Noteworthy members
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The Mexican Youth Athenaeum (Spanish: Ateneo de la Juventud), 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. It was an association of intellectuals, primarily writers and philosophers. Most of the members were indeed young and came to represent a new generation of Mexican scholars, reacting specifically against positivism and its prevalence in the ideology of the regime of Dictator Porfirio Diaz. [1] The group sought a revindication of the humanities as the center of cultural creation.
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.
The Ateneo officially convened on the 28 of October, 1909. [2] However, its origins are found in the Revista Savia Moderna (New Modern Journal), originally published in 1906 by Alfonso Cravioto and Luís Castillo Ledón. [3] The second major antecedent to the Ateneo was the Sociedad de Conferencias [4] (Society of Conferences), an inchoate form of the Ateneo de la Juventud who took as its goal to display to the public new ideas of education, poetry, the plastic arts, and philosophy. Finally, in the summer of 1909, Antonio Caso organized a series of conferences [5] dealing with the history of Positivism, given at the National Preparatory School, an institution founded on positivist principles and source of Mexican educational since its creation in 1868. [6]
As stated in the official statutes of the club when, in 1912, it took the name Ateneo de México, the principal goal of the association was to promote intellectual and artistic culture. [7] The same document outlines the strategies proposed in this effort. The members held public meetings, discussions, and lectures, and published a journal. The fundamental ideology of the Ateneo was a rejection of positivistic influences on education and culture. Instead, the members of the Ateneo thought, the humanities would be responsible for the revitalization of Mexican culture, the group's ultimate concern. Members of the Ateneo such as Alfonso Reyes stressed the importance of classical scholarship and additionally looked to the works of modern continental philosophers such as Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson, as well as Spanish writers such as Jose Ortega y Gasset, to propound new values for human societies which were contrary to scientific and positivistic trends in thought. [8]
| This article's list of alumni may not follow Wikipedia's verifiability policy.(January 2021) |
One hundred years after its foundation, [10] Ateneo de la Juventud is refounded under the name Ateneo Nacional de la Juventud with the participation of young people from the main public and private universities in Mexico City. In 2011, it was consolidated as a non-partisan and non-profit Civil Association, which seeks, since then, the empowerment of young Mexicans in the public, cultural, academic and political life of Mexico.
Following the ideals of the 1909 Ateneo, this association has become an important nucleus of youth advocacy, recognized by members of civil society, government and other international organizations. Its work is characterized by the development of programs aimed at training young people in different areas ranging from the dissemination of culture and philosophy, to entrepreneurship and advocacy in public policy.
In 2009, the group launched the first edition of the Escuela de Formación Humana, a course for young people between the ages of 15 and 21, which included workshops in philosophy, art appreciation, ethics, public speaking, assertiveness and human rights. Following the ideology of the Ateneo de la Juventud of 1909, the School of Human Formation aimed to provide participants with a humanistic education and to complement their academic training in a critical manner. [11]
In 2011, the Ateneo is constituted as a civil association under which the same project continues, made up mainly of students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and other public institutions in Mexico City.
Alfonso Reyes Ochoa was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times and has been acclaimed as one of the greatest authors in Spanish language. He served as ambassador of Mexico to Argentina and Brazil.
The Científicos were a circle of technocratic advisors to President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz. Steeped in the positivist "scientific politics", they functioned as part of his program of modernization at the start of the 20th century.
Gerardo Murillo Coronado, also known by his signature "Dr. Atl", was a Mexican painter and writer. He was actively involved in the Mexican Revolution in the Constitutionalist faction led by Venustiano Carranza. He had ties to the anarchosyndicalist labor organization, the Casa del Obrero Mundial "House of the World Worker." Later in his life, he became a supporter of fascism and wrote pieces supporting the Axis powers in the buildup to the Second World War.
José Vasconcelos Calderón, called the "cultural caudillo" of the Mexican Revolution, was an important Mexican writer, philosopher, and politician. He is one of the most influential and controversial personalities in the development of modern Mexico. His philosophy of the "cosmic race" affected all aspects of Mexican sociocultural, political, and economic policies.
Daniel Cosío Villegas was a Mexican prominent economist, essayist, historian, and diplomat.
Roberto Montenegro Nervo was a painter, muralist and illustrator, who was one of the first to be involved in the Mexican muralism movement after the Mexican Revolution. His most important mural work was done at the former San Pedro and San Pablo monastery but as his work did not have the same drama as other muralists, such as Diego Rivera, he lost prominence in this endeavor. Most of his career is dedicated to illustration and publishing, portrait painting and the promotion of Mexican handcrafts and folk art.
Justo Sierra Méndez, was a Mexican prominent liberal writer, historian, journalist, poet and political figure during the Porfiriato, in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. He was a leading voice of the Científicos, "the scientists" who were the intellectual leaders during the regime of Porfirio Díaz.
Alfonso Caso y Andrade was an archaeologist who made important contributions to pre-Columbian studies in his native Mexico. Caso believed that the systematic study of ancient Mexican civilizations was an important way to understand Mexican cultural roots.
The Archdiocese of Monterrey is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory or archdiocese of the Catholic Church located in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico.
The Porfiriato is a term given to the period when General Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico as president in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, coined by Mexican historian Daniel Cosío Villegas. Seizing power in a coup in 1876, Díaz pursued a policy of "order and progress," inviting foreign investment in Mexico and maintaining social and political order, by force if necessary. There were significant economic, technological, social, and cultural changes during this period.
Andrés Molina Enríquez was a Mexican revolutionary intellectual, author of The Great National Problems (1909) which drew on his experiences as a notary and Justice of the Peace in Mexico State. He is considered the intellectual father of the land reform movement in modern Mexico embodied in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917, and for reasserting the principle of national sovereignty with regard to ownership of land and resources on a liberal positivist basis. He has been called "the Rousseau of the Mexican Revolution."
Antonio Caso Andrade was a Mexican philosopher and rector of the former Universidad Nacional de México, nowadays known as the National Autonomous University of Mexico from December 1921 to August 1923. Along with José Vasconcelos, he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud, a humanist group against philosophical positivism. The Athenian generation opposed Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’s philosophical views, giving credence to and expanding on the ideas of Henri Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and José Enrique Rodó. Caso opposed rationalism. His group the ateneistas believed in a moral, willing, and spiritual individual being. He was the older brother of archaeologist Alfonso Caso.
Meshico is a term which began to be employed in the middle of the 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 ontology of the Mexican person, one that would serve, as well, as a means of confronting the dependency of the official intelligentsia on ways of thinking perceived as being too foreign to permit a true understanding of Mexican reality.
Los Contemporáneos can refer to a Mexican modernist group, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as to the literary magazine which served as the group's mouthpiece and artistic vehicle from 1928 to 1931. In a way, they were opposed to stridentism.
Julio Torri Maynes was a Mexican writer and teacher who formed part of the Ateneo de la Juventud (1909–1914). He wrote mainly in the essay form, although his limited production included short stories and scholarly works as well. Considered one of the best prose stylists of Latin America, he was admitted to the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua in 1952. His parents were Julio S. Torri and Sofía Maynes de Torri.
Luis Vicente Cabrera Lobato was a Mexican lawyer, politician and writer. His pen name for his political essays was "Lic. Blas Urrea"; the more literary works he wrote as "Lucas Rivera". During the late presidency of Porfirio Díaz, he was a vocal critic of the regime. He became an important civilian intellectual in the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).
Fabiana Sebastiana María Carmen Romero Rubio y Castelló, was the second wife of Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico.
Amalia González Caballero de Castillo Ledón was a Mexican diplomat, cabinet minister, minister plenipotentiary, writer, and the first female member of a presidential cabinet. She distinguished herself for fighting for women rights including her efforts to secure women's voting rights in 1952.
El vuelo del águila is a Mexican telenovela produced by Ernesto Alonso and Carlos Sotomayor for Televisa in 1994–1995. Telenovela based on the Mexican soldier and President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz, from his name had come out the title "Época Porfiriana" or "Porfiriato" during the period of his rule, in the years 1876–1911.
María Elena Caso was a Mexican biologist who pioneered the study of starfish and other echinoderms in Mexico. She started the National Collection of Equinoderms in Mexico, the most important one in Latin America, which currently counts with at least 100.000 samples from 800 species from the Mexican coast and participated in the foundation of the laboratory of hydrobiology of the Biology Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, currently known as "Marine Sciences and Limnology Institute". She became a reference scientist in marine biodiversity.