Backroads Pragmatists
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Like the United States, Mexico is a country of profound cultural differences. In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), these differences became the subject of intense government attention as the Republic of Mexico developed ambitious social and educational policies designed to integrate its multitude of ethnic cultures into a national community of democratic citizens. To the north, Americans were beginning to confront their own legacy of racial injustice, embarking on the path that, three decades later, led to the destruction of Jim Crow. Backroads Pragmatists is the first book to show the transnational cross-fertilization between these two movements. In molding Mexico's ambitious social experiment, postrevolutionary reformers adopted pragmatism from John Dewey and cultural relativism from Franz Boas, which, in turn, profoundly shaped some of the critical intellectual figures in the Mexican American civil rights movement. The Americans Ruben Flores follows studied Mexico's integration theories and applied them to America's own problem, holding Mexico up as a model of cultural fusion. These American reformers made the American West their laboratory in endeavors that included educator George I. Sanchez's attempts to transform New Mexico's government agencies, the rural education campaigns that psychologist Loyd Tireman adapted from the Mexican ministry of education, and anthropologist Ralph L. Beals's use of applied Mexican anthropology in the U.S. federal courts to transform segregation policy in southern California. Through deep archival research and ambitious synthesis, Backroads Pragmatists illuminates how nation-building in postrevolutionary Mexico unmistakably influenced the civil rights movement and democratic politics in the United States. Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.
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Backroads Pragmatists
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The same set of documents in which Sánchez and Embree discussed Rivera’s mural images also captured their interest in Mexico’s state-led policy projects for achieving the harmonious society. Sánchez had come to Mexico in 1935, two years into the massive reorganization of government Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated in 1932. And yet, during the quintessential episode in the growth of the American federal state, it was not the New Deal that represented the archetype of the activist state for George Sánchez. When he returned from Mexico in 1935, it was Mexico’s central state growth after 1920 that he celebrated for its postrevolutionary ‘new deal’ efforts, not that of the United States.41 Edwin Embree had long been involved in the Rosenwald Fund project to build schools for Blacks in the American Deep South. But Mexico’s public mechanism for constructing educational institutions in rural Mexico provided a novel model for thinking about the role of public government in modern society rather than that of private philanthropy.42 For these Americans, Rivera’s images had provided proof that the United States was not alone in conceiving of itself as a society of disparate cultures needing to be fused into a common whole. But those images functioned primarily as symbols of a monumental government attempt to harness the power of the central state in the pursuit of social reform, not as images of the romantic racial utopia.
The history of state involvement in the relationship between the Europeans who colonized Mexico and the native Americans they encountered there was not original to the postrevolutionary writings of Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz. Such thought has always been one of the dominant strands in Mexican intellectual history. In his assessment of the differences between social projects that came before and after the revolution, for example, Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro traced a line of antecedent projects that had attempted to merge Mexico’s indigenous cultures into the life of the nation-state as far back as the sixteenth century.43 Hernán Cortés, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, and Manuel Orozco y Berra—these and more had all attempted to reformulate the relationship of Mexico’s native Americans to the European power structures established by the Spanish invaders.44 These ideas about the relationship between the Indian and the European were a broad spectrum of models that stretched as far back in Mexican history as one cared to look, Villoro argued. One important precursor to postrevolutionary thought about the relationship of Mexico’s peoples to one another that had been reached in the late nineteenth century, for example, when the Porfirian era work of Francisco Pimentel, Francisco Bulnes, and Andrés Molina Enríquez had reformulated the Native American from a novelty to an integral sociological unit of the Mexican nation. “Before we were interested in the Indian as a relic of the past, as a tradition. But now he has been configured as a vital element of our national character,” wrote Villoro. “The Indian is now considered to be a living, breathing factor in our social life, an input into our nation whose efficient contribution we are all now in search of.”45 Operating from the vantage point of 1900, when the view of Mexican history seemed only to magnify Mexico’s military and economic weaknesses before the growth of the United States, Villoro wrote, Pimentel and others had accepted the assumption that only a reconfigured relationship of Mexico’s people to one another could produce a strong nation capable of withstanding foreign military power. While they stopped short of giving Indians autonomy within the nation, they nonetheless triumphed Native Americans as integral to fin de siècle Mexico. “A nation is an assemblage of men who share a common set of beliefs, who are guided by a single idea, and who labor toward the same goal,” wrote Pimentel in 1864. “So long as our Indians are segregated as they are today, Mexico cannot reach the rank of true nationhood.”46
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