Vasconcelos was something of a
father to the
Mexican Mural Movement of the early 1900s. He was named head of the
Mexican Ministry of
Education under the administration of General
Alvaro Obregon in 1921. In this position, Vasconcelos became the first to begin employing the likes of
Siqueiros,
Orozco and
Rivera to paint public
murals on the walls of the schools he was in charge of. On numerous occasions, he camouflaged the work of the
muralists he was employing in order to shield the program from a barrage of public
criticism, giving them official titles as teachers or as inspectors of
drawing in the Ministry. During the time that he was in office, the murals completed for the
government tended to reflect Vasconcelos' own
political beliefs of moderate
idealism, shifting into more
radical directions only after his departure in 1924.
Vasconcelos went on to publish a book entitled
La Raza Cosmica (
The Cosmic Race) in 1925, where he began to discuss a growing
philosophy regarding
Mexicans of
mixed heritage, called
mestizos. The mestizo, he argued, was destined to become the fifth great
race of humanity. As a synthesis of
pre-Columbian and
European ancestries, the mestizo would come to embody all of the best characteristics of the races that came before it, taking up a
dominant place in the scheme of the world. Theories such as this paved the way for others that placed mestizos at the head of the
political consciousness of
the country.