The family moved to the border town of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, where he grew up attending school in Eagle Pass, Texas.

His time living on the Texas border likely contributed to fostering his idea of the Mexican "cosmic race" and rejection of Anglo culture.

When his wife of forty years died in 1942, their daughter Carmen is reported to have said, "When the coffin was lowered into the ground, Vasconcelos sobbed bitterly.

[14] The Ateneo de Juventud was led by a Dominican citizen, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, who had read Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, an influential work published in 1900 that was opposed to Anglo cultural influence but also emphasized the redemptive power of education.

[16] Opposed to the Díaz regime, it formulated arguments against it and its emphasis on positivism by employing French spiritualism, which articulated "a new vision of the relationship between individual and society.

"[14] After graduating from law school, he joined the law firm of Warner, John, and Galston in Washington, D.C. Vasconcelos joined the local Anti-Re-election Club in Washington, D.C.[14] It supported the democratic movement to oust the longtime President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz in 1910 and was headed by Francisco I. Madero, the presidential candidate of the Anti-Re-election Party.

Vasconcelos returned to Mexico City to participate more directly in the anti-re-election movement, became one of the party's secretaries, and edited its newspaper, El Antireelectionista.

[14] After Díaz was ousted by revolutionary violence that was followed by the election of Madero to the presidency, Vasconcelos led a structural change at the National Preparatory School.

Soon, Vasconcelos was forced into exile in Paris, where he met Julio Torri, Doctor Atl, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and other contemporary intellectuals and artists.

The leader of the Constitutionalists, Venustiano Carranza, and General Álvaro Obregón split with more radical revolutionaries, especially Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

He redesigned the logo of the university to show a map of Latin America, with the phrase "Por mi raza hablará el espíritu" (The spirit will speak for my race), an influence of Rodó's arielismo.

[25] Although Vasconcelos was no advocate of Mexican Indigenous culture, as Secretary of Education he sent a statue of the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtemoc, to Brazil for its centennial celebrations of independence in 1923, to the amazement of the South American recipients.

Vasconcelos' first writings on philosophy are passionate reactions against the formal, positivistic education at the National Preparatory School, formerly under the influence of Porfirian thinkers like Justo Sierra and Gabino Barreda.

As he argued that only by the means of rhythm can humans able to know the world without any intermediation, he proposed that the minimal aspects of cognition are conditioned by a degree of sympathy with the natural "vibration" of things.

His research on the nature of Mexican modern identity had a direct influence on the young writers, poets, anthropologists, and philosophers who wrote on this subject.

Paz wrote that Vasconcelos was "the teacher" who had educated hundreds of young Latin American intellectuals during his many trips to Central and South America.

Nevertheless, his work La raza cósmica has been used by Chicano and Mexican-American movements since the 1970s, which assert the reconquista ('retaking' or literally 'reconquest') of the American Southwest, based on their Mexican ancestry.

("La Inteligencia se impone", Timon 16; June 8, 1940) Vasconcelos was a prolific author, writing in a variety of genres, especially philosophy, but also autobiography.