Redeemers by Enrique Krauze Page A

that was more attentive, more sensitive, and that came to venerate him.
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    The educational mission “to the people” also involved a huge expansion in public education. Between July and November 1922, for instance, the thirty-five professors of the Department of University Extension and Exchange within the National University (headed by Pedro Henríquez Ureña—the “Sócrates” of the Athenaeum of Youth who had returned from exile) gave three thousand lectures to workers, at their work sites or union halls, on the most varied themes, ranging from the narrowly utilitarian issues of health and hygiene to such subjects as history, patriotism, astronomy, and grammar.
    Libraries were another Mexican void that Vasconcelos felt the need to fill. The Porfiriato had left an illiteracy rate of nearly 80 percent among the common people. In the Mexico of 1920, with its 15 million inhabitants, there were only 70 libraries and only 39 of those were public. In 1924, when Vasconcelos left the Ministry of Public Education, there were 1,916 libraries, and 297,103 books had been distributed among them. In the words once again of Cosío Villegas, nostalgically remembering his youth as a devoted participant in this mission of education:
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    Then one had faith in the book, and the book of lasting quality; and the books were printed in their thousands and they gave thousands away. To found a library in a small and remote village seemed to have as much meaning as building a church and decorating its dome with brilliant mosaics that, for the traveler, would announce that a place was nearby where he could rest and gather his senses.
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    Vasconcelos, who would be given the honorific of Maestro de América (Teacher of America), thought that “the schools are not creative institutions” and that the most important teachers were “the missionary teachers” who would travel through the country (like the Franciscans and Dominicans after the Conquest) carrying with them the good news of a government concerned with the most needy among its people and anxious to offer them the benefits of culture. The good news now was not a sermon but a collection of books. The teachers carried traveling libraries with them. Jaime Torres Bodet, Vasconcelos’s private secretary, described how it was done: “Some fifty volumes were carried around in a wooden crate that could be loaded on the back of a mule, to reach places far from a railroad line.”
    In the main quadrangle of the building that housed the Ministry of Public Education, Vasconcelos erected four statues, representing Greece, Spain, the Buddha—“as a suggestion of how, in . . . this Indo-Iberic race the East and the West, the North and the South have to unite . . . in a new amorous and synthesized culture”—and in the fourth corner, the figure of an Aztec warrior “to remember the refined art of the indigenes and the myth of Quetzalcoatl.”
    Meanwhile, the highly selective disciple of Plotinus devoted much of his free time to the cultivation of beauty with a list of lovers. When Berta Singerman, the famous Argentine declamadora (public performer of poetry, a profession then much valued), came to visit Mexico, Vasconcelos seduced her and paid his homage to the “refined art of the indigenes” through an act of love somewhere within one of the pyramids of the ancient temple complex of Teotihuacan.
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    VI
    The foundation myth of the Mexican Revolution was created most centrally through the visual arts under the patronage of José Vasconcelos and as another, highly important and original feature of his educational mission. He had spent much of his time in exile absorbing the masterpieces in American and European museums. His philosophical essays would interpret the world as a dance of the spirit, rising toward a musical, “Pythagorean” harmony. He saw himself as the restorer of a higher