor of Francisco Madero’s electoral campaign. José Vasconcelos would become the cultural caudillo of the Revolution.
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    He was born in 1882 in Oaxaca, capital of the state with the same name, home to one of the largest and most varied Indian populations in Mexico, who had evolved an impressive pre-Columbian civilization. Both Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz had been born in Oaxaca: Juárez was a pure Zapotec Indian, Porfirio Díaz a Mixtec from his mother’s side. Vasconcelos’s mother was a very pious Catholic much beloved by the young José. Her relatively early death (in 1898) left a wound that never completely healed.
    His father was a Mexican customs official and, as a child, Vasconcelos lived in the border town of Piedras Negras in Coahuila, where he would cross the border daily to a school in Eagle Pass, Texas, where he first began to acquire his excellent English. His later education would eventually lead him to the best high school in Mexico, the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School), and then to law school at the Escuela Nacional de Jurisprudencia. In 1905 he formally became a lawyer but his broader intellectual pursuits would always consume much of his energy. He was early known for his interest in philosophical speculation (and his arrogant temperament). He was a reader of Schopenhauer and was led, through him, to a serious interest in Hinduism. A circle of young intellectuals, soon to be very influential, welcomed his participation. The Ateneo de la Juventud (Athenaeum of Youth), with its affectedly classicist self-description, was led by the young Dominican Pedro Henríquez Ureña, that young “Socrates” who had become part of Mexican culture, who had praised Rodó’s Ariel in 1905, whose father would become president of the Dominican Republic in 1916 and to whose uncle Federico, José Martí had written his famous letter of farewell. For all the