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Chapter 2

Shock Troops

The Mexican state attempted to integrate the peoples of Mexico into a single bloc of citizens not through a timeless process of biological mestizaje, but through instruments of statecraft that included patronage of the arts, a new infrastructure network, and a renewed focus on national symbols like the flag, the Indian, and folkloric dress.¹ However, it was three institutions of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), institutions symbolized by the schoolteacher depicted in Rivera’s murals, that the Americans found amenable to the work of integration and civil rights in the American West. When the Americans returned home, they duplicated the intellectual and political labor of these institutions. They wrote of them as models for the United States in the aftermath of institutional failures that had led them to Mexico in the first place. They took photographs of them, juxtaposed them to their own schools in New Mexico and Texas, and described them as the agents of cultural regeneration for a Mexican nation on the move. These institutions became the policy units through which the Americans refracted their pragmatism-inspired experiments in the United States.

The first was the cultural mission. As the name suggested, la misión cultural (cultural mission) was an adaptation of the sixteenth-century practice through which the mendicant orders had attempted to proselytize the indigenous communities of Mexico to the Spanish Catholic Church. The mendicants learned the language of the Indian nations to which they had been assigned, then moved into their communities during temporary journeys of exile from their Catholic monasteries as they sought to transform indigenous Mexico into Catholic Mexico. José Vasconcelos adapted this model as the outreach campaign of the postrevolutionary Mexican state when he became secretary of public education in 1921. Under Vasconcelos, the cultural mission became a secular organ of the state, not a religious one, although the millenarian project on which it was embarked shared the hallmarks of the erstwhile projects of the Spanish mendicant orders. Vasconcelos organized libraries of classical European texts that he sent into the provinces of the nation via cultural missionaries who were tasked with social reform work in the form of formal seminars conducted in the rural countryside. Schoolteachers from the rural schools were obligated to attend the seminars for three weeks at a time, where they were introduced to the pedagogical techniques that Mexico City had directed them to try.

The second was the escuela normal rural (rural normal school), which was a permanent teacher training academy at which the rural schoolteacher trained to be an educator in the service of the state. The normal school was the centerpiece of rural education, for it was there that first-time teachers were introduced to the pedagogy of the state. As a central repository of state resources directed from Mexico City, its physical plant sometimes became the location at which the cultural mission performed its three-week seminars for rural schoolteachers. But the rural normal school provided the original imprint of what the postrevolutionary educator was supposed to be, a role that was enriched thereafter by the cultural missions.

The third was the rural school. Forming the base of a pyramid whose apex was represented by the federal secretariat in Mexico City, it was the closest institution to the young schoolchildren and their parents whose lives were the targets of reform work by the postrevolutionary state. Beautiful images taken by photographers of the SEP while accompanying federal inspectors detail the discrete acts of labor through which the rural schools resocialized their students into the revolutionary nationalism Diego Rivera had captured in his Mexico City murals. There are students marching through small towns in remote areas while carrying the Mexican flag that had become the symbol of regeneration across the country. Primary school students are shown playing basketball as rural schoolteachers work to instill athletic games imported from the United States. In other photographs, young men and women stand in front of school buildings as they read from schoolbooks brought to them from Mexico City, or they offload bricks from trucks brought in to help with village construction projects. The rural school was what the Americans came to call the “House of the People,” after the nickname the Secretariat of Public Education had given to the school, la casa del pueblo. From the 1930s until the 1950s, the Mexican rural school would provide the primary model for the Americans of what the public school in rural America should be.

Together, the personnel of these three institutions were the shock troops of the postrevolutionary Mexican state. They were schoolteachers and school administrators, inspectors and vocational experts whose labors in education may have appeared docile and beneficent. But in the photographs that captured their work, they appear as nothing so much as Green Beret soldiers who had been sent to resocialize the rural communities of the nation into the policy platform of the state. They operated as platoons of teachers, trained in a variety of skills that were put to use in the service of creating a new economy and a new relationship of the individual to the school. They operated in remote communities where schools had been built for the first time in the history of the country. They traveled to municipal seats of power at regular intervals, where they were greeted by federal inspectors who monitored their work and advised them on the newest advances in science and pedagogy. For the Americans, they came to represent the caring state. In the federal government’s interest in moving the villages of the nation toward national integration, the Americans saw a central state that cared enough to bring the promises of the public school to the remotest areas of the country.

The Cultural Missions

Of Mexico’s federal institutions for integrating the nation into one, the misión cultural was the model that the Americans found most practical to replicate at home. The excitement for the Americans resided in the metaphor that the mission represented. The mission was not merely attached to the metropolitan center of the nation. It was that the center of the nation had flung itself outward toward the provinces, like some giant exhalation of energy that was the embodiment of social change itself. In the mission’s centrifugal movement outward, the Americans detected the promise of state responsibility to cultural frontiers that had long been forgotten. My own attempt to translate the institution of the mission to the American scene always returns to the institution of the Freedman’s Bureau after the American Civil War, for it was there that the American state took responsibility for redefining the relationship to cultural communities that had been locked out of the American political experiment. Something similar in both its promise and its failures was at work in the Mexican terrain after the revolution. For Americans looking to multiply the resources of the state in the effort to create an integrated society, the effects of the misión cultural were irresistible. Loyd Tireman immediately copied the misión cultural when he returned home to New Mexico from Mexico in 1931, flinging out his own cultural mission from Albuquerque in a bid to tether the rural communities of New Mexico to the melting pot project that he was building there. George Sánchez experimented with the misión cultural in Louisiana, where he replicated it among the black communities of the American South in an institutional experiment that became part of the founding history of Grambling State University. It was only in the aftermath of this experiment that he returned to New Mexico, Texas, and civil rights fame.

Institutionally, the Mexican cultural missions acted as platoons of metropolitan intellectuals who traveled to rural communities in the provinces in the attempt to proselytize their members to the integrationist project of the state. Pictures show them radiating outward from the capital by truck or by donkey, laden with the equipment needed to establish a new political beachhead in former monasteries expropriated from the Catholic Church. As a unit of the state, the missionaries were entrusted to organize the local school in each community to which they came, with the assistance of the local inhabitants. They were the organizers of the rural schools that would perform the work of pedagogy and indoctrination in pursuit of the postrevolutionary republic’s integration project. At first, the missionaries moved from community to community at three-week intervals. The missionaries organized the school, helped to recruit a schoolteacher from the local community who had been trained in one of the state’s normal schools, and regularized an academic pattern of instruction that was formalized through the succeeding years of operation. As the work of the cultural missionaries expanded and the rural schools became a formal part of the rural environment, the work of the missions was modified to increase the efficiency of the government’s labors. The cultural missions were given permanent seats at the rural normal schools, for example, out of which they now radiated rather than returning to Mexico City each time. They began to journey repeatedly to each village for multiple trainings each year rather than a single one. And they modified their curriculum in accordance with the labor needs of the local community.

The misión cultural was one of the mythical institutions of twentieth-century Mexican history, in part because it seemed to be a reworking of an organic institution that dated to sixteenth-century Mexico. As the Spanish continued their conquest of Mexico in the aftermath of the Aztec defeat in 1521, they turned to the Spanish Catholic Church to aid in the cultural transformation of Mexico’s indigenous societies. It was then that the mendicant priests, dressed in their robes and carrying the Catholic cross, spread across central Mexico in the effort to proselytize the Native Americans to the Christian faith. In their twentieth-century guise, however, the cultural missions received their great institutional impulse in the state from José Vasconcelos, the conservative melting pot theorist who would offer his raza cósmica vision of Mexican society in 1925.² Beginning in 1921, Vasconcelos launched a series of grand experiments within the federal Secretariat of Public Education that included itinerant platoons of educators whose role was to establish rural public schools under the direction of the federal government. Vasconcelos may indeed have been acting out of respect for the Spanish Catholic mendicant tradition, given his lifelong devotion to the Mexican Catholic Church. Historians have argued vigorously about whether the ministry’s ultimate aim was to create a democratic polity or to rebuild a national economy under the supervision of capitalist elites, just as they have argued about the relationship of the SEP to the communities where the misiones did their work. They disagree less over the character of that project, which Vasconcelos rooted in Catholic metaphysics and the classical education associated with ancient Greece and Rome.

But the centralizing work of José Manuel Puig Casauranc and Moisés Sáenz after 1924 was of greater importance to the history of integration in the American West. Vasconcelos provided the initial burst of institutional energy out of which emerged the cultural missions, but it was between 1924 and 1935 that the specific configuration of institutions, policy framework, and management structure emerged that won the accolades of the Americans. In my own estimation, the Americans would not have been nearly as impressed with the integrationist work of the Mexican state at any other moment after 1920. Prior to the centralizing work of Casauranc and Sáenz between 1924 and 1935, Vasconcelos’s emphasis on the classical curriculum impeded the Deweyan philosophy to which the Americans had committed themselves in the United States. After the departure of Casauranc in 1931 and Sáenz in 1933 and the subsequent accession of the socialist-inspired Narciso Bassols to the Secretariat of Public Education, experimentalism in progressive education was diluted in favor of socialist doctrine whose determinisms were every bit as unattractive to pragmatists as nineteenth-century científico science. And beginning in 1940, the increasingly conservative tone of the presidential administrations deflated the institutional enthusiasm that had given the postrevolutionary period its definition. It was only during the narrow moment of educational changes between 1924 and 1935 when the American westerners were swept away by Mexican reform. What occurred under Casauranc and Sáenz drew them to Mexico for the rest of their careers.

The greatest transformation was the profound philosophical shift of the misión cultural toward pragmatism under Moisés Sáenz after 1924. When he became SEP secretary in 1924, Puig Casauranc had hired Sáenz to assume supervision for the rural school campaign Vasconcelos had initiated three years earlier. Sáenz had trained to be a schoolteacher at Jalapa Normal School in the state of Veracruz, graduating there in 1915 before being elevated to the directorship of Mexico’s Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, the prominent preparatory academy that educated the children of Mexico’s elite.³ Then, at twenty-five, he left Mexico to study with Dewey at Columbia Teachers College in New York City, for reasons that remain unclear. The decision may have resulted from his immersion in the Protestant missionary circles of Mexico, part of a long tradition of Protestantism in his family. As children, he and his sister had attended Protestant schools in Mexico City and Laredo, Texas, for example, and Protestant preacher Isaac Boyce was among the family’s closest friends. These ties to Protestantism carried into his professional career. Even as he was directing the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, he was simultaneously helping to widen the influence of liberal Christianity in revolutionary Mexico. In 1918, the American missionary organization whose efforts were directed at proselytizing Mexicans to evangelical Christianity, the Protestant Cooperating Committee, had turned to Sáenz to edit its monthly newsletter El mundo cristiano. It is through the editorship of El mundo that Sáenz may have first been exposed to Dewey, for it regularly published articles on pedagogical practice in the United States. The translations of Dewey and work of American progressive educators would have reinforced the pedagogical training Sáenz had already received at Jalapa.

Sáenz expanded Mexico’s rural education system to new areas of the Mexican countryside by increasing the number of schoolteachers in the field and, alongside fellow Deweyite Rafael Ramírez, by instituting normal training academies to supervise schoolteacher fieldwork. But it was in Sáenz’s attention to pedagogy where the influence of Dewey was felt most deeply. Sáenz remolded Vasconcelos’s platoons of educators to emphasize Dewey’s experimentalist ethics rather than Christian metaphysics as the guiding philosophy of rural education. By replacing a classical curriculum with an experimentalist project in pragmatist education, Sáenz elevated local experience to a primary role in the public schools and imbued them with the opportunity to transform postrevolutionary society. How quickly Sáenz transformed Vasconcelos’s work is indicated by the enthusiasm Dewey noted for Mexico’s schools during a summer research trip to Mexico City in 1926, only two years after Sáenz had assumed control of the rural schools. Dewey famously declared his admiration for the efforts of the Mexican schools, concluding that Mexico’s education efforts were providing a model of rural education for the rest of the world. “The most interesting as well as the most important educational development is the rural schools,” he wrote: “This is the cherished preoccupation of the present regime; it signifies a revolution rather than renaissance. It is not only a revolution for Mexico, but in some respects one of the most important social experiments undertaken anywhere in the world.”⁴

The fiscal and philosophical investment away from the metropolitan centers that the cultural mission represented made it the most exciting institutional development for the Americans during this time. The financial commitment the central government needed to maintain the platoons drew much attention. The scale of that work was not immense, but given that it operated in the rural arena where resources from the state were historically low, the consistent funding pattern was not unimpressive. Three years into Casauranc’s tenure with the SEP, in 1927, the Mexican state was providing support for six platoons of educators who had conducted a total of forty-five itinerant seminars lasting three weeks each over a terrain that included twenty of Mexico’s thirty-one states. The division of labor represented by these missions was not haphazard, but discrete and standardized. There were standardized duties for a platoon director, a social worker, a physical education teacher, an agricultural specialist, an animal technician, and a vocational arts instructor. There were the usual necessities for instruction, but also included had been agricultural implements and means of transportation to get the instructors into the field.

That a centrally coordinated effort was responsible for the division of labor of the cultural missions was another of its impressive features. It was not merely the large scale of each of the cultural missions that was worth noting, but that the fiscal resources for the missions were provided by the central government of the Mexican republic. The importance of central state financing is best understood not in the context of Mexican history, but in that of the historical tension in American history between the federal government and the various state governments. The Americans had been historical antagonists of states’ rights philosophies, since state control of educational resources had been a major historical impediment to the expansion of schools to the ethnic communities in whose name they fought. Thus, when the central coordination of the misión cultural out of Mexico City became evident to them, the Americans celebrated the different role of the central state in Mexico from that which they traditionally associated with the federal state in the United States. The presence of the misión cultural was the proof that the state was willing to place its institutional energy behind political transformation in an aggressive pursuit of a new moral vision. That the effort of the Mexican state was directed at the nation’s poorest and most ethnically marginalized communities only underscored the transformative moral vision to which the power of government had been harnessed. Such a vision seemed to validate a philosophy of government based on social welfare in an era that Daniel T. Rodgers has called the age of social politics.⁵

In the cultural mission the Americans saw a system that could be adapted to the Deweyan principles that made a new integrationist ethics possible. Loyd Tireman had only just moved from northern Iowa to New Mexico when, in the process of opening his laboratory school at the University of New Mexico, he was faced with the task of extending the results of his experimental labors to rural New Mexico’s 600 villages. To achieve the pedagogical outcome promised by Dewey’s philosophy was one of the labors he set for himself in 1927. But to replicate those results throughout the provinces of rural New Mexico was equally important. For him, the cultural missions in Mexico became the administrative platform for extending the reach of his ideas, just as extending the reach of the Mexican ministry of education had become the task Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez had assigned to the cultural missions in Michoacán and Tlaxcala. For George Sánchez, the missions became the instrument to create the community school in rural Louisiana from a seat of administrative power at Grambling University. After leaving his home state of New Mexico in 1937, but before starting his famed career at the University of Texas in 1940, he stopped in the Deep South to experiment in the rural schools of Louisiana. Under the philosophical gaze of John Dewey, it was there that he created Grambling’s equivalent of the cultural mission, radiating to the rural villages still residing in the long reach of Huey Long’s populist politics.

Figure 5. Cultural missionaries in the field at El Nith, one of the rural communities served by the normal school of Actopan, Hidalgo, 1932. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Misión Cultural Permanente en Ixmiquilpan, Box 45, Folder 34 (Hidalgo).

Hundreds of communities became the objects of SEP attention, representing a chronological and geographical relationship of spectacular breadth beginning in 1921 that had no match anywhere in the hemisphere. The diversity of ethnic communities, the variations in the regional economies, the spectrum of political ideologies from supporters of the state to supporters of the Catholic Church, and the orientation of the SEP educators were some of the many factors that determined the fate of the state’s project in national consolidation via the instrument of the cultural mission. In the state of Chiapas, for example, the cultural missionaries were welcomed as agents of a moral order that promised to protect new agrarian rights against the landed hacendados whose power had been curtailed by the state. In Michoacán, the cultural missionaries represented a moral threat to the power of the church, whose authority had been confined and narrowed by the rise of the Sonoran Dynasty. Given such dramatic differences, the relationship of the cultural mission to the local community in Mexico was descriptive rather than normative, a matter of local experience and negotiation rather than distant control and top-down absolutes.

Under such differential conditions, the Americans witnessed missionary programs in Mexico that worked with the support of the local community when the federal state deliberately avoided places that were physically hostile to the presence of Mexico’s shock troops. This success explains the enthusiasm the Americans noted in the communities where the cultural mission was present, for there the community had been vetted and approved. The cultural missions became, in other words, a malleable instrument for rethinking the administrative power of the school and government’s relationship to rural communities in the United States. Tireman found residents eager to use the outreach power of the state government to improve the soil of their rural New Mexico communities. Likewise, rural residents in New Mexico were eager to use the school to learn English for their children, a task considered necessary to participate in the changing economy. In 1940s California, meanwhile, the cultural mission became the mechanism for assimilating immigrant children to a national culture of the United States that was being reformulated in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.

Actopan, or the Rural Normal School

Sixty miles northeast of Mexico City, as one moves out of the historical core where the SEP established its headquarters in 1921, Mexico’s highway system collapses from a pattern of north-south tributaries radiating out of the capital into an east-west federal interstate that veers sharply around the southern periphery of the Las Cruces Mountains. Follow the interstate east to the city of Puebla, eighty miles away; follow it west, and Querétaro can be reached one hundred miles away. But directly to the north, the Las Cruces Mountains remain largely impenetrable even today, effectively helping frame the northern tier of mountain ranges that give Mexico City its shape as a bowl.

It is on the flat plain that drops out of the northern side of the Las Cruces Mountains that the postrevolutionary Mexican state located the educational institution that received more commentary by the Americans than any other. Here, in the geographic center of the homeland where the indigenous Otomí people have lived for more than one thousand years, the SEP established the teacher training academy, or escuela normal rural, known as Actopan, in a converted Catholic monastery the Mexican government had stripped away from the Catholic Church. Rural normal schools as physically close to Mexico City as Actopan had also been located in the states of Tlaxcala, Puebla, and Morelos, part of a system of normal academies that had been established throughout the republic.⁶ But the density of indigenous communities so close to Mexico City made the state of Hidalgo a prime target for Mexico’s educational integration work. It was the site of the oldest misión cultural, for example, and SEP officials frequently steered American visitors who came to Mexico in the 1930s toward Actopan. It was here that child psychologist Loyd Tireman visited in 1931 and wrote of several months later. Educator George Sánchez visited here and showcased Actopan in his 1936 book on Mexico’s schools. Social worker and teacher Catherine Vesta Sturges worked at Actopan for four years beginning in 1928 before becoming a protégé of John Collier at the BIA during the New Deal.

This premier showcase of the Mexican government won accolades from the Americans for its attempts to systematize the training of the schoolteachers to whom the Mexican state had given primary responsibility for ensuring the success of the postrevolutionary integration project. If the misiones culturales launched the postrevolutionary project out of Mexico City in the early years when local communities did not yet have federal schools, it was the role of the escuela normal rural to indoctrinate the cadre of schoolteachers into the state’s melting pot project after those rural schools had been established. Much like a normal school in the United States, the federal normal school was a teacher training college for young adults, and it received lavish resources from Mexico City. In the early years of the SEP, the escuela normal rural was absent from the educational landscape. But as the number of elementary schools grew in the years after 1921, it became the hub of teacher training. It took on the responsibility of training the teachers who went to work in the new public schools, and it provided the primary institutional footprint out of which radiated the cultural missions on the training sojourns to the rural communities of the nation. Teachers migrated from their home villages to the normal school for extended seasons of classroom instruction, after which they were certified to teach in the rural schools of the various provinces. Once they returned home to their villages, they were visited by the instructors of the cultural missions, whose duty was to reinforce the original instruction that the teachers had received from the state.

Since normal schools like Actopan were expected to operate indefinitely in remote areas of the nation, they depended almost entirely on federal outlays from the SEP budget. Education professors were assigned to the normal school, where they often remained in place for three years or more. Pupils at the normal school were adolescents and young adults, many with only rudimentary reading and writing skills, yet they were much older than the four- to ten-year-olds who attended the federal rural schools, and they were expected, as a result, to maintain much higher degrees of discipline and attention to their studies as representatives of the new state. The escuela anexa (annex school) was attached to each federal normal school and served as the laboratory school for these young teachers. The normal school and annex school are sometimes mistaken for one another, but they were distinct institutions. Much as a laboratory school served as a teacher training elementary school in schools of education in the United States, the escuela anexa was the laboratory school where normal students trained to be classroom instructors under the supervision of the normal school professors. It was in the escuela anexa where theory hit the road. Ideas in learning were transformed into the practice of learning, in preparation for the ultimate test of the new nation: instruction and social reconstruction from within the federal rural school where the new teachers would find themselves in trial-by-fire situations within a few months. If things went well, the teachers would find a happy medium with the community to which they had gone. If things went poorly, they would be killed and their bodies dumped on the outskirts of the village.⁷

For the Americans, the most important characteristic of the rural normal schools was the system of supervision through which the Mexican federal state attempted to indoctrinate its normal school students into the regimen prescribed by the Secretariat of Public Education. The rural normal school of Oaxtepec, Morelos, was typical. Along with Anenecuilco, both Oaxtepec and Cuautla—the first city to fall to Zapata during the Mexican Revolution—lie on the same flat plain in Morelos fifty miles south of Mexico City, bounded by mountains on all sides. When inspector Higinio Vázquez Santa Ana was tasked with preparing an inspection report for the SEP headquarters in 1933, he left a description of Oaxtepec’s training policies. Vázquez left out the exact number of students enrolled at the school, but they had come from the states of Guerrero, Puebla, and Mexico, and from Mexico City. He reported that 50 percent were men and 50 percent women. Students had to be sixteen or older to enroll, and they were subsequently arranged in classes of instruction that corresponded to the first-, third-, and fifth-grade classrooms to which they would be assigned on graduation. Some students were deficient in primary skills, including reading and writing, and required an additional year of primary school instruction before they could return to their studies at Oaxtepec. Of those found to need an extra year, two-thirds were members of Mexico’s Native American communities.⁸

Figures 6 and 7. Two photographs of the normal rural school at Erongícuaro, Michoacán. At bottom, a teacher in training guides his students at Erongarícuaro’s annex school. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Escuelas Normales Rurales, Box 77, Folder 9 (Michoacán) and Box 40, Folder 1 (Michoacán).

The teaching corps at Oaxtepec was one of its greatest strengths, according to Vázquez. “They are all actively involved in the school, enthusiastic, and come with good training.” They were primarily responsible for giving classes in the traditional curriculum, including arithmetic and geometry, algebra, Spanish literature and language, social science, and music and singing. But they also demonstrated specializations in other domains that had been deemed central to the integration project of the state. They were expected to study the native languages of the indigenous communities of Morelos, since, as Vázquez reported, a majority of schoolchildren still spoke only their native language rather than Spanish. He was even surprised to find that Spanish was being spoken in one location in the jurisdiction of the rural normal school. “It is important to take note of the fact that in the region of Oaxtepec there is to be found one school whose students speak Spanish,” Vázquez wrote. “That village is Tetelcingo. It is for this reason that we must endeavor to teach this language not only there, but in other communities of Morelos state, where it is more common to find the languages of the native Americans.” There were classes in psychology of education, rural sociology, Native American languages, and a broad range of manual arts that included carpentry, toolmaking, introduction to the manual trades, the domestic household, and basic drawing. Normal school students were expected to attend six forty-five-minute sessions of instruction every day from Monday through Friday every month between January and June, with added sessions dedicated to physical activity and rural economic production at night.⁹

The state maintained its leverage through the relationship between the cultural missions and the rural normal school. Programming at the normal school was modified through the cultural missions, which functioned as the network through which instruction from Mexico City could be modified in the field. “The normal school professors put into place those programs that had been sent to the school in 1931 from the Office of the Cultural Missions [in Mexico City],” wrote Vázquez. The cultural missions continued to function as a centralizing agency whose role was to standardize pedagogy as it radiated out from Mexico City. Still, local conditions often tempered this centralizing function. “These directions from the Office of Cultural Missions are always modified by the particularities dictated by the region in question,” wrote Vázquez. “We must put them to work in the context of the cultures that our students bring to them.” Meanwhile, the normal school was open to whoever wanted to visit, including the parents of the normal school students. “Some parents of the students at the school visit Oaxtepec and even live at the school themselves,” Vázquez reported. Oaxtepec was also the subject of frequent visits by cultural missionaries from other states and dignitaries out of Mexico City. “I was also there during the visit by one of our congressmen from Mexico City and when several visitors were escorted to the school,” wrote Vázquez. Another visit was made by Alfredo Basurto. “Professor Alfredo Basurto, Chief of the Cultural Mission, also visited the school while I was there.… His visit was beneficial for both the teachers and students of the school, since Basurto was interested in the technical progress being made in the methods of instruction and spoke with them about the refinements that had to be made to their chosen methods. He finished after consulting with several of the teachers and students of the school.”¹⁰

The House of the People

In a photograph taken in Zacatecas in August 1935, New Mexican George Sánchez began capturing the visual record of the analogy in integration he made between rural Mexico and the rural American West during the 1930s. Already he had captured images of instruction in regional dancing, waterworks, and manual labor that was happening at the escuela normal rural in Oaxtepec, Morelos.¹¹ Sánchez had captured scenes from the annex schools attached to the other normal academies he had already visited, as well. There was a community park with a new fountain in one photograph. In another, there was a collection of farm animals taken in the company of a trainee learning animal husbandry in the state of Puebla. He also recorded his impressions of daily life. In one, he recorded the thatch huts of Morelos’s peasants, under a canopy of sky that was framed by the volcanos Popocatépetl and Ixtaccihuatl in the background.¹² Here, in Anenecuilco twenty-five years earlier, Zapata had begun the revolutionary movement of sugar workers whose rebellion against the state became a central component of armed confrontation in Mexico between 1911 and 1920. In these photographs taken in Mexico’s rural valleys, away from the metropolitan centers of the postrevolutionary nation, one can see Sánchez’s impressions of rural Mexico.

But it was after he arrived in the state of Zacatecas in the desert north that Sánchez took the photograph that provided the finest visual metaphor for the integrationist work of the Mexican state he had come to study. Sánchez was making an inspection tour of Mexico’s northern schools in the company of one of the regional directors of federal education. He had already visited Chihuahua, and was headed next to Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, and Querétaro before turning east toward Yucatán.¹³ In front of an adobe structure with a single door and two large windows, he arranged a group of Zacatecan elementary school students in front of their rural school. They were arranged by gender and size, with women to the left, men to the right, and smaller children to the front. At the far left, Sánchez placed the schoolteacher. As adobe structures go, the school was an impressive achievement. The large adobe bricks depend on stone arches for support. The style is territorial as New Mexicans understood it, with rock lining the edges of the roof for architectural display. This was a building into which some resources had been devoted, indicating that it must have functioned ceremoniously in the high deserts of the Mexican altiplano.

Sánchez had collected a similar group of photographs in New Mexico one year earlier. He had embarked on a study tour of northern New Mexico’s own rural schools, and just as he would later do in Zacatecas, he arranged the students of northern New Mexico’s rural schools into the same pattern he would later follow in Mexico. In the New Mexico photographs, as well, Sánchez lined up the schoolchildren in front of their own school, with the schoolteacher to their immediate left. Behind them towers the rural school, while in the background one can detect something of the environmental isolation in which these communities were located. The New Mexico schools are more modest than those in the Mexican photographs. But the larger statement is the same as the one at work in the Zacatecas photo. Here is the rural school as an instrument of national integration. The children are arrayed close together, as if in some statement of unity. The teacher and the school watch over the group, as if to protect them and guide them toward the social ideal of the progressive reformer. That one would have difficulty separating the photos taken in New Mexico from those taken in Mexico is perhaps the greatest statement of the single project in unification that united Sánchez’s career across Mexico and the United States.

What George Sánchez had photographed in Zacatecas was the rural school, la casa del pueblo. It was at the bottom of the SEP’s institutional pyramid, or, depending on one’s point of view, at the top. In the SEP archives in Mexico City, no institutions built during the 1920s have received less attention than the rural schools. Their paper trail to Mexico City is far thinner than it is for the cultural missions and the rural normal schools, with large gaps in the chronological sequences of the documents collected. The information gathered is sporadic and haphazard. One finds little evidence of the high officials of the SEP, and little attention devoted to the questions of pedagogy that one finds among the records of the rural normal schools. Such inattention is perhaps to be expected, given that some 10,000 of these rural schools had been established in the decade of the 1920s. With so many schools operating in such a small span of time, it is easy to see why any particular one did not receive much attention. Yet Sánchez’s photographs indicate that he understood the heavy responsibility of the rural school in Mexico’s integration project. The cultural missions and rural normal schools were tactically important as the platforms for the delivery of ideologies and resources through which the melting pot was to create itself in the Mexican territory. They received the most resources and attention from foreigners and state officials alike. But the central state had aimed the cultural missions and the rural normal schools at the rural school. It was through the rural school that hundreds of thousands of Mexico’s schoolchildren were to be fused together into a united society. It was there where the nation was to be forged. A recent book by one of Mexico’s leading scholars of postrevolutionary education has adequately captured the hope that was infused into the rural school: To Build the School, To Build the State.¹⁴ Sánchez implicitly recognized the true import of the rural school in the Mexican hierarchy of power and social transformation. It was the rural school that was to carry the heaviest burden of Mexico’s integration project, and in this sense, it was the most important institution of the state after 1920, just as Sánchez’s photographs reflect.

In theory, the purpose of la casa del pueblo was to close the political gap between Mexico City and the thousands of rural villages that composed the postrevolutionary nation. The extent to which the state was promoting the cultural life of the villages as part of the reconstituted nation has been the topic of some of the finest scholarship in Latin American history over the last thirty years. Some forty years ago, Josefina Zoraida Vázquez noted that the textbooks used by the federal state promoted a vision of Mexico that favored the dictates of the SEP over the cultural practices of the local communities.¹⁵ A large body of important scholarship subsequently argued that Mexico’s state builders, including the Columbia University graduates Manuel Gamio and Moisés Sáenz, sometimes failed to uphold the designs of local communities in establishing the new equilibrium between the local and the national during the process of national consolidation. Even if no transcendent ethical platform existed on which to construct the new nation, as pragmatism and cultural relativism held, it did not matter anyhow, these scholars have argued, since public officials in Mexico City were unwilling to modify their presumptions to align themselves more closely with the wishes of the local community. More recently, new scholarship has deepened our understanding of the local experiments in nation building from which the Mexican melting pot was forged. Local communities often supported the state schools, thereby establishing new avenues for social movement that became important for social mobility in later generations. And the melting pot project may have witnessed its first hesitant movement toward cultural pluralism during the 1930s under the banner of the SEP schools.¹⁶

Figures 8 and 9. George I. Sánchez’s photographs of rural public schools in Mexico and New Mexico. While the discursive framework of integration across Mexico and the American West was made possible by the pragmatist ideas Mexican and American social scientists shared, the political movements toward integration were reflected in the institution of the elementary school as a site of cultural consolidation across distinctive cultural communities. At the top, for instance, Indian and mestizo schoolchildren attended postrevolutionary Mexico’s new public schools after 1921; at the bottom, Mexico-descended and European immigrant children went to school together in the schools of rural New Mexico. These projects in national consolidation did not occur independently of one another. Top: George I. Sánchez, Mexico: A Revolution by Education (New York: Viking, 1936), 202; Bottom: Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

A universal statement about these petit projects within la casa del pueblo is elusive given the diversity of postrevolutionary Mexico’s rural communities, but there can be no doubt of the enormous scope of the work they performed. Looking back on the years between 1920 and 1940, one could see the establishment of thousands of new schools in the Republic of Mexico at the hands of the federal government and the local community alike. Like the Rosenwald schools of the American Deep South and the progressive education movement in the United States, this institutional project was one of the grandest educational chapters in the twentieth-century history of the Western Hemisphere. In every state of the Mexican republic, new rural schools were constructed by the hundreds. Whereas prior to 1910 and the downfall of Porfirio Díaz, schooling had taken place exclusively in the metropolitan centers of the republic, by 1940 nearly every community in the country could claim a rural school of its own. The French state took notice and replicated Mexico’s efforts by 1960.¹⁷ Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Bolivia also copied the example. This international example may have reached its apogee in the late 1940s, when UNESCO turned to Mexico’s revolutionary schools as models for development in many parts of the world.

Ultimately, however, it is less important that we come to a universal resolution on the quality of Mexico’s schools than it is to understand why the rural schools became a powerful example off which Americans reflected their spectrum of thought as they wrestled with the place of the public school in the rural American West. First, the relationship between the local community and the national government in Mexico was an example for the Americans of how to rethink the relationship between the state and rural America in the 1930s. Nothing drew their attention more than the willingness of some communities to use their resource bases to construct public schools and provide for the maintenance of the local schoolteachers. Such a funding mechanism for the rural schools was an example, the Americans thought, for the system of schools in the American West, where village schoolhouses still operated without the financial support of state government and outside the supervision of state boards of education. Second, the Americans were interested in the comprehensiveness and uniformity with which pedagogical instruction was carried out away from the metropolitan centers of the nation. The communities that they had come from in the United States were not merely minority communities, but, more important, rural communities whose relationship to the metropole was uncertain and underfinanced. In the context of the small size of the federal state before President Roosevelt and state resources that failed to protect the educational resources of the rural American West, the question of implementing reform was among the most important topics of concern for these Americans. As we shall see, they had committed their careers to the public school as an instrument of ethnic democracy. But such ethical commitments meant almost nothing if institutions could not be produced to carry forth the rejuvenation of industrial society that they imagined. Third, Mexico’s use of the local natural environment as an adjunct space of pedagogy that could be harnessed to the classroom was an important model of instruction. Agriculture, ravines, mountains, flora, animals—all these and more formed a part of the organic environment the Americans surveyed as they journeyed through the provinces of the Mexican countryside. It should be remembered that they had been trained in the pedagogy of pragmatism, and so were constantly on the lookout for methods in learning that they could put into practice in the context of the rural American West.

John Dewey and the Mexican State

Moisés Sáenz had imported pragmatist education to Mexico from Columbia University at the height of John Dewey’s influence in North America. He had studied with Dewey only three years after the publication of Democracy and Education, and he began studying at Columbia the same year, 1919, as the founding of the Progressive Education Association. When he helped to create a province of experimentalist schools for the postrevolutionary state, then, Sáenz transformed the thousands of new schools that began operating in Mexico into a new province of experimentalist education in North America at the very moment new schools inspired by Dewey were simultaneously opening in the United States. Yet timing alone cannot explain the attraction Mexico’s institutions had for the Americans.

The use of Deweyan pragmatism as a system of social transformation in Mexico suffered from important shortcomings, moreover. The expansion of modernist ideas on Mexican soil appears to have been unsystematic, applied across a variety of institutions in various forms rather than on any single level of the federal system, and not limited to any single theory of new education or any single theorist. Pragmatist theory appeared more prominently in the curriculum units of the escuelas normales regionales and the misiones culturales than it did a level below, in the rural elementary schools where the children were attending school. Even in the normal school, however, one is struck by small evidence of direct discussions of pragmatism in comparison to the room given to matters of hygiene, the agricultural economy, and rudimentary pedagogy in mathematics, language instruction, history, and physical science. Similarly, it is difficult to measure systematically the extent to which normal school teachers translated their theoretical training into experiential learning techniques, and to what end. One cannot gauge comprehensively, therefore, whether the outcomes of pragmatism reached Mexico’s schoolchildren, or in what form. Similarly, if one of the ultimate values of Deweyan theory lay in its moral critique of political and economic intransigence in Western society, then we are still left short from understanding without much further work whether children in rural villages like San Miguel Nocutzepo, Michoacán, or Santa Cruz, Hidalgo, were being given the opportunity to think creatively and independently about the relationship of their communities to the new nation that was being reformulated after 1920.

Figure 10. A cultural missionary in the state of Tlaxcala delivering a lesson in educational pedagogy in 1928. John Dewey was received with warm praise and the public honors attending to a foreign diplomat of large stature during a 1926 visit here. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Institutos Sociales, Box 20, Folder 3 (Tlaxcala).

Dewey himself had noted the shortcomings of Mexico’s nascent education system. Famously, he had celebrated Mexico’s rural schools in a series of articles for the New Republic after Sáenz had invited him to Mexico City in 1926. Yet in a little-known article in the New York Times on his return to the United States, Dewey revealed his skepticism that Mexico had produced a system of education that reflected the particular needs of Mexico’s peoples. “[T]he Mexican peon, like the Russian mujik, could do with a quarter of a century of intensive drill in reading, writing, spelling, and playing with ideas,” he told the newspaper.¹⁸ Although some would indict Dewey as assuming that U.S. democracy was the normative model to which postrevolutionary Mexico should aspire, Dewey’s own view of the importance of diversity to the development of the good community had actually led him to underscore the differences between social organization in the United States and Mexico. Social conditions in Mexico were different, he was arguing, and those particularities deserved deeper considerations from the schools there than they had received. A comment to a group of rural schoolteachers while visiting the normal school of Tlaxcala underscored his skepticism to the New York Times that Mexico had established schools designed for its own needs instead of copying those of other countries. “Dewey wanted the rural schoolteachers to remember the urgency and necessity of avoiding imitation, even if the model originated in the advanced countries, because each nation organizes its own system of education in accordance with its unique history, tradition, racial past, and economic and social institutions,” wrote cultural missionary Primitivo Alvarez during Dewey’s visit to Tlaxcala. “He told us never to look dismally upon the surroundings in which we worked, because once education was reduced to mere imitation, we would lose our unique personality and those things that we could contribute to world civilization.”¹⁹ As James Gouinlock has argued, what was noteworthy about Dewey’s observations about Mexico’s schools was Dewey’s “insistence that historical change of all sorts be governed by ideas appropriate to the respective cultures. As in any problematic circumstance, plans should not be imposed a priori and from without.”²⁰

Why, then, did the misión cultural, the escuela normal rural, and casa del pueblo become institutional examples of progressive change for the U.S. social scientists if neither the timing nor pragmatism’s ambivalent career in Mexico suffices to explain the turn? Like Dewey, they noted important shortcomings in Mexico’s schools, including a heavy-handed state bureaucracy that did not always live up to the highest hopes of Deweyan philosophy and the unevenness of educational reform policies across the expanse of the nation. These Americans may have been foreign observers, but they were not intellectuals blind to the weaknesses of Mexican reform. They may have been optimistic, but they were not naive social scientists who saw redemptionist possibilities for the postrevolutionary educational system where there were none.²¹

For the Americans, Mexico’s educational institutions were a realm of contingent possibilities rather than a model example of politics that had been successfully achieved. First, the evidence of pragmatist theory at the level of the rural normal school—however attenuated it may have been—represented an experiment in potential transformation via the school they tested for use in the United States. Second, Mexico provided a source of experimental ideas about educational administration in the rural scene. Third, because they placed experience and practice alongside theory, Mexico’s schools provided the Americans with useful evidence for the questions of psychology that Dewey asked in the wake of the educational revolution that he helped to usher in. Taken collectively, these broader interpretations of Dewey provided three strong reasons the Americans found institutional experimentation in Mexico constructive for their discrete projects at home rather than a superficial confirmation of the spontaneous emergence of ethnic democracy in postrevolutionary society.²²

Documentary evidence from the rural normal schools, for example, shows that some of the essential characteristics that defined pragmatist theory were being used in rural Mexico. In a series of handwritten exams completed by schoolteachers-in-training in the state of Michoacán, for example, young men and women in residence at the escuelas normales left evidence that what they were being taught was something more than top-down management techniques designed to create a tractable labor force. Félix Gómez was one case in point. “The child has a divine right to a life of enjoyment, to an abundance of room carved out for play, to shape his labors at school in a manner that conforms to the distinct stages of his life and to express his efforts through activities of immediate interest,” he wrote in his final exam. “It is the case, then, that to impose on the child is to stifle his spontaneity; it is fatal to his free choice; that work subverts play and the execution of labor to his own proper initiative.” He continued: “Under the inspiration of a good schoolteacher and with a developed sense of initiative, the innate interests of the child are sufficient for him to carry out his daily labors.” There are many questions raised by this small passage buried in the final exam of a young schoolteacher in training as it was recorded in the educational records of a nascent normal school in the mountains of central Michoacán state. What was the precise source of these ideas? To what extent were these ideas practiced at the annex school among four-and five-year-old children rather than merely left at the level of theoretical instruction in the normal school? Were Gómez’s ideas edited by his normal school professors? We may never know the answers to these questions. But the very presence of these ideas in modern education, written just three months after John Dewey’s 1926 study trip to Mexico, opens up the possibility that some of the tenets of pragmatist thought were infiltrating the minds of the young schoolteachers of the nation.²³

Félix Gómez was not alone. Another handwritten document by a young schoolteacher from the rural normal school at Tacámbaro, Michoacán, supports the role of the pragmatist critique of formalistic education in the educational institutions of Mexico’s still evolving nation: In the old school “it was simply understood that the students would work, like the teeth of the wheel of a grand machine without enjoying any of the benefits of their excessive labors, by force of the teacher who would give loud orders or harsh punishments.… But today this method no longer exists in the schools. It is not the teacher who obligates one to work, but love itself, or interest in the thing that the student is dedicated to learning.” Like a divine wind, the student wrote, a new school had been created. “The day came when the winds of progress came and broke apart the walls of the old school, leaving it clear to everyone in general, that, like the dictum that is repeated in the Decalogue of El Maestro Rural, ‘My school in the true house of the people.’ ”²⁴ In a different example, schoolteacher-in-training María Chávez exhibited the new philosophical principles as they had been introduced in rural Mexico in a celebration of the career of the sixteenth-century Catholic bishop Vasco de Quiroga. Among the episodes in Mexican history that the Americans celebrated when they began arriving in Mexico in the early 1930s were the open-air academies of Vasco de Quiroga, whose sixteenth-century policies in education and self-government among the Tarascan Indians of Michoacán continue to be honored by some in Michoacán today. Often counterposed to the scorched-earth policies of Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, Quiroga’s policies of vernacular-language instruction and autonomy in learning practices were used by the Americans as a precursor to twentieth-century postrevolutionary government policy. Chávez agreed, as her 1926 final exam at the Tacámbaro rural normal school reflected: “The theme that was recommended to me has convinced me of the large similarity that exists between the pedagogy imparted by a group of benefactors after the conquest and the present-day rural schools,” she wrote. “Don Vasco de Quiroga … said that the Indian is a rational human being and a younger brother who waits for an education and who is worthy of it like anyone else.… Quiroga formed the rural schools whose trajectory to better the conditions of the Indians was very great. That tendency cannot be reduced to the social life of the Indians, but to Quiroga’s move to release them from the slavery in which they found themselves.”²⁵

The monthly newspapers published by the rural normal schools displayed testimonials to potential social change, meanwhile. In Erongarícuaro, Michoacán, for example, a young fourth-grade student named Jesús published a short editorial consisting of the ten maxims that expressed the social ethics he was developing at the rural normal school there. “Our country cries for citizens who fight to be free. It is good to be independent,” he wrote. In a space left blank, he invited his readers to express their hopes for self-fulfillment as the administrators of the SEP in Mexico City attempted to build a national system of schools. “If you would create a brilliant career, fulfill your responsibility as student and you shall end by becoming a (fill-in-the-blank-as-you-choose).” In a third comment, Jesús directly targeted the Indians of Michoacán: “You [the Indian] have fought to liberate your race and died [for that cause] so that others later could defend their rights, thereby becoming free like the lion of the mountain and free like the birds of the skies.”²⁶ A second example comes from the monthly newspaper of the rural normal school at Xocoyucan, Tlaxcala. In December 1926, the young student identified only as “A.G.A.” described the importance of paying attention to the interests of the child as the central consideration of the schoolteacher under whose supervision she would fall. “To study the talents of a child is fundamental and requires continuous and close observation of his spontaneous activities. One must watch the child at play and during her assigned tasks, where one can measure the satisfaction that occurs when she experiments with a difficult labor,” he wrote. Such work, wrote the student, was a labor of many years, since oftentimes one’s interests did not emerge until age twelve or fourteen. Yet such difficult labor was necessary because the world needed people of all types. “We take great notice of our mission, which is steadfastly opposed to transform our classrooms into warehouses for our students. Many students who were called good-for-nothings, stubborn, dense, dumb, or crazy were simply misunderstood; we tried to force square pegs into round holes.” Earlier in his essay, he had elaborated on just this very point. “It is well known that there are no two individuals who are exactly alike. That is why we say that nature breaks the mold each time that a new child is born.”²⁷

These postrevolutionary challenges to traditional power structures do not invalidate contemporary historical criticism that Mexico’s postrevolutionary educational projects were efforts at social control. In Chávez’s own words is the evidence that the state could be a paternalistic influence on rural Mexico via education policies that rationalized the Indian as a member of the human race in the attempt merely to subvert his freedom anew. Chávez states that it was her schoolteacher who had recommended the topic of Vasco de Quiroga to her, for example. Quiroga was a Catholic priest who, as Chávez writes, was attempting to convert Mexico’s Native Americans to the Catholic faith rather than trying to increase their level of freedom to some precursor condition that antedated the Spanish conquest.²⁸ Similar clues of control are found throughout the essays in the files of Tacámbaro, Michoacán. In the words of Agripina Magaña J., for example, the Indian was alcoholic, dirty, and lazy.²⁹ According to Catalina Medina César, life in rural Mexico was a decayed civilization where new light had to be introduced as part of the postrevolutionary moral order.³⁰ The rural normal school newspapers sometimes argued that the new Mexican school should become an arbiter of power no matter what the local community desired. These examples clearly confirm what scholars like Mary Kay Vaughan, Susana Quintanilla, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez have argued about postrevolutionary Mexico: through such instruments as El Maestro Rural, the state represented a heavy hand of authority that constrained the possibilities for rural people into prescribed channels rather than increasing the chances for lives free of authoritarian control.³¹

Yet as historian of Mexico Alexander Dawson has pointed out, emphasizing paternalistic control without underscoring the simultaneous presence of ideas that can be interpreted as challenges to authority structures is a good story that “relies on a vision of the past that distorts as much as it reveals.”³² Félix Gómez emphasized free choice in his essay, for example. Salvador León y Ortiz was clear that the SEP’s new education models emphasized interest in the task at hand rather than obligation as the source of work. And even as Chávez romanticized the career of a sixteenth-century priest whose politics was not neutral, she underscored the critique of the conventional view of the Indian that John Dewey and Franz Boas had helped to make central to twentieth-century social theory. The Indian was rational in the context of his own culture, and fitted to ideas just like anyone else, she wrote.³³ Quiroga was a model not merely because he emphasized the expansion of freedom in the realm of civic intercourse, but because he emphasized political freedom as part of the hierarchy of power. One eminent historian of postrevolutionary education in Mexico, Elsie Rockwell, has put the spread of modernist ideas in the following way. “The SEP’s bulletins and journals carried the new educational philosophy into the states of the nation. The echo of those ideas is to be found in the texts and the discussions in the schools of Tlaxcala. Those ideas did not enter without much subsequent commentary, but at the very least, the educators of the SEP created new spaces in which these debates could take place.”³⁴ These examples do not suggest Mexico had been transformed into a democratic nation. They support the more modest claim that new philosophical ideas were entering the provinces of the Mexican state through the influence of John Dewey and others, where they were recognized by the Americans who visited Mexico in the 1930s. The Americans who came to Mexico later were astonished to find such ideas at work there, because they were struggling to bring those same ideas to bear on the difficult social conditions of the rural American West where they worked.

Mexico’s schools also represented important experimental models of administrative practice for the Americans. Such concerns may seem quotidian, but the flow of resources from Mexico City to the rural normal schools required methodical planning, good communication between SEP headquarters and rural schools in the provinces, and a system for supervising the mandates directed by the state. Cultural missionaries had to find ways to organize rural students into discrete grades and classrooms, integrate teaching methodologies into the daily rituals of rural villagers, and convince supportive villages that new methods of instruction would prove beneficial to the economic and political inclinations of local families. None of these measures could be taken for granted, the Americans knew. Faced with metropolitan political bureaucracies at home that had little experience in managing new educational techniques in rural communities, the Americans were amazed by the extent to which Mexico’s central state had unfolded its educational projects in the provinces of the postrevolutionary republic. The expenditure of resources was deeply inadequate by Mexico’s own standard, covering only a fraction of the national territory. But to the Americans, those resources represented a formidable administrative project in the rural scene whose components could be profitably modified for use in the American West.

Third, Dewey in Mexico had currency for the Americans because he had succeeded in moving the understanding of the school in the direction of the study of psychology. Contextualizing Dewey within psychology is not an easy move to make in twentieth-century Mexican history, since debates about psychology and the school are not antiseptic discussions to be considered outside the deep political stakes involved in the decades following the Mexican Revolution. Yet any review of Dewey’s role in educational reform, political transformation, aesthetics, and ethics is not merely incomplete, but fundamentally flawed, if it does not first take into account his interest in how the mind creates knowledge out of experience in order to transform how knowledge is used politically. Psychology was central to Dewey’s transformational project, but it was not its handmaiden, as it is typically treated in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution.³⁵

Mexico’s emphasis on psychology in education sensitized the Americans to rural education in Mexico as a system that was attempting to make the apprehension of meaning more transparent and tangible. In this regard, nothing was more important than the process that in Mexican historiography has come to be called “action-centered education.” In the tradition of Mexican historiography, the rituals of practice in Mexico’s rural schools have been widely condemned for their presumptions and attempts at labor control. Teaching such manual skills as gardening, sewing, furniture design, and basket making has been rightly critiqued as a means of emphasizing specific labor practices in the interest of promoting a particular form of economic production in postrevolutionary Mexico. Yet for the Americans, manual practice was more than mere production for the economy. It was, instead, the measure of an idea. It was what distinguished one thought from another, the link between an impression residing in the mind and a specific object, process, or relationship in the world that surrounded the human being. As Greg Grandin has recently pointed out in the case of Brazil, it is right to see experience in the progressive educational universe as amenable to labor control and the dictates of the teacher.³⁶ But such a view does not exhaust what practice represented. If viewed though the language of psychology that was under development during the first half of the twentieth century, it also represented a way to comprehend how human beings made associations between thought and world. As such, practice was an inescapable component of knowing, a process that needed to be studied and refined in all the circumstances in which it took place. Such experiential practice was fundamental to Deweyan thought. For making associations in the world was a fundamental step in transforming the physical and social conditions in which human communities were enmeshed.³⁷

Psychologist Loyd Tireman was the consummate example of the window into practice and action that rural education in Mexico represented when the Americans arrived to study state policy there. He had long been interested in the psychology of language as a process of thinking. In the laboratory schools of the American Midwest and American West where he had trained, the concern with drawing associations between word and object was the fundamental concern of a forty-year career in education. When he arrived in Mexico in 1931, he was quickly drawn to the use of guitars as instruments of practice in the rural schools of Hidalgo, as well as plays and skits as instruments for teaching history and cultural tradition. Such practices, he knew, had long been a staple of Deweyan laboratory schools across the American landscape, as John and Evelyn Dewey’s 1915 Schools of Tomorrow attested.³⁸ Yet such techniques for understanding how the mind apprehends data routinely came up against a problem in psychology that remains a large stumbling block in social science work into the twenty-first century: how were educators and psychologists to design systems of learning for children whose native language was not English? In the context of New Mexico where Tireman worked, the dominant language was Spanish, a language for which he found a ready analog in postrevolutionary Mexico. Not labor control, but the fit between ideas in Spanish and practice in Mexico and New Mexico became the object of his search within the institutions of the Mexican state in the 1930s. Such minute observations by Tireman may seem otherworldly for scholars searching to tell the political history of twentieth-century Mexico. Yet the fact that such minuscule work was central to the Americans only underscores how important it is to interpret Deweyan pragmatism as something other than a defense of Fordist political economy.

The set of policy experiments that postrevolutionary Mexico represented made its cultural missions, rural normal academies, and rural schools institutions the Americans could profitably study as potential new instruments for social reconstruction in the United States. As practitioners of modernist ideas who had studied the thickness of Dewey’s wide-ranging thought, the Americans searched for clues about Dewey in Mexico that were broader than most contemporary scholars have assigned to them. The evidence suggests that some elements of Deweyan theory were being applied in the Mexican field to the wider spectrum of instruments that Dewey understood to be a part of social change. And it suggests that Mexican policy experimentation was useful to the Americans because it was a working system of interdependent institutions that represented the complicated relationship between education and the modern state rather than a complacent ethical pronouncement about local communities in a rapidly changing North America. The teacher, the importance of experience in learning, and the relationship of the student to the larger community were all instruments to be studied closely, the Americans knew. Given the large framework into which Dewey developed his philosophy, it makes sense to evaluate the presence of Dewey in Mexico by splintering the elements of education into its multiple parts and testing each one, rather than reducing Dewey to an unbreakable whole that must stand as a single test of ethics in the modern nation. It was not hope alone that had brought the Americans to study Mexico’s misiones culturales and casas del pueblo. In the face of a political project that was still unfolding, the Americans saw reform impulses of potential change in Mexico’s educational institutions that they adapted for their racial liberalism work in the United States. It was these impulses that attracted their attention, even as they acknowledged that transforming the social hierarchy was neither an instantaneous process nor one for which success was ever guaranteed.

The Convergence of Pragmatism and Indigenismo