The group of the Ateneo de la Juventud (Youth Athenaeum), later known as the Ateneo de México (Athenaeum of Mexico, 1912), was founded in 1909. It was a unique group in the Mexican intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century, because many of its members would later become famous and because it hosted significant events in Mexican cultural history. We will examine the intellectual history of this particular group and the changes in its composition and organization. We will also interpret its ideological foundations as they relate to the political and social changes that were happening in Mexico at the time. This will allow us to understand the cultural and political roots of the concept today known as mexicanidad (Mexicanness).

The Ateneo group is generally understood as a reaction to literary and cultural modernism, which advocated an aestheticizing and bohemian role for intellectuals in society. The Ateneo promoted development based on the humanities, it encouraged significant university reform, and its intellectual leaders influenced Latin America and Spain. It was a heterogeneous group, composed of writers, doctors, architects, and painters, such as José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Antonio Caso, Martín Luis Guzmán, and Diego Rivera. They inherited the modernist cultural background from two journals: Revista Moderna (1898–1903) and Savia Moderna (1906). Their interests were more literary than either journal. The Ateneo's most significant period was between 1906 and 1914, when the Dominican teacher Pedro Henríquez Ureña influenced the group. Henríquez Ureña, who had been based in Mexico since 1906, was one of the most prominent essayists and critics of his time, and counseled the younger group of Mexican intellectuals.

Henríquez Ureña strongly critiqued positivism from a Latin American perspective. Although his movement originated in the Americas, his extensive knowledge of European culture marked the Ateneo members, who admired Greek and neoclassical European philosophers. Henríquez Ureña's main works, Horas de estudio (1910) and Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión (1924), relate intellectual and political history with cultural and literary criticism.

Henríquez Ureña was not the only intellectual giant to influence the Ateneo. The Ateneo's entire intellectual thrust, in fact, represented a shift from the Porfirian period to the Mexican Revolution, and its projects reflect this massive change.