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This article analyzes the writings about India of the first federal Secretary of Public Education of Mexico, José Vasconcelos, to connect the emergence of his culturalist thinking with Orientalist conceptions about Asia. The relation between the two can be seen in his first long work about South Asia, Estudios indostánicos (1919), in which Vasconcelos develops ideas about India that he will later apply to the Latin American case in La raza cósmica (1925). From this perspective, India operates as a subtext for Latin American mestizaje. Similarly, the article traces the prominent role of his readings of the Indian intellectual Swami Vivekananda in the development of his spiritualist anticolonialism in La raza cósmica. Thus, the transnational and interperipheral nature of his philosophical practice is emphasized. Furthermore, Vasconcelos's literacy campaigns include Indian religious practices as yoga and vegetarianism, thus showing the instrumentalization of spiritual practices within the State imperatives of development and modernization. Based on these examples, this article proposes Mexican Orientalism as a complementary practice to cultural nationalism, and, therefore, as a central discourse in the development of a Latin Americanist ideology in the 1920s.
