The present thesis studies the concepts of mestizaje and Mexican identity in five essays and two short stories: La raza cosmica and Indologia, by Jose Vasconcelos; El perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mexico, by Samuel Ramos; El laberinto de la soledad and Posdata, by Octavio Paz; and finally the short stories "Chac Mool" and "Por boca de los dioses", by Carlos Fuentes. The thesis shows how the confrontation between the European and the Pre-Columbian cultures, still very much a part of the Mexican reality, affects the intellectual efforts by which those authors try to grasp the problematic of mestizaje and Mexican cultural identity. The perspectives of those four authors, from the racial and optimistic vision of Vasconcelos to the psychoanalytical and rather bleaker approach of Paz, are unable to give an objective account of mestizaje and Mexican identity, precisely because of the confrontation, never settled, between the two cultural universes.

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