Mexican Youth Athenaeum

The Mexican Youth Athenaeum, later known as the Athenaeum of Mexico, was a Mexican civil association founded on October 28, 1909 with the purpose of working in favor of culture and art, by means of organization public meetings and debates. Born as a response of a generation of young intellectuals who in the decline of the rule of President Porfirio Díaz set a series of criticisms to determinism and mechanism set by the Comtian and Spencerian positivism as the development model of Porfirio Díaz's administration and the group of the "científicos. Through a series of conferences and different cultural efforts they activated a reflexive awareness on education.

The members of the Athenaeum gave to Mexican education system a wider vision which rejected racist biological determinism and which found a solution for the cost of social adjustment problem generated by the processes which change society as industrialization or urbanization.

Against the official position of Justo Sierra, porfirian minister of Instruction, and the "científicos" (pejoratively nicknamed in the Mexican slang), José Vasconcelos and the Athenaeum generation promoted criticism of the philosophical sole vision (positivism and determinism). The Athenaeum generation proposed academic freedom, freedom of thought, and overall the cultural, ethic and aesthetic values in which Latin America emerged as a political and social reality. Here is important to emphasize that one of the most important characteristics of the Porfiriato years, was its disdain for everything national, Mexican; its fascination for European, French, German or if nothing of these were possible American things and ideas, as the only way for achieving progress.

Antonio Caso, Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Ricardo Gomez Rebelo and José Vasconcelos along with the other members of the Youth Athenaeum set up the basis to an ambitious rescue of what is Mexican, and to set what is Latin American as an identity that besides being real, might be possible in the future and mainly non-dependent on the destruction of national, local, Latin-American, as the way to progress, as it happened under the Porfiriato and other experiments such as the Coronelismo in Brazil.