Meshico
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Meshico is a term which began to be employed in the middle of 20th century by a group of Mexican intellectuals connected to the influential magazine "Meshico Grande" in order to define a philosophical and sociological stance based on an authentic onthology of the Mexican person, one that would serve, as well, as a means of confronting the dependancy of the official intelligentsia on ways of thinking perceived as being too foreign to permit a true understanding of Mexican reality.
The group decided on the unusual spelling in order to differentiate themselves from the official europeanizing intelligentsia, since they believed that the spelling "meshico" was more accurate as it reflected the original Nahuatl pronunciation of the word, and, for this reason, would be an appropriate name for a group professedly dedicated to an authentic understanding of Mexican identity.
Among the many notable members of the group were Dr. Rosario Gutierrez Eskildsen, Manuel Sánchez Mármol, Francisco Javier Santamaría, and José Vasconcelos. Dr. Ricardo Alfonso Sarabia y Zorrilla was one of the group's more assiduous promoters and served for a time as director of "Meshico Grande." He also contributed to a wider awareness of the group's goals and positions by writing, among other works, a paper entitled "Filosofía de la acción y reseña del pensamiento filosófico de Meshico" ("Philosophy of Action and Review of the Philosophical Thinking of Meshico"), which was originally published in the Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Philosophy, Brussels 1953.
Sarabia y Zorrilla cites, in the aforementioned work, the definition of truth given by the obscure Mexican philosopher and mathematician Edmundo Cetina Velázquez: "[it is knowledge] which corresponds to the integral unity of being; the world of thought will always reveal to us an external world, sensible or abstract; but always unilateral. 'Truth,' which is reality, is the patrimony of the totality of being." Sarabia y Zorrilla saw in such a statement a correct testimony of faith in an epistemological holism functioning in opposition to the notion of knowledge as a goal obtainable only through a scientific vision which is essentially ontic and a posteriori (compare the avowal made by Sarabia himself in the same text: "everything is related, coordinated, linked harmoniously and amorously").
José Gómez Robleda, a teacher, psychiatrist and Subsecretary of Public Education during the Adolfo Ruiz Cortines administration, published in 1947 a study titled Imagen del Mexicano (Image of the Mexican), a book which Sarabia y Zorrilla refers to in his paper as "the work which for the first time studies the way of being of the Mexican man," especially in his ethnopsychological dimensions.
