The dissertation examines the relations between literary creation and national systems of education in Spanish America, from the last decades of the 19th-century to the 1940’s. Paying special attention to Mexican literature, the dissertation analyzes the prose works by four key Spanish American intellectuals: José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917), Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959), José Vasconcelos (1882-1959) and Jorge Cuesta (1903-1942). The study begins with the publication of José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), the landmark volume that launched the alliance between “high” culture and state-funded education in Spanish America. Then, it deals with works by the two most influential Mexican thinkers of the first half of the 20th century, both convinced arielistas, namely, Alfonso Reyes and José Vasconcelos. Just before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, young Reyes and Vasconcelos advanced the need for a humanist reform and the nation’s “aesthetic” redemption; over the 1920’s and 1930’s, as high-ranking intellectuals, both were fundamental in fostering national institutions of education, as well as in promoting the popular and fine arts. The study concludes with the Mexican avant-garde’s criticism of aesthetic humanism, seen through Jorge Cuesta´s critical works. I argue that, during these decades, literature in and through national systems of education brought about a specific kind of subject, the “aesthetic subject” - understood both as a self in philosophical terms and as a citizen in political terms. Hence, I show that what was at stake in the important moment of the “aesthetic question” was not merely the doggedly argues issued of national representation or identity. I submit that, as an essential component of national systems of education, aesthetics sought the emergence of a synthetic subject capable of overcoming the division of labor, the fragmentation of skills and the specialization of knowledge in a modern liberal society. That was what aesthetic education always meant: the possibility of transforming specialists into full human beings through art. Thus, the Spanish America’s aesthetic obsession, which was the distinctive intellectual mark of an era, constituted but an episode of that older and larger cultural project that went back to the end of the 18th century: aesthetic humanism.