Subverting geopolitics: The reinvention of geography in post‐revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

Within the enduring effort to rethink geography from multiple viewpoints and new conceptual categories, critical geographers have recently sought to ‘decentralise geopolitics’ (An, Sharp, and Shaw, 2021, Dialogues in Human Geography, 11(2), 270) by proposing alternative analyses that can tackle the Eurocentric stance that has largely defined the field. This paper contributes to this decentralising effort by bringing to light, historically, an anti‐imperial discourse that took the form of a proper geographical invention. Specifically, the paper analyses the thought of the Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos – who acted as Secretary of Public Education in the aftermath of the Revolution (1921–1924) – and argues that Vasconcelos' discourse represents a ‘subaltern’ intervention against the imperial presuppositions of the new‐born discipline of geopolitics. The paper contends that Vasconcelos' thought constitutes a conscious attempt, although clearly imbued with ‘postcolonial’ tensions and contradictions, to challenge the ‘scientific’ basis of the emerging geopolitical discourse at that time. By analysing Vasconcelos' geographical and geo‐social imagination through his recuperation of the myth of Atlantis and the idea of Cosmic Race, the paper illuminates an early operation of ‘subaltern geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2011, Geoforum, 42, 271) that aimed to contrast the new wave of Western imperialism which, intensively nurtured by socio‐environmentalist narratives, defined the turn of the twentieth century.

José Martí and Antonio Gramsci: The World as a Radical Geography

“…However, the question of mestizaje represents a contradictory aspect in Latin America's postcolonial history, a situation in which, in general terms, the reiteration of racial ideas “made it possible paradoxically for mestizos and mulattoes to identify themselves with white elites as against Indian or black majorities—to accept theories that justified white domination over ‘colored’ populations” (Graham 1990b:1). Mestizaje and Indingenismo have been the ideas around which several Latin American countries shaped the making of the new nation‐state, both in cases of anticolonial struggles, such as in the case of Martí, and in postcolonial periods, such as during and in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (in regard to the latter, see Vegliò 2023). While the nature of these operations considerably changed depending on the specific case (for significant discussions and a number of examples, see Appelbaum et al.…”