Last week we looked at Creelman’s interview with Porfirio Díaz and whether or not he was a true hero to Mexico with his optimism for a democratic future, as well as the impacts of the export boom and the kinds of political and economic transformations the region went through. José Vasconcelos’ manifesto, La Raza Cosmica (The Cosmic Race), seeks to reconstitute and celebrate a country torn apart by years of violence by embracing Latin America’s racial hybridity, or mestizaje, the “moral and material basis for the union of all men into a fifth universal race, the fruit of all the previous ones and amelioration of everything past,” (162) which is basically the integration over time of peoples and cultures from Europe (mainly Spaniards and Portuguese) with those of the New World. I found his writings extremely interesting and quite liberal, if not a bit skewed in the science factor of it all, however his drive to unite all peoples unrelated to race takes a direct hit against the casta paintings which we had looked at earlier in the year. This argument still has a long way to go, even in present times, and not just in Latin America, but in the world as a whole if we ever want to achieve this sense of complete community as a society.