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14 Torres Bodet and the “Male Pedagogies” Radiography of a Thought of Transcultural and Transnational 1 Circulation Mauricio Zabalgoitia Herrera Jaime Torres Bodet (Mexico City, 1902–1974) is considered one of the main educators, intellectuals, political figures and, in a lesser sense, poets and writers of Mexico. Also, he is highly valued as a diplomat and inter- national and influential figure who helped to build—and rebuild—the Hispanic and transnational world during the 20th century. According to all these avatars, Torres Bodet is one of the male creators of the Mexi- can cultural and educational institutions, but also one of the men who took the reins of the world in the interwar period and mostly after the Second World War. As a man educated in the lettered minorities of the time, the Mexican knew how to reconcile the cultural, artistic and edu- cational needs of an unequal society with the modernizing movements of the world in this international context, and from Mexico City, Madrid, Paris, Buenos Aires, The Hague, Brussels and other places of the interna- tional cooperation. Torres Bodet formed his own ideal of humanism, renewed according to his own experience as a lettered and international subject and also as a man who witnessed in Europe the fall of the pillars of humanity and its most appreciated symbolic cultural assets. This “new humanism” was configured in his literary texts, in the transnational spaces of men of his same education and rank, but above all in the speeches he gave in international forums. These places were created as emergency spaces to save humanity from barbarism. And all this he did, we have to say, read- ing, thinking and arguing with other men. Together they decided to take the categorical Man of history and knowledge to renewed places, such as that of international education, thus writing a new chapter not only in the history of humanity but of the genre and its characters: men and women (without thinking on marginal identities, as expected). In what is presented subsequently is carried out a radiograph of a thought of transcultural and transnational circulation. This work is done by dividing the personal, cultural, literary, political and diplomatic life of Torres Bodet into three moments. His first youth (training period in Mex- ico), his second youth (his first international period) and his international Torres Bodet and the “Male Pedagogies” 273 adulthood (period in which he directs UNESCO). In this regard, the biog- raphy of Torres Bodet is taken as an example because it is, perhaps, the greatest case of a cultural mediator and a man “between worlds”. In any case, to work with a biography invites us to go inside some pri- vate spaces, but as feminists say years later: the personal is political. And we can add: the political is cultural. Briefly, the main intention of this approach is the idea that if we apply a (strong) gender point of view, this can reveal new methods of transcultural mediation in representative spaces, new edges in the framework of transatlantic relations and new means of grasping and reading the past of cultural globalization. First Youth. Homosociability as a Strategy and National Pedagogy The revolutionary process (1910–1917) during which a young Torres Bodet lives in the sumptuous streets of downtown Mexico City and in the classrooms of elite schools for the new cultural gentleman brings to him a new disorder of ideals and male possibilities. With this, the new men of the nation and the arts will have to negotiate from a cultural sexo-politics inherited from the Ateneo de la Juventud as well as from other more restricted areas of homosocial power privileged by the State between 1900 and 1914. These areas are the ones that make his identity and those of his “close friends” possible. In Mexico, homosociability is shaped from the Colonial era through the Porfiriato as a conglomerate of male social networks, agreements, family relationships and friendships. This project, as contradictory as it may seem—as opposed to liberalism and its promises—is about rein- forcing sentiments and functions of racial, social, economic and gender differences. An idea of nation is born from the empowerment of the self- consciousness of the criollo or criollo-mestizo , turned into bourgeoisie. This works as a metonymy of normativity between men and towards women. Citizen and individual—male gendered not exclusively in a grammatical way—represent the most elaborate tailoring of the national unification process (1750–1921.) By 1913, a coming-of-age Torres Bodet attends Escuela Nacional Pre- paratoria in San Ildefonso. He still wears short pants while his mother walks him to the Cathedral ( Zertuche 2011 , 30). However, this still- childish gender burden does not prevent him from inserting himself in the great teacher’s league. By 1914, he gives Enrique Fernández Gra- nados his first poem to read, and he is a fervent listener of young but vigorous teachers: Alberto Vázquez del Mercado, Manuel Toussaint and Antonio Castro Leal (31). In this environment, a shy and bullied Torres Bodet—he was still a fat boy—starts to develop and wins himself a place in one of the most privileged environments by the generic-sex logic of the elites, that of passionate friendship among males with similar interests: 274 Mauricio Zabalgoitia Herrera Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, José Gorostiza, Carlos Pellicer and Luis Garrido, among others. Another factor that promotes the building of Torres Bodet as a novel trope of intellectual masculinity is a proposal from the government itself to renovate the Mexican civil service with “new young people”. Dur- ing this period, “youth had moral, aesthetical and symbolic connotations that attached to the Joven the most generous human ideals: he should be active, audacious, ambitious, adventurer, capable of great emotions, the creator” ( Blanco 1996 , 163). 2 As a political gender artifact, the joven varn is a construction promoted by bourgeois liberalism and the educa- tional national project. Both Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and Escuela de Jurisprudencia—which Torres Bodet entered in 1920—and the worlds around ateneos, clubs, cafes and groups—and their manifestos—became the settings for the practice of a place where functions of validations of race and class are discovered, as well as those of national transfor- mation beyond the boundaries of capital. This is the ideal of masculin- ity that takes on great significance in the face of educator-intellectuals and conservatives of previous decades such as José Roa Bárcena, Ignacio M. Altamirano or José Tomás Pérez de Cuellar. They saw in the emerg- ing youngsters a threat to the masculinizing Mexican empire. Thereby, the old cachetitos de manzana (small apple cheeks) becomes an elegant Figure 14.1 The Little Sailor Becomes an Elegant Caballerito . Source: (IISUE/AHUNAM/Fondo Incorporado Jaime Torres Bodet, Caja 2, Foto 32/Caja 11, Foto 54) Torres Bodet and the “Male Pedagogies” 275 gentleman who wears high life or El Palacio de Hierro suits (Zertuche 2011 , 40). Around that time, he goes from being a young man and efficient secre- tary of Escuela Nacional Preparatoria to being secretary to his admired José Vasconcelos in the presidency of the Universidad Nacional . It was 1921 and he was only 19 years old. The figure of Vasconcelos, his writ- ing, actions and political decisions, each one of his educational creations in a broad spectrum: schools, libraries and his “cultural missions”, trans- form the ethical and cultural ideal of the young Torres Bodet. Vasconce- los’s move from the University to the Ministry of Public Education does no more than invigorate the life of his young mentee, who continues to work for him. Torres Bodet’s professionalization advances at the same time as his experience in public service. The period of revolutionary crisis, although it complicates the publication and circulation of cultural goods, also enlivens some groups, their ideas and the not always transparent rela- tion between modernity and vanguard. Those paradoxical relations may be coded in several magazines in which Torres Bodet and his passionate friends collaborate. To many of them, Madrid and Paris-based Spanish and Hispanic American authors also contribute, a transatlantic dynamic network of transcultural flow, a concept used by Alastair Pennycock about the contacts between tongues to “address the ways in which cul- tural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts. This is not, therefore, a question merely of cultural movement but of take-up, appropriation, change and refashioning” ( 2006 , 7). It’s in this dynamic framework where many of the national identities of class and gender in an international frame were negotiated. Standing out, of course, are the definitions of educated men, as well as a still-in-the-making idea of citizen and intellectual. Both of them are generic categories that exclude women, as we will see in Torres Bodet’s educational speeches given in transnational environments. Some of those publications are the weekly Pegaso , founded in 1917 by Enrique González Martínez, Ramn Lpez Velarde and Efrén Rebolledo, to which a young Carlos Pellicer and Torres Bodet contributed, as well as in Revista Nueva, published by José Gorostiza and Enrique González Rojo in 1919 (Zertuche 2011, 49). Or, from 1920 to 1923, the monthly magazine México Moderno, also published by González Martínez, with later collaborations by the ateneistas and the newcomers Gorostiza and Torres Bodet as critics and recipients of French literature: André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry and others. As a highlight, in 1922, La Falange was launched, which with a continental scope sought to bring together the voices of Latin American men (and only some women) beyond rules and races. Poets, painters and muralists from both sides of the ideological spectrum collaborated democratically.

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