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In his classic essay La raza cósmica (1925), Vasconcelos devotes great attention to the Iguazu Waterfalls and the future construction of a hydro-electric power plant in this privileged natural space, dreaming of a not-too-distant-future in which the electricity produced by this power plant would secure South America’s global industrial hegemony. Through an analysis of the concept of energy in La raza cósmica and other key texts of the period such as La revulsión de la energía(1924), this paper explores how Vasconcelos’s fascination with electricity and industrial modernization unveils the key role played by the scientific discourse of thermodynamics––the field of physics that deals with energy processes––in his intellectual and political thought. Heavily influenced by the German scientist and educator Wilhelm Ostwald, Vasconcelos develops throughout the 1920s a new form of scientific idealism that fully incorporates the techno-centric imagi-nary of thermodynamics to his philosophical and aesthetic thought. By mobiliz-ing the utopian and futuristic appeal of electrical technologies in his writings, Vasconcelos vindicates a new project of Latin American modernity that fully incorporates the scientific and technological imaginary of industrial develop-ment, thus subverting the Ariesta opposition between Anglo-Saxon utilitarian materialism and Latin idealism that had dominated the continental intellectual debates since the turn of the century.
