Molding the Spirit in the Twentieth Century: Converging Rodó, Vasconcelos, and Zapotec Cosmology for Zapotec Cultural Preservation and Revitalization

In the heart of postrevolutionary Mexico, a group of Zapotec student-authors united to publish a newspaper, Neza (“road” or “path”). They wrote and published two manifestos in which they declared their goal: the preservation of the Zapotec spirit. They were inspired by the intellectual and cultural movements of the time, the Vanguardia, Rodó, and Vasconcelos, and merged those with Zapotec cosmology to call for their own continuance and that of their culture. While Zapotec literature of the Isthmus has primarily been read as a literature of nostalgia or considered folklore, this article highlights the way that the Zapotec intellectuals were in conversation with larger Latin American movements of their time and how they merge with Zapotec philosophy. This article argues that early twentieth-century Zapotec intellectuals utilized both Western and Zapotec traditions to (re)think concepts such as the spirit, thus contributing to Zapotec philosophy and ultimately enacting Zapotec futurities.