The aim of this paper is to study the formation of anti-racist pedagogical ideas and political projects for racial equality in public elementary school at the beginning of the 20th century. To do this, I take the trajectory of black educators José Eutrópio (1886-1929), in Brazil, and Carter Woodson (1875-1950), in the USA, as a guiding thread to observe how these processes took place. This research establishes a profound dialog with transnational history as a perspective of analysis and as a historical process. This is because it is impossible to understand the constitution of anti-racist pedagogical ideas formulated by these two individuals without including them in a transnational scenario of black mobilizations that took place at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, understanding the anti-racist pedagogical ideas and political projects for racial equality formulated by these educators in the context of the school acquires meaning and historical coherence if seen in the light of movements that took place in a transnational scenario. These movements can be grouped under the heading of Black Internationalism. Studying the trajectories of José Eutrópio and Carter Woodson, one can see that their political agendas in the field of education were built in the midst of such transnational contexts. It was precisely in this scenario that ideas of race gradually became a fundamental category in their political agendas. From the intellectual and symbolic exchange – in most cases – that they established with other realities and experiences beyond national borders, they both invented and disseminated racial terms and began to problematize the introduction of the idea of race as an instrument of interest in the defense of a certain political project. What I am calling anti-racist pedagogical ideas and political projects for racial equality are in fact expressions of the foundation and philosophy of José Eutrópio’s and Carter Woodson’s political agenda, the basis of which was the defense of the development and adoption, especially by the state, of teaching models and pedagogical ideas and practices that condensed the racial ideologies in vogue, and the teaching – devoid of stereotypes based on the idea of racial and biological inferiority of non-whites – of black history as strategic political actions in the fight against racism and other forms of racial exclusion. My argument is that this political commitment has been shaped by transnational networks of racial solidarity. The struggle to invent anti-racist pedagogical ideas was one of the most important links that connected black men with different backgrounds, social conditions, origins and nationalities in a political activism that went beyond the idea of the nation-state.

O objetivo da comunicação é estudar a constituição de ideias pedagógicas antirracistas e projetos políticos de igualdade racial no âmbito da escola primária pública no início do século XX. Para isso, tomo a trajetória dos educadores negros José Eutrópio (1886-1929), no Brasil, e Carter Woodson (1875-1950), nos EUA, como fio condutor para se observar como se deram esses processos. Trata-se de uma pesquisa que estabelece profundo diálogo com a história transnacional enquanto perspectiva de análise e como processo histórico. Isso porque, não é possível compreender, com riqueza, essa constituição de ideias pedagógicas antirracistas formuladas por esses dois sujeitos, sem inclui-los num cenário transnacional de mobilizações negras que tiveram lugar no final do século XIX e no início do século XX. De fato, entender as ideias pedagógicas antirracistas e os projetos políticos de igualdade racial, formulados por esses educadores, no âmbito da escola adquire sentido e coerência histórica se observado à luz de movimentos que ocorreram em um cenário transnacional. Tais movimentos podem ser alocados no que se pode chamar de Internacionalismo Negro. Estudando as trajetórias de José Eutrópio e de Carter Woodson, nota-se que as suas agendas políticas no campo da educação foram construídas em meio a tais contextos transnacionais. Foi justamente neste cenário que ideias de raça se tornaram, paulatinamente, uma categoria fundamental em suas agendas políticas. A partir do intercâmbio – intelectual e simbólico, na maior parte dos casos – que se estabeleceu com outras realidades e experiências para além das fronteiras nacionais, é que ambos inventaram e difundiram termos raciais e passaram a problematizar a introdução da ideia de raça como instrumento de interesse na defesa de um determinado projeto político. O que estou nomeando como ideias pedagógicas antirracistas e projetos políticos de igualdade racial, na verdade, são expressões do fundamento e da filosofia da agenda política de José Eutrópio e da de Carter Woodson, cuja base era a defesa da elaboração e da adoção, especialmente por parte do Estado, de modelos de ensino e de ideias e práticas pedagógicas que condensassem as ideologias raciais em voga, e o ensino – desprovido de estereótipos baseados na ideia de inferioridade racial e biológica dos não-brancos – da história do negro enquanto ações políticas estratégicas no combate ao racismo e outras formas de exclusão racial. O meu argumento é que esse compromisso político foi moldado a partir de redes transnacionais de solidariedade racial. A luta pela invenção de ideias pedagógicas antirracistas foi um dos mais importantes elos que ligaram homens negros, com distintas trajetórias, condição social, origem e nacionalidade em um ativismo político que extrapolou a ideia de Estado-nação.

José Vasconcelos (1882-1959) returned to Mexico in the early 1920s, after a five-year exile. He was invited by the constitutionalist general Álvaro Obregón, who put him in charge of the Office of the National University of Mexico. From where he proposed an educational project of great magnitude with the creation of the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) in July 1921. As the head of this agency, he implemented important educational actions that functioned through three elements: schools, libraries and fine arts (Blanco, 2013, pp. 90-91). He quit from the SEP in June 1924. A few months later, Vasconcelos left the country again, and in 1925, he published one of his most important works, The Cosmic Race, in Spain. In this book, he proposed the emergence of the fifth race: a synthesis of all races with an universal vision. The lower types of the species would be absorbed by the higher type. According to this conception, the inferior races would become less prolific with the education, and finally it would be an ethnic improvement (Vasconcelos, 1925, p. 31). On the other hand, the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), a Marxist writer and journalist, founder of the magazine Amauta (1926) and of the Socialist Party of Peru (1928), published his most important work, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928). In the essay "The Problem of the Indian" he refused the position of Vasconcelos and states that the concept of the inferior races served the white West in its work of expansion and conquest (Mariátegui, 2007, p. 30). In addition, he assured that socio-economic environment conditioned the work of the teacher and the problem of the indigenous was not only a subject of the school and didactic methods. (Mariátegui, 2007, p. 33). The aim of this presentation is to show two different responses in the education problem who coexisted in the Latin American context, that were represented by two of the most important intellectuals in this region: the Mexican José Vasconcelos and the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui.

José Vasconcelos (1882-1959) regresó a México a principios de 1920, después de un exilio de cinco años. Fue invitado por el general constitucionalista Álvaro Obregón, quien lo puso al frente del Despacho y, por lo tanto, de la Universidad Nacional, desde donde lanzó un proyecto educativo de gran magnitud que tendría como eje la creación de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) en julio de 1921. Como titular de esa dependencia llevó a cabo acciones educativas de largo alcance que funcionaron a través de tres elementos: escuelas, bibliotecas y bellas artes (Blanco, 2013, pp. 90-91). Su renuncia a la SEP, en junio de 1924, marcó el final de lo que algunos historiadores han llamado “los años del águila” en la educación y la cultura mexicanas postrevolucionarias (Fell, 2009). Unos meses después, Vasconcelos salió de nueva cuenta del país, y en 1925, publicó una de sus obras más importantes La raza cósmica, que constituyó todo un acontecimiento en el ámbito intelectual de Hispanoamérica, en el que propondría el surgimiento de una quinta raza, síntesis de todos los pueblos con una visión universal. Los tipos bajos de la especie serán absorbidos por el tipo superior. De acuerdo con esta concepción, las razas inferiores, por medio de la educación, se harían menos prolíficas y habría en consecuencia un mejoramiento étnico: “[…] El indio, por medio del injerto en la raza afín, daría el salto de los millares de años que median de la Atlántida a nuestra época, y en una cuantas décadas de eugenesia estética podría desaparecer el negro junto con los tipos que el libre instinto de hermosura vaya señalando como fundamentalmente recesivos e indignos, por lo mismo de perpetuación (Vasconcelos, 1925, p. 31). Por otra parte, el peruano José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), escritor y periodista marxista, fundador de la revista Amauta (1926) y del Partido Socialista Peruano (1928) publicó su obra más importante, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928), en donde en su ensayo “El problema del Indio” se opone a la postura de José Vasconcelos y afirma que “el concepto de las razas inferiores sirvió al Occidente blanco para su obra de expansión y conquista” (Mariátegui, 2007, p. 30). Además asegura que tampoco es una cuestión únicamente pedagógica, ya que el problema del indio “no es una mera cuestión de escuela y métodos didácticos. El medio económico social condiciona inexorablemente la labor del maestro” (Mariátegui, 2007, p. 33). En esta participación se pretende dar cuenta de dos respuestas distintas acerca de la educación del indígena que convivieron en el contexto latinoamericano durante la segunda del siglo XX, representadas por dos de los más importantes intelectuales de nuestra región: el mexicano José Vasconcelos y el peruano José Carlos Mariátegui.

The Argentine essayist, attorney, pedagogue and philosopher Saúl Alejandro Taborda (1885-1944) developed during the first half of the 20th century a profound philosophical-political reflection that had one of its articulating axes in the historicization and problematization of educational action and transmission cultural, with special reference to what happened in South America. An outstanding protagonist of the University Reform, the events unleashed in Córdoba in 1918 constituted an opportunity for him to interpret the emotional sources of the student movement that promoted it and the estimable horizon of an ambition that at times eluded the conscience of its actors. The familiarization during the decade of the twenties with the pedagogical ideas and the educational systems prevailing in Europe, particularly in Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States, prompted him to carry out a rereading of the educational system consolidated in the Argentine Republic, in all its levels and in a historicist key. Responding to the naturalization of appropriateness and nationalism as guiding principles of the pedagogical plan of Western Modernity, the history of education that Taborda articulated enabled him to rehearse a kind of critical archeology of the human spirit, which he conceptualized as an ethnically embodied spirit. For modernizing rationalism, Taborda evaluated, this spirit survived scattered in the historical, geographical and cultural present, as an archipelago of obstacles - habits, ways of inhabiting space, experience of time, architectural materials, forms of community organization - opposed to the strength and the promises of progress, like the weeds that were essential to uproot to definitively consolidate westernization and a capitalist economy; for the present generation, on the other hand, it constituted a call to awaken awareness of its historicity, to retrace the genesis of its intersubjectivity and to deliberately build, through a set of acts of transmission, its bond and that of past generations with future generations. In this perspective, the history of education proceeds for Taborda in the manner of a sweep against the grain of the dominant pedagogy and takes the reader back to the sources of an original cutting off or founding denial in which, contested the native idiosyncrasy - that which, for Argentina, Taborda calls the “genio facúndico” – sought to build a educational, political and economic order copied from Europe. In the context of unleashed crises, Taborda's thinking will ask about the possibilities of a cultural synthesis. This work seeks to reconstruct the relationships between the history of education, pedagogy and ethnopolitics in the thought of Saúl Taborda, showing how this triad synthesizes the historical ontology of a cultural experience.

El ensayista, abogado, pedagogo y filósofo argentino Saúl Alejandro Taborda (1885-1944) desarrolló durante la primera mitad del siglo XX una profunda reflexión filosófico – política que tuvo uno de sus ejes articuladores en la historización y problematización de la acción educativa y la transmisión cultural, con especial referencia a lo acaecido en América del Sur. Destacado protagonista de la Reforma Universitaria, los sucesos desencadenados en Córdoba en 1918 constituyeron para él ocasión de interpretar las fuentes anímicas del movimiento estudiantil que la impulsó y el horizonte estimable de una ambición por momentos esquiva a la conciencia de sus actores. La familiarización durante la década de los años veintes con las ideas pedagógicas y los sistemas educativos imperantes en Europa, particularmente en Alemania, en la Unión Soviética y en Estados Unidos, le impulsaron a efectuar una relectura del sistema educativo consolidado en la República Argentina, en todos sus niveles y en clave historicista. Contestando a la naturalización de la idoneidad y el nacionalismo como principios rectores del plan pedagógico de la modernidad occidental, la historia de la educación que Taborda articuló le facilitó ensayar una suerte de arqueología crítica del espíritu humano, al que conceptualizó como un espíritu étnicamente encarnado. Para el racionalismo modernizador, evaluó Taborda, ese espíritu sobrevivía desperdigado en el presente histórico, geográfico y cultural, como un archipiélago de obstáculos ―hábitos, modos de habitar el espacio, vivencia del tiempo, materiales arquitectónicos, formas de organización comunitaria― contrapuestos a la fuerza y a las promesas del progreso, como la maleza que era imprescindible arrancar para afianzar definitivamente la occidentalización y una economía capitalista; para la generación presente, en cambio, conformaba un llamamiento a despertar la conciencia de su historicidad, a desandar la génesis de su intersubjetividad y a construir deliberadamente, mediante un conjunto de actos de transmisión, su lazo y el de las generaciones pretéritas con las generaciones futuras. En esta perspectiva, la historia de la educación procede para Taborda a la manera de un barrido a contrapelo de la pedagogía dominante y remonta al lector a las fuentes de un cercenamiento original o negación fundadora en la que, impugnada la idiosincracia nativa ―aquello que, para Argentina, Taborda denomina el “genio facúndico”― se procuró edificar un orden educativo, político y económico copiado de Europa. En la coyuntura de las crisis desatadas, el pensamiento de Taborda preguntará por las posibilidades de una síntesis cultural. Este trabajo procura reconstruir las relaciones entre historia de la educación, pedagogía y etnopolítica en el pensamiento de Saúl Taborda, mostrando cómo dicha tríada sintetiza la ontología histórica de una experiencia cultural.