El Colegio de México is the story of how a handful of scholars with passion, intellect, vision, and powerful backers created an advanced school of the humanities and social sciences with an outstanding publication record. Founded in 1938 as La Casa de España en México, an academie halfway house for Spanish Republican exiles entering Mexican cultural life, it was refounded in 1940 as El Colegio de México. These books recount its history and celebrate its 50th anniversary.
The authors are all associated with El Colegio and come experienced to their task. They explain the school’s purpose of transcending partisan politics, institutionalizing continuity, and maximizing research. El Colegio has always been in the vanguard of Mexican history, playing out an ongoing attitudinal revolution. It represents the externally influenced enclave force, almost un-Mexican, seeking to transform, even reject, an older Mexico, whose altering capabilities are rechanneled into a new orientation in Mexican life.
El Colegio’s evolution also reflects the interests of its directors: humanistic under Alfonso Reyes; social scientific and currentist under Daniel Cosío Villegas, Silvio Zavala, Victor Urquidi, and Mario Ojeda, though these concerns were implicit in the early Colegio. Among the first publications of the Casa/Colegio were two gems of Spanish thought: María Zambrano, Pensamiento y poesía en la vida española (at long last reprinted), and Joaquín Xirau, Amor y mundo. A few years later, however, Leopoldo Zea’s watershed studies on positivism embodied the Sierran dictum to train the telescope on Mexican skies. As the Colmex curriculum matured, universalist themes balanced nationalist ones, Hölderlin was taught as well as Netzahualcóyotl, and the school achieved a Latin American reach, culminating Reyes’ Americanist vision.
The professor who emerges most compellingly in these books is José Gaos. A student of Ortega’s, he established a unique program in the history of ideas. When Zea proposed a thesis on Greek philosophers, Gaos suggested he do it on Mexican thinkers. When Luis Villoro wanted to explain indigenismo through a European model, Gaos told him to develop his own framework. In the 1960s, when Gaos had left El Colegio, students petitioned his return. Among his last students were José María Muriá, Javier Ocampo, and Guillermo Palacios, whose theses were noteworthy in their field. In 1969, Gaos died while giving Muriá’s doctoral exam.
The books argue that important change occurred in El Colegio in 1958 and 1976. In 1958, Cosío Villegas, in a crude power play, took over the school from the revered and ailing Reyes. He threw out the poets and oriented the curriculum in a more positivist and internationalist direction. In 1976, the school moved to its present location south of town, and many felt it became too large and impersonal. The old family system no longer obtained, and people sometimes did not even greet each other. The Arriagas, custodians who had lived on the roof of El Colegio at Guanajuato 125, now “disappeared” among the contract maintenance workers.
Disclaimers of subjectivity notwithstanding, these books suffer the drawbacks of commemorative history: haste, overweening pride, insider enthusiasm, and veneration. Vignettes of timoneles do not substitute for critical interpretation, and a certain baroque sentiment is more interesting than moving. More seriously, these books do not probe the impact of El Colegio’s scholarship (the heart of its history) on Mexican culture. There is, of course, a problem in writing education history as institutional history, since it precludes the internal meaning of education.
Part of the ritual of Mexican culture is the observance of the quarter-century, and these books should be read with those of Alicia Hernández Chávez and Manuel Miño Grijalva, coordinators, Cinquenta años de historia en México, 2 vols. (Mexico City: ECM, 1991). The theme is continued in Miño Grijalva, “Historia Mexicana. Historiografía y conocimiento,” and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “Historia Mexicana en el banquillo,” both in Historia Mexicana 41:1 (July–Sept. 1991), pages 25-47 and 11-23, respectively. The books reviewed here not only provide an administrative record of El Colegio but also open overdue research on Mexican cultural institutions.
