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Chapter 1

A Symphony of Cultures

If the essence of comparative history is to find differences rather than to highlight convergences, as Daniel T. Rodgers has argued, then the relationship between the United States and Mexico may be a better case study in comparative history than the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.¹ Scholars have contrasted Mexico’s economic underdevelopment to America’s industrial leviathan, for example. They have idealized Latin America as a series of politically conservative Catholic societies in contrast to a Protestant United States that they have seen as politically progressive. The Mexican practice of race mixing known as mestizaje has been held up as an antithesis to the antimixing politics in the United States regarding miscegenation. Political instability has seemed to define Mexico, whereas America is held as the archetype of political stability.

George I. Sánchez and his colleagues in the civil rights movement overcame America’s conventional orientalism toward Mexico by comparing three features of postrevolutionary Mexico to the United States.² The first was that Mexico represented a country of enormous cultural diversity, not a source of uniform labor for American industry. “It is time now for the revolutionaries of Mexico to take up the hammer and wrap themselves in the blacksmith’s apron, in order to fashion the new nation composed of iron and bronze,” one of Mexico’s eminent twentieth-century public intellectuals, Manuel Gamio, had written of Mexico’s diversity in 1916.³ These Americans concurred, noting the presence of fifty indigenous groups whose distinctive cultures were vibrant contributors to the Mexican national community. The second feature was the central state as the mechanism for blending people into a united bloc of national citizens. Mexico had tried to use its central government to unify its cultural communities every few decades since independence in 1821. But only now, after the devastating Revolution of 1910, had social scientists come to believe that Mexico had finally found the way to national consolidation. As Gamio put it, a “powerful fatherland and a coherent and precisely defined nationality” would be the outcome for Mexico’s melting pot democracy, the result of new social sciences that had equipped the enlightened public official with the tools needed to achieve the perfect balance of a united public.⁴ The third was Mexico’s turn to the theorists at Columbia University to fashion social scientific solutions to the challenges posed by the institutional destruction of the revolution. Faced with an overwhelmingly rural population of extreme cultural diversity, Mexico’s state intellectuals faced a militaristic country to the north and the complete destruction of their own state amid ethnic and religious differences of vast proportions. These Mexican thinkers responded by turning to the work of John Dewey and Franz Boas, thus mirroring the responses of the Americans like Sánchez who had turned to Mexico in their search for ethnic consolidation and nation building in the rural American West.

Some of the Americans had come to Mexico in their teens, fleeing the World War I draft. Others came on study trips paid for by private philanthropies in Chicago and New York that saw potential solutions to America’s race problem in Mexico’s state policy. Yet others were young schoolteachers who backed into Mexico’s influence on the life of the American West as a result of youthful enthusiasm to leave homes in Michigan and Iowa for new ones in New Mexico and California. Whatever their trajectories to postrevolutionary Mexico, these Americans became more than tourists to America’s southern neighbor. Mexico’s own resemblance to pressing questions of social change in the United States made Mexico a lifelong example for them, despite careers that they developed almost exclusively in the American West.

A Symphony of Cultures

It was impressive to watch how much ground of the Mexican countryside George I. Sánchez had covered. Already he had made two trips to Mexico, one to Mexico City in April 1935 to plan his future scope of work there for the Rosenwald Fund and a second in May, marking his first foray outside the national capital. But it was in June that he appeared to encounter his first difficulties, as he followed the rural school officials who escorted him on his trip southward into Mexico’s tropics. Guerrero and “Vera Cruz”—he misspelled the name by writing it with two words, not one—came first late in the month, followed by Yucatán, Tabasco, and the remaining southern states in July. The trip to Puebla had been easy and brought him to the federal government’s rural teacher-training academy and the Escuela Regional Campesina, the adult magnet school for the region’s rural farmers. But the prospect of Yucatán and Campeche was a hard one. “I’m debating on an air trip to Yucatán and Campeche where the problems are quite different due to geography, topography, history, and races,” he wrote in June. “By land or sea the trip is prohibitive due to the inclement season, time, poor connections, and cost.”⁵

In Zacatecas two months later, he found the architecture stunning but the arrangements horrendous. “I’m taking a two-day field trip with the federal director of education—to contact rural areas,” he wrote. But the hotels were flea circuses, the water was contaminated, and the food questionable, Sánchez wrote. “Aside from [this], I really like this town.” On this latest trip, he had passed southward from the border with Texas and New Mexico, heading toward Mexico City while stopping in the states in between. He had visited the Tarahumara Indians in Chihuahua, noting the intensive mining and smelting in the state. He was headed for Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, and Querétaro thereafter. “If any mail is sent to me before September 20, please address it to me at the Hotel Regis in México, D.F., México. I’ll be there through about the 25th on my return trip to the West Coast,” he wrote.⁶

Sánchez was on his way to study Mexico’s postrevolutionary schools and the rural communities they served. He was twenty-eight, an educator with the state of New Mexico, and at the beginning of a career in education and civil rights that would last until the Vietnam era. Normally not associated with Mexico, Sánchez actually completed nearly half his academic output between 1935 and 1955 on postrevolutionary reform there. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, before his name became synonymous with the American civil rights movement in the American West, he wrote five articles on postrevolutionary reform and published two books. His 1935 trips to Mexico were the first series of forays he made during his career, studying its system of elementary and university education and the cultural diversity of the nation.

When Sánchez published his analysis of Mexico’s new revolutionary schools in 1936, he found Diego Rivera’s murals the best symbols of the revolutionary policy and social reforms he had gone to Mexico to study. “He is a master of character study—choosing his subjects from among the common people,” wrote Sánchez.⁷ “He paints them in all their pathos and tragedy, their colour and gaiety, their simplicity.” One could criticize Sánchez for his reductionism. Mexico’s “common people” shared little in common at all, and his claim about “simplicity” was plain wrong. There was nothing simple about Mexico’s peoples, as ten years of civil war two decades earlier had shown. The “simple” peoples of Mexico had helped bring down one government after another, had frustrated church and the civil state alike, and had continued to press their demands for political autonomy from the highlands in the north to the lowlands in the south.

But Sánchez had noted something else in Rivera’s work. Rather than just painting a monolithic representation of Mexico’s people, Rivera had portrayed the range of Mexico’s ethnic diversity. There were the Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Tarascans, Yaqui, and Tarahumara. Rivera had also captured the medium-hued mestizos that made up 60 percent of Mexico’s population. In his murals and paintings, he captured the range of Mexico’s distinctive ethnic communities using different skin tones, clothing patterns, and bodily features. This variety of people was one of the first observations that Sánchez made about Mexico as he traveled throughout the country for the first time in spring and summer 1935. Much later, as he looked back on a lifetime of visits to Mexico, he would describe the breadth of difference he noted in Mexico’s cultural tapestry by analogizing it to that of the United States. “The Mexican people, like people in many other countries, are not the product of just one culture,” he wrote. “In the United States … many cultures have contributed to the personality of the United States citizen: Italian, German, English, Polish, Dutch, and many, many others.… [I]n Mexico, the same is true: the Mexican is the product of many cultures.”⁸

Edwin Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and committed to white-black relations in the American South, was also captivated by Rivera’s murals. He had visited Mexico in 1928, seven years before Sánchez, and his report to the Rosenwald board was especially heavy on the social themes reflected in Rivera’s murals. Embree was clearly moved by the open books that Rivera’s schoolteachers displayed before their rural pupils in the murals that Rivera had painted at the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City. One showed “the teacher bringing new light to Mexican peasants,” he wrote, while another depicted the “wicked priest and capitalist … frowning in the background.”⁹ And just as Sánchez later noted, Embree, too, noted that there was no cultural uniformity among the Mexican people that Rivera portrayed. “Ethnologically, present day Mexico presents … a heterogeneous picture,” he wrote. “The indigenous tribes include 49 well distinguished ethnical groups, speaking 100 distinct languages or dialects, and exhibiting markedly different customs and habits of life.” These were only part of the many groups, wrote Embree, that composed this single nation.¹⁰

Rivera’s murals reflected the major concerns that had brought two of the central figures of twentieth-century American race relations to study the social reforms of the postrevolutionary Mexican state in the 1920s and 1930s. The first was Mexico’s ethnic diversity, which reflected the ethnic diversity of the states in the American West and South where Sánchez and Embree were committed to working. The American West had Mexican-descended mestizos, Indians, and whites, while the Deep South had blacks and whites. But it was the fact of ethnic diversity rather than its specific particularity that made postrevolutionary Mexico important to these Americans. A second was Rivera’s representation of the Mexican state. In the Secretaría de Educación Pública murals Rivera captured the state in the form of a federal schoolteacher imparting the wisdom of the nationalist project to indigenous and labor groups arrayed around her, or alternately, as a mounted federal soldier watching over the educational labors of the teacher before rural farmers. For the Americans, Rivera’s images of the state symbolized an interested government that saw its responsibilities as extending to the reformulation of ethnic relations in the modern nation. The third concern that Rivera captured was the rural countryside. The teacher and the soldier were portrayed not just anywhere, but in rural Mexico. Since Sánchez and Embree were principally concerned with rural New Mexico and the rural South, they wished to study the labors of Mexico’s public officials in the agrarian villages of the nation.

Rivera’s art coincided with one of the recognized moments in U.S. history when public discussions about race relations and ethnic diversity in American society seemed to reach a crest. In The Souls of Black Folk, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois had declared to America that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”¹¹ Not long after, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race gave Americans a canonical installment in the conservative concern with immigration and nativism.¹² Franz Boas had startled the academy in 1911 with one of the definitive statements of the falsity of racial typologies, The Mind of Primitive Man.¹³ But it was two images of the American melting pot produced shortly before Rivera painted his representations of ethnic diversity in Mexico City that arguably became even more archetypal in American culture. In 1915, philosopher Horace Kallen announced in The Nation that the arrival of non-British immigrants to the United States was creating a federation of peoples whose diversity would destroy the insipid national culture that the heirs of British America had created there.¹⁴ Israel Zangwill had been wrong in his turn-of-the-century play, The Melting Pot, that immigrant diversity was destined to collapse into a melting pot that had obliterated the defining features of European immigrants to the United States.¹⁵ Instead, a great moment in American history had been reached at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote Kallen. The widening of American national character that was happening de facto every day as new immigrants came to the United States represented a “cacophony” that could go one of two ways. It could become a sterile, uniform ethic—what Kallen called a “unison”—if conservative Americans refused to transform the accepted basis for an American national culture. Or it could become a “harmony” of peoples who willingly joined each other’s differences to one another to create a richer, more vital American community.¹⁶ In his 1916 “Trans-National America,” meanwhile, young New York essayist Randolph Bourne created a second canonical image of American diversity.¹⁷ Kallen had insisted that the American mosaic was to be fashioned from distinctive cultures whose ultimate quality was insularity that emanated from their intrinsic uniqueness. These could not mix, as Kallen insisted, since the individual could never separate himself out of the distinctive history that his ancestors had bequeathed to him. By contrast, Bourne argued that America was becoming “transnational, a weaving back and forth … of many threads of all sizes and colors.” What made America rich was the impulse toward cultural sharing and the transformation of ethnic cultures that resulted. Kallen stressed the inertial properties of ethnic cultures, arguing that the American federation would be held in place by the pressure of ethnic cultures pushing against one another but never synthesizing. Bourne downplayed the primacy of ethnic cohesion. What mattered was not the intrinsic properties of any one culture, but the decision to share those qualities across cultures. “Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision,” he wrote. Kallen’s harmony was rooted in the group, its intrinsic distinctiveness in need of protection because that difference was the root of identity. Bourne was less excited by the vibrancy of particular cultures. For him, the amalgam of borrowed ideas and practices was more important than the cohesion of tradition.

Yet despite their canonical position in the history of American race relations and ethnic diversity, these archetypal metaphors of American pluralism never appeared in the work of the Americans who came of age in the 1920s and helped build the civil rights movement in the American West a generation later. For these far-off western Americans, it was the canonical melting pot images crafted in Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution that had instead captured their attention as they tried to understand American pluralism during the 1920s and beyond. Crafted in the aftermath of social conflict in Mexico that rivaled similar episodes of ethnic tension in the United States, images from Mexico like those that Rivera had emblazoned on the walls of the Mexican ministry of education became the primary symbols of national integration in the United States for western Americans whose regional communities in New Mexico, Texas, and California were undergoing the same dramatic demographic changes that Kallen and Bourne had described for the American East. In his 1934 Ph.D. dissertation, for example, New Mexico educational philosopher George I. Sánchez identified the fabled American melting pot as the telos to which state government and public schools should direct their resources. But when he searched for the best example of institutional labors in pursuit of national integration, it was Mexico’s melting pot images that he pointed to, not those of the United States. For Carey McWilliams’s North from Mexico, still considered one the seminal studies of Mexican migration to the United States after sixty years in print, the idea of ethnic fusion created by Mexican intellectual Manuel Gamio in 1916 became the explanatory framework for a narrative of social unity amid the extremes of ethnic tensions that characterized World War II California.¹⁸ For the bureaucrats of the New Deal Office of Education, Mexico’s melting pot images provided the template for attempts to reduce social conflict on Western and Great Plains Indian reservations during the Great Depression. For Americans like Sánchez and Embree, it was Mexico’s history of diversity that provided the symbols of how the melting pot might be converted into daily politics in the United States, rendering those symbols as politically important in American culture as those that were being created elsewhere by Kallen and Bourne.

Those symbols were constructed in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, that great civil war that some progressive Americans had seen as the first salvo in the overthrow of capitalism, whose next installments they believed were represented by World War I and the Russian Revolution.¹⁹ Their cultural history is easy enough to understand. At roughly the same time that the armies of England and Germany were sending 120,000 men to their deaths at the Somme and that the Bolsheviks were destroying the social order of the czar, Mexico was busy destroying the Porfirian state and killing one million of its own people. This was Mexico at the dawn of the twentieth century, a nation in revolution that was doing its own part to destroy the fin de siècle order, wrote Manuel Gamio. Out of that war would rise a new man of steel, continued Gamio, one blended together from the panoply of ethnic cultures that represented Mexico’s distinctive peoples. Kallen and Bourne had used musical metaphors to describe the American melting pot. Gamio preferred the symbolism of metal. More than just a crucible where people mixed into one, Mexico was a giant smelter where the future of the nation was being forged by anvil-wielding revolutionaries, Gamio wrote.

It was in the spirit of such rebirth that Diego Rivera had been commissioned by Secretary of Education José Vasconcelos to emblazon the walls of the new secretariat building in Mexico City with murals depicting the postrevolutionary progress of the Mexican nation. Rivera was thirty-six when Vasconcelos hired him in 1922, alongside muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, on a government-sponsored art project that antedated the WPA murals project by more than a decade. He had recently returned to Mexico from studying art in Europe, and had just painted new murals in various locations throughout Mexico City. No one better captured in visual form the work of the Mexican state as it sought to create Mexico’s melting pot ideal from the spectrum of ethnic groups that composed the Mexican nation.

Rivera painted two murals on the walls of the secretariat that captured the relationship of the reconstituted Mexican state to the melting pot ideal. In Alfabetización: Aprendiendo a leer, a female schoolteacher looks with pride on a group of students surrounding her whose complexions and dress represent the diverse cultures of the Mexican peoples. A dark-skinned woman with African features sits next to a Maya Indian who is accepting a schoolbook from the teacher. Behind them stand two young men, one a light-skinned resident of the city wearing a gray beret, the other a ruddy-skinned mestizo wearing a straw hat typical of rural Mexico. Above the schoolteacher and her provincials stand three revolutionary soldiers, watching over the process of conversion signified in the textbooks being distributed by the teacher. They wear the bandoliers of the revolution, just recently concluded but still a tangible presence in the life of the country. Rivera painted a more dramatic image of the revolutionary melting pot project at the secretariat headquarters, as well. Whereas the first image of the state’s schoolteacher provides no clues about the geographic context for the education lesson that she is imparting, it is clear in La maestra rural that the schoolteacher has ventured away from metropolitan Mexico and into the countryside where Mexico’s agrarian workers cultivated their fields. Here, the schoolteacher is dressed in red, immediately training the eye on the nine individuals who surround her and the book that she has stretched out before them. They represent three generations, grandparent, parent, and child, sitting in a serene repose as the teacher underscores her latest point with an outstretched hand. But whereas the teacher and her circle had taken up two-thirds of the mural in Alfabetización, in the present one, two-thirds of the mural is an agrarian landscape framed by towering mountains in the background, with two teams of horses plowing a field in front of rural laborers who follow them, and an armed federal soldier mounted on horseback who guards the schoolteacher with a carbine rifle that he points at the sky. The state is present in each of the Rivera murals in the form of a teacher and a soldier, but in the latter mural, the melting pot ideal has been transformed from a metaphoric representation of unity into a dynamic panorama where the work that the state has set out for itself is more accurately rendered.

Rivera’s murals portrayed Mexico’s ethnic communities in their uniqueness as part of the project of national reconciliation that the postrevolutionary state builders had outlined for themselves. Represented quite clearly in his murals are the distinctive clothing, different skin tones, a diverse set of occupational labors, and both men and women as actors in the postrevolutionary drama. Rivera’s images suggest that he believed their discrete identities should be allowed to flourish as part of the reconstituted nation. The teacher is positioned as an agent of consolidation, but Rivera did not render consolidation as a threat to the regional cultures that were the constituent elements of the new Mexican nation. Difference abounds and is celebrated, even as books and public officials of the state are portrayed sympathetically. His depiction of the school as an agent of transformation also appears nonthreatening. Although Rivera assigned a centripetal function to the school, its task seems limited to creating bonds of citizenship among Mexico’s people, not destroying the variety of cultural forms of the twentieth-century republic. For Rivera, nationality seemed to reside above and alongside regional culture, not as a substitute for it or as a superior force to that of the provincial centers.

Figure 2. Alfabetización. Aprendiendo a leer, Diego Rivera, 1929. Secretaría de Educación Pública headquarters, Mexico City. 2014 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Three other images crafted by Mexico’s leading social theorists proved equally influential to race relations in the American West between 1930 and 1960. Manuel Gamio had crafted his image of cultural heterogeneity in a 1916 text, Forjando patria, that originated the phrase that scholars use to this day to describe the postrevolutionary project to rebuild the Mexican nation, forjar patria. Gamio opened Forjando patria with the image of a giant smelter in which Mexico’s diverse cultural communities were being melted into a single synthetic ore. The American continents had always acted as a giant forge in which indigenous Americans mixed with one another to form new communities. Only the arrival of Columbus had prevented a single indigenous superpower aggregated from America’s distinct native cultures from forming. That forge had overturned with the arrival of the Europeans, spilling the blend before it had hardened, however. The Europeans—the “men of steel,” as Gamio tagged them—refused to mix with the Native Americans—whom Gamio called the “men of bronze”—during the colonial era. Suddenly, however, the independence movements of early nineteenth-century nationalism had presaged a return to a universal mix of peoples. Gamio represented Bolívar, Morelos, and San Martín as Olympic titans, donning the blacksmith’s apron and taking up the hammer to forge an original metallic statue that contained all the metals of America’s peoples. That statue would have been immense, corresponding to the panhemispheric nation that the liberators would have forged from the ruins of the Spanish empire.²⁰

The early idealism of independence was not to be. As the nineteenth century unfolded, smaller national communities had been established across the hemisphere, instead. A new monument had been forged, but rather than containing all Latin America’s ores, the statue had been forged out of iron—out of Europeans, in other words—and placed over a pedestal made of bronze—the Native Americans. This was Gamio’s way of critiquing the social segregation of Latin America in the national era and its failure to reach toward the equality of its ethnic communities. This era of a stillborn mixture had to an end with the Mexican Revolution, Gamio argued. Now that the revolutionaries of Mexico had deposed Porfirio Díaz and taken up the role of blacksmith, they would consummate the task of blending the iron of Europe and the bronze of America into an indestructible synthetic ore. The new nation would rise to challenge the might of Europe and the power of the United States. “There is the iron … and there is the bronze,” Gamio wrote in Forjando patria at the halfway point of the Mexican Revolution. “I implore you to mix, my countrymen!” he commanded Mexico’s people, hopeful that Mexico’s rise to continental prominence after a decade of bloody war was at hand.²¹

Like Bourne and Kallen, Gamio had situated his essay in the context of the attempt by Germany and England to destroy each other in World War I. In “Trans-National America,” Bourne had called the United States a “star” wandering between two European antagonists that were trying to blast each other to bits in the Great War. As Bourne put it, America was “a wandering star in a sky dominated by two colossal constellations of states.” America would work out her cosmopolitan ethic, “some position of her own.… A trans-nationality of all the nations, it is spiritually impossible for her to pass into the orbit of any one,” in this colossal tragedy. Gamio, too, believed that World War I was a turning point in history, and like Bourne, believed that the fragments into which Europe was collapsing provided the ideal political moment for the rise of the melting pot in the Western Hemisphere—in Mexico rather than the United States. In Forjando patria, Gamio used the example of World War I to chide the presumed superiority that Europeans had historically assumed over Mexico’s indigenous cultures, begging the great foreign powers to leave Mexico alone in anticipation of Mexico’s postrevolutionary rise to prominence. “Have your last words in Europe,” he wrote, “on the occasion of the great battle whose only defense seems to be the will to vanquish the other.”²²

Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’s vision of the Latin American melting pot arguably became the most enduring image of cultural fusion in twentieth-century Mexican history and the one that has become most prominent in American scholarship.²³ One year before Robert Park added the assimilationist melting pot of the “race relations cycle” to the canonical images of American diversity,²⁴ Vasconcelos became synonymous with the postrevolutionary melting pot project, an ideal that he captured in a short 1925 essay called La raza cósmica.²⁵ La raza cósmica was an aesthetic prophecy of the eventual triumph in the Western Hemisphere of one melting pot civilization, Latin America, over another, British America.²⁶ The ruins of the great Mesoamerican societies at Chichén Itzá and Palenque were proof that the greatest civilization ever seen had flourished in the Western Hemisphere before being transported—he did not say how—to Egypt, India, China, and Greece. To Greece had fallen the task of reconstructing the once-grand civilizations of Middle America, a project initiated by the migration of Spanish and British whites to America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Britain’s whites had been triumphant through the beginning of the twentieth century owing to Anglo unity amid the challenges of colonization. But Spanish disunity was equally to blame. Incompetent rulers and the rise of provincial nationalisms after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain had fractured the once-dominant Iberian peoples into a collection of competitors. While the Protestant descendants of Britain retained their spiritual unity with England, allowing them to expand a hemispheric mission of political dominance, Spain’s Catholic tradition had failed before the selfish pursuit of earthly, not transcendent aims.

Vasconcelos’s idealized melting pot would rise anew in Latin America as the result of a mortal sin committed by Anglo America, however. Despite its political successes in the hemisphere, England’s great weakness in the New World had been the sin of destroying the “dissimilar” races of man that it had encountered there. In the northern half of the Western Hemisphere, British whites had mixed only with other whites, had exterminated the Native Americans they encountered, and had sought physical control of the Chinese and black races, Vasconcelos argued. In the southern half, by contrast, Spanish whites had exhibited an “abundance of love” for Indians and blacks that had resulted in the creation of mixed races. Spain’s “greater capacity for sympathy toward strangers” continued to be consummated through the sexual mixture of races that is ongoing through the present day. Vasconcelos switched metaphors at this point, from biology to music. The exclusionary history of white North American represented a vigorous allegro march in the direction of the ethics of purity that had been handed to them by their British forebears. By contrast, the Ibero-American path represented the profound scherzo of a bottomless symphony that mixed together all the races. Within that symphony could be discerned the faces of the Native American, Chinese Mongol, white European, and Jewish and Muslim. “What is going to emerge there is the definitive race, the synthetical race, the integral race,” wrote Vasconcelos. This race, which he termed the cosmic race, would be “possessed of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, would be more capable of true human fraternity and a true universal vision.”²⁷

A mural painted in 1979 by artist Aarón Piña Mora in the deserts far north of Mexico City was a visual reminder that Vasconcelos’s vision was not cultural pluralism but a uniform melting pot.²⁸ As Piña accurately captured by painting a single human archetype emerging from webs of energy that radiated outward from four distinct people, Vasconcelos did not celebrate distinctive cultural communities working in harmony with one another. Instead, Piña Mora captured a synthetic race whose distinctive cultural and biological features had been absorbed into a homogeneous civilization. Vasconcelos’s ideal cosmic society was a sexual blend of human beings capped by the cultural forms of classical Greece and Rome and the metaphysics of the Roman Catholic Church. “Love” had produced the mestizo strength of this ideal society, but unlike Randolph Bourne’s plea that the United States was to be a cosmopolitan agglomeration of distinct cultures, Vasconcelos did not envision an eclectic mixture of people. La raza cósmica represented a melting pot ideal in a destructive sense of the word, as the obliteration of cultural difference as the price of collective strength directed by the Church from above. One of the remarkable ironies of twentieth-century Latin American history is that this autocratic vision posed by a Catholic metaphysician became the institutional foundation for the role of social science in mediating the middle ground between ideas and institutions in postrevolutionary Mexican society.

Musical metaphors were Moisés Sáenz’s preferred images for describing Mexico’s mixing of peoples into a harmonic assembly of national citizens, as well. At the moment that Kallen was witnessing the heavy movement of European immigrants into the United States that inspired “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” Sáenz was studying diversity in New York City at Columbia University and taking deep notice of ethnic democracy in American society as he struggled to make sense of Mexico’s own history of ethnic difference. In San Antonio he noted the Mexicans, he wrote, while Nordic whites in Texas seemed to constitute their own race of humanity. In California, those who claimed affiliation to the colonial Spanish empire struck him the most. In Oregon, British Americans, who he argued had been forced out of Boston by the Irish, now lived among Swedes, and Danes. As for metropolitan U.S. society, New York was a Jewish city, Boston an Italian and Irish one, and Chicago a “universe of a thousand races, all built into one.”²⁹ Kallen’s analysis had been limited to Europe’s ethnic cultures, but as a foreigner, Sáenz noted America’s Blacks and Native Americans, as well. These latter groups represented the great problems of the American ethnic order, he wrote, and not the quarrel between British and Jewish America, as Kallen had written. Locked away on reservations or ignored altogether, Blacks and Indians provided the greatest test of the American definition of cultural democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sáenz’s musical metaphors of the Mexican melting pot were written in a series of essays that were published in 1939 under the title México íntegro, which given the book’s emphasis on national consolidation might be loosely translated as A Unified Mexico.³⁰ As in the writings of both Vasconcelos and Kallen, the image of the symphony orchestra was interspersed throughout the text. Mexico was a grand symphony, he wrote at one point, “where distinctive villages and cultures mix and where the prehistoric lives alongside the feudalism of Europe and the progressivism of the United States.”³¹ Sáenz also favored the image of a choir organized from all the peoples of the Mexican republic, singing the postrevolutionary songs of nationalism in unison and pride. Each morning as they trained in Mexico City for the task of unification that was at hand, the schoolteachers that Rivera had painted at the Secretaría de Educación Pública sang the national songs of Mexico alongside the government officials who had hired them. “It seemed as if the entire country was singing,” described Sáenz in México íntegro. “At the same time, Rivera was painting those strange images on the walls of the public buildings of the capital.… We all understood the language of the heart that those images and those songs conveyed.… The music was us.… We were united.”³²

It was ultimately vernacular rather than foreign images of music, however, that Sáenz favored, a choice that he recorded in México íntegro in the form of the mariachi. The mariachis sprang from the rural west of Mexico, especially the state of Jalisco, from individuals who had once spoken the Indian languages but who by 1930 were understood by the people of the nation to represent the hybrid culture of Mexico that had been in the making as a result of the Spanish encounter with the Indian. The mariachis had once been provincial, but now they were interspersed throughout the country. They sang a panoply of song types, not a single one. The music was original, picaresque, and crude all at once. The instruments were European, but the dances they stimulated resembled those of the indigenous communities. The mariachis were, in short, a hybrid art form, neither indigenous nor European, but purely Mexican. They represented the “armies of popular artists in Mexico who had instinctively undertaken the cultural reconstruction of the nation since the advent of the catastrophic conquest.”³³ The mariachis symbolized the process of cultural unification that had yet to be fulfilled in postrevolutionary Mexico, argued Sáenz, an art form that had emerged from the originary cultures that had been foreign to one another before the arrival of the Spanish. They represented the task of unification that had yet to be consummated on a national scale.

Nearly a century has elapsed since these melting pot images were introduced to Mexican politics, yet they have remained largely unknown to American scholars interested in Mexico’s role in the history of North America. Scholars have more often been interested in Mexico’s peoples as laborers and immigrants rather than as members of ethnic cultures with complex relationships to one another and to their national state. Similarly, they have used the term “Mexican” freely, without considering the complicated connotations of that term. But across the twentieth century, the weave of Mexico’s peoples was in evidence to a selected range of American scholars who studied Mexico not as an adjunct to the United States, but as a nation unto itself with particularities as rich as those of any nation on the planet. For Lesley Byrd Simpson, the nation to the south of the Rio Grande River was not a single country, but “many Mexicos,” a title he gave to his first book.³⁴ “[W]e must recognize that Mexicans are a brand new people—and that they are the products of tremendously diverse antecedents and circumstances,” wrote George I. Sánchez in the early 1940s. “The Mexican and his institutions … reflect a kaleidoscopic blending of many peoples, they reflect the coursing of a tortuous stream that is placid here turbid there—where the Moslem, the Jew, the Christian, the Maya, and the Aztec mix to build a new people, and those people new institutions.”³⁵ “ ‘The Mexican’ does not exist,” wrote Mexican sociologist Carlos A. Echánove Trujillo in 1946, “because Mexico is constituted from a mosaic of diverse ethnic groups and from dissimilar cultural regions.”³⁶

Some represented twentieth-century Mexico as a solution of peoples waiting to be synthesized into a mixture stronger than the sum of its parts. Others would call Mexico a mosaic, a weave of colored strands brought together on a giant loom. Still others would employ a biological metaphor. Mexico was a crossroads of people where the capacity to love the other translated itself into a sexual power capable of bringing the cosmic energy of the universe to the terrestrial earth. An era of universal harmony was at hand, wrote José Vasconcelos, where the utopian homeland of Latin American prophecy was to be created after two centuries of New World decline and the expansion of Protestant Europe into the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, as the postrevolutionary state stabilized later in the century and a government administrative structure had formed, sociologists reduced Gamio’s world-historical forge to a laboratory melting pot (crisol) where fusion was occurring daily. But the point was clear. Whether it was expressed in the language of biology, the weaver’s loom, or as the furnace and smelter, Mexico was a crucible of cultures whose future depended on the idea of blending.

Mestizaje and the Leviathan State

The representations of postrevolutionary national unity created by Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Sáenz have produced a celebration of Mexican mestizaje among scholars of the United States as the antithesis to U.S.-based notions of racial purity and what historian David Hollinger has called the “one-drop rule.”³⁷ Mestizaje is properly defined as racial amalgamation, or the biological blend of Spanish and Indian in Latin America, and is conventionally portrayed in contemporary U.S. scholarship as the opposite of the U.S.-based notion of miscegenation.³⁸ As the argument goes, the historical Mexican porosity to the biological crossing of Spaniard and Indian produced a social community that defined hybridity as an ethical virtue. Such an ethic was antithetical to the ethical injunction in U.S. history to avoid racial mixture, especially across the black-white color line. The contrasts in racial subjectivity across North America’s distinctive national communities are important to bear in mind historically, of course, especially in the twenty-first-century context of rapid immigration from Latin America to the United States.³⁹

Yet American scholars have missed the political platforms on which Sánchez and Embree based their study of Mexican race relations because they have continued to position mestizaje as a biological process rather than an institutional and cultural one. It is true, clearly, that mestizaje included biological hybridity across the Mexican ethnic spectrum. But in contrast to many contemporary American interpretations of Mexican racial history, it was not biological mestizaje that Sánchez, Embree, and others celebrated. Rather, looking horizontally across the bureaucracies of the postrevolutionary Mexican state, these latter scholars were captivated by the institutional designs the Mexican federal government had created in order to foster cultural exchanges among Mexico’s diverse peoples. Such institutional designs were aimed at new forms of social exchange rather than at biological blending. These broader types of exchanges in Mexican race relations are critical to bear in mind, for they manifested institutional experiments in ethnic relations that Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Sáenz created as the analogues to their teleological visions of the Mexican melting pot.

When Vasconcelos wrote La raza cósmica, for example, he was speaking about racial fusion in Latin America only after three years of government service with the Secretariat of Public Education, which was attempting to fuse the peoples of Mexico into a united whole using platoons of schoolteachers called cultural missionaries. Gamio’s image of the smelter as a metaphor for postrevolutionary history in Forjando patria was an injunction to mix, but his text was one of the founding statements of twentieth-century Mexican statecraft for its argument about the application of social science to twentieth-century government in the interest of national unity. Moisés Sáenz described Mexico as a mosaic, a mariachi, and a choir, but he had done so on the leeward side of a ten-year career with the Mexican central state, spent trying to reconcile Mexico’s cultural diversity via a centralized political structure capable of addressing Mexico’s social ills through the institution of the public school.⁴⁰ Thus, while U.S. scholars have emphasized the visual and linguistic metaphors of Mexico’s integrated community as evidence for the ethical superiority of biological mestizaje, it is in fact more important to underscore mestizaje as the policy outcome shaped by public intellectuals who are recognized in Mexican national history as the architects of Mexico’s postrevolutionary state. In contrast to romantic portrayals of biological mestizaje in Mexico among contemporary U.S. scholars, then, it is important to understand the careers of the civil rights Americans in the 1930s as more than the wanderings of orientalist intellectuals who imbued a foreign society with dreams of race mixture. Mexico came to represent for the Americans as much a province of policy work as a source of ethnic imagery as, beginning in 1920, Mexico mobilized its public policy resources and harnessed the power of the central state to fuse the nation culturally into a unified citizenry.

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

But it was the heavy growth of the postrevolutionary federal state after 1920 that dramatically transformed the relationship of Mexico’s people to one another. The expansion of the postrevolutionary state was so rapid, in fact, that an important historiography dating to the 1970s began referring to the postrevolutionary Mexican government as the “Leviathan state.” The state had transformed itself into a top-down behemoth that imposed its will on the people of the nation, these scholars argued, as represented by the PRI party’s seventy-year dominance of Mexican politics across the twentieth century. Subsequent scholarship argued strongly that postrevolutionary state growth was real but not necessarily evidence in itself of an increasingly powerful federal government.⁴⁷ But even those scholars who disputed the strength of Mexico’s central state agreed that the period 1920–1940 represented a moment of radical reformulation for the Mexican melting pot. The institutional state became the site of social transformation via policy work that sought to rebalance Mexican society in the aftermath of its terrible civil war. As Alan Knight has argued, “The revolutionaries’ discovery of the Indian … was paralleled by their commitment to state- and nation-building.”⁴⁸ This was the institutional state from which Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz launched their policy projects in social fusion.

The generation who built Mexico’s central state in the years following the Mexican Revolution spoke of building a harmonic national symphony from a triptych of peoples. In the context of the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau and others have condensed America’s diverse ethnic and racial communities into what David Hollinger has called the twentieth-century racial pentagon.⁴⁹ That formation is characterized by symbolic red, black, brown, yellow, and white hues, corresponding to the distinctive communities in North America, Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe from which America’s people are descended. In Mexico, the analogue consisted of the criollos, mestizos, and indígenas.⁵⁰ Of a total population of 14 million persons the year before the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1909), 2.25 million were criollos, or white foreigners born in Spain or to Spanish parents living in Mexico. These were Mexicans who had never intermarried with either the indígenas or the mestizos.⁵¹ The indígenas (Indians) numbered a total of 4.75 million persons, roughly 35 percent of the population, while 7 million persons representing 50 percent of the population were of mixed white and Indian blood, or mestizos. In the work of postrevolutionary social theorists, mid-century Mexican sociologists and anthropologists, and historians of twentieth-century Mexico, this triptych became the standard shorthand representation of Mexico’s peoples.

No one had identified the ethnic range of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, the indígenas, perhaps more than Andrés Molina Enríquez, who had once printed a list of 752 distinct tribes who he argued had left anthropological records of their presence in Mexico at the moment of the Spanish conquest.⁵² But the smaller number of fifty or so Indian groups became the conventional number for Mexico’s Indian cultures in the century of scholarship that followed after the revolution. No one could agree on precisely what constituted the definition of “indigenous.” Early in the century, affiliation based on phenotype was common, but as biological arguments for race became less defensible after 1900, cultural characteristics such as language and dress became more common markers. Statistics could fluctuate widely at any one moment as well, depending on the definition of language ability. The 1930 census counted 2.6 million speakers of indigenous languages, for example, 17 percent of a population base of 16.5 million people, but half of these were monolingual in one indigenous language and the other half bilingual in combination with Spanish.⁵³ Indians could be reduced to 8.5 percent of the population, in other words, if monolingualism was the defining characteristic of indígena society.

Less in dispute in postrevolutionary society was the social distance that separated Mexico’s indigenous groups from the metropolis that had emerged as the agent of national consolidation. The Maya Indians of the Yucatán peninsula had managed to sustain a forty-year low-intensity conflict against the Porfirian state that had not ended until 1890, and these Maya, after the triumph of the revolutionary armies, remained dominant across a vast expanse of mountain and jungle that remains forbidding even today. In the far north, in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa immediately south of Arizona, the Yaqui Indians remained a marauding presence whose war parties continued to disrupt the economic projects of the national state. The Otomí people lived in the mountains of Hidalgo state, less than one hundred miles from Mexico City, yet they were largely independent from the political and economic projects of the state. Around Mexico City proper were the Aztec peoples, descendants of the original settlers of Tenochtitlán, while in eastern Michoacán, surrounding the vastness of Lake Pátzcuaro, were the Tarascan Indians. Each of the communities had a different relationship to the national state, just as individual Indian nations did to the federal government in the United States, yet in general they were characterized by independent economic and political systems that remained in place alongside the accelerating projects in nation building that surrounded them.

The mestizos were noteworthy for the sheer volume as a percentage of Mexico’s population that they represented. At a moment in U.S. history when the social distance between those people configured as white and those configured as Native American and Black was rigid, Mexico’s mixed population represented half or more of the country’s entire population base. Vasconcelos called them the integral race of hybridized people whose birth in Mexico had been made possible by the fecund love of the Spanish. As descendants of both the Indian and European peoples of Mexico, Mexico’s state-builders designated them the mythic carriers of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism and imbued them with the project of leading the reconstruction of the twentieth-century nation. As representatives of both the European and the Native American lineages of twentieth-century Mexico, it is they who were believed to contain each of the originary strands out of which postrevolutionary nationalism was to be constructed.

At the top of the racial hierarchy were the criollos, or whites, who lived mostly in the large cities of the nation, including Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Puebla. The historical blending between Europeans and Indians in Mexico meant that whiteness had become less of a marker of elite society by the twentieth century than was membership in the country’s plutocracy. But those who claimed descent strictly from European society continued to wield cultural power in a nation where indigeneity had become a despised mark of identity. Whites were the smallest of Mexico’s ethnic groups, yet the sense of superior European civilization with which they were associated became a social marker that defined much of Mexico’s Porfirian era culture. French-inspired architecture and art, for example, were prominent in nineteenth-century Mexico, and the golden era of colonial Spain remained a large touchstone for those who believed that Mexico should develop its European heritage rather than its indigenous ethnicities as a marker of progress.

Mestizaje has been a perennial theme in the sociology of Mexico, just as amalgamation has been a perennial concern in the United States. As Milton Gordon pointed out many years ago, however, many variables can contribute to the centripetal acceleration of one group toward another. Peoples can be joined by marriage and sexual contact, but they may also be directed toward one another through the reorientation of cultural patterns, entrance into new organizations, and government efforts to control conflict toward one another.⁵⁴ At stake in postrevolutionary Mexico was not merely the presumed endpoint of new experiments in cultural and political mixing, but the question of who was to provide the motor for such transformation. In Mexico, that motor became the postrevolutionary state, whose attempts to reorganize its people paralleled a similar interest by American reformers in the United States. In both places, at the same time, intellectuals and social scientists were widely debating the role of the federal state as a mediator of ethnic conflict.⁵⁵ The Americans came to Mexico to study these debates beginning in the 1920s, and would continue to do so through the era of civil rights change in the United States that followed the end of World War II.

Pragmatism in Mexico and the United States

While businessmen and government officials in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., fretted over Mexico’s nationalist stance toward American capitalists in the 1930s, a different relationship between the United States and Mexico was evident as Embree, Sánchez, and other Americans came to Mexico at that time. For some Americans, periodic ruptures in diplomatic relations seemed to presage war if Mexico could not convince the United States that it would not expropriate American property in the aftermath of the Querétaro Constitution of 1917. But elsewhere, intellectuals from both sides were simultaneously engaging one another on philosophical common ground, representing an important moment in an intellectual rapprochement that became the discursive platform for the later entry of the American westerners into Mexico in the 1930s. That philosophical common ground was adequately represented by the visit by José Manuel Puig Casauranc, Mexico’s Minister of Education between 1924 and 1933, to Columbia University in 1926.

It is unclear how Puig Casauranc forged a friendship with Nicholas Butler Murray, president of Columbia University, but as the New York Times reported in March 1926, Casauranc had spoken at Teachers College to warm applause about Mexico’s efforts to expand public education to the peoples of Mexico.⁵⁶ William F. Russell of Teachers College spoke of Mexico’s great educational advances since the end of the revolution, from which would flow economic prosperity for the peoples of the nation, as Samuel M. Vauclain, president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, had already explained. It was in such myriad ways that Mexico was reconstituting itself in the shadow of the United States. For some, Mexico was consolidating the nation through the expansion of the workforce. For others, it was through the schools. Yet others saw a new nation taking hold through the diminution of the Church’s power.

Casauranc’s meeting at Columbia was deeply symbolic, for it marked the beginning of a new wave of research collaboration between the Mexican state and Columbia University that reinforced the intellectual links that had become part of the institutional culture of Mexico’s postrevolutionary government ministries after 1920. Those links had started earlier, and though they were small, they were powerfully influential. Manuel Gamio himself, whose image of the smelter in Forjando patria had become a metaphor for Mexico’s assimilation projects, had earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas in 1911. Manuel Gamio was explicit about the importance of the ideas he had learned in New York in Forjando patria. “In the interesting text The Mind of Primitive Man, in which Dr. Franz Boas published the summary of conferences he had delivered at Harvard and in Mexico, the chapter entitled ‘Racial Prejudices’ is of particular note. There [Boas] proves that there does not exist any innate inferiority that is sometimes attributed to some human groups relative to others,” he wrote. “The general statement of such logical ideas is indispensable among the Mexican people, who constitute a panoply of ethnically diverse social groups whose social evolution has been dissimilar and which continue to develop along divergent, not parallel paths.”⁵⁷ On his return to Mexico, Gamio had begun applying Boas’s theory of cultural relativism to the case of Mexico’s indigenous peoples as an instrument for rebuilding the Mexican nation. Under the continuing tutelage of Boas, meanwhile, he developed Mexico’s twentieth-century institutions of anthropology. Scholars of Mexican anthropology still disagree over the extent to which Gamio truly abandoned the formalism of nineteenth-century anthropology, but they all agree that his scientific and administrative career marked the integration of Boasian relativism into the agencies of the Mexican state that had targeted ethnic relations as an arena of social transformation.

Moisés Sáenz, meanwhile, had been heavily influenced by the development at Columbia University of one of the central movements in American philosophical history, pragmatism. At its broadest, pragmatism was a critique of the abstract principles of Western philosophy for their detachment from the everyday experiences that shaped social life. Thinkers had turned ideas into rationalizations that bore little resemblance to what people were living, it argued, a dualism that had separated life into abstract principles on the one hand and social experience on the other. Sáenz used pragmatism as an intellectual wedge to reshape the deterministic ideas that had presided over Mexican social theory under Porfirio Díaz toward the more fluid, experimentalist tenets that came to characterize postrevolutionary social ethics after 1920. For him, pragmatism closed the breach between the old idealisms of Comte and Spencer and the use of lived experience as the test of ethics that he adopted in postrevolutionary society. Sáenz studied at Columbia between 1919 and 1921 directly under one of pragmatism’s central theorists, John Dewey, before going on to become Dewey’s most important Mexican student. When Puig Casauranc hired Sáenz in 1924 to assume supervision of the SEP rural school campaign Vasconcelos had originally established three years earlier, Sáenz began a career that would spread Dewey’s ideas throughout the Mexican countryside. Sáenz spoke of Dewey’s influence in Mexico before an audience of sociologists and anthropologists at the University of Chicago in 1926, for example. “John Dewey has gone to Mexico. He was first carried there by his pupils at Columbia; he went later in his books—School and Society is a book we know and love in Mexico.”⁵⁸ But Sáenz’s pragmatist approach was most evident in his 1939 collection of essays, México íntegro, in which he spoke about the difficulties Dewey’s emphasis on experience had made for his attempt to reformulate Mexico’s postrevolutionary social contract:

For those who live here, the task is not so simple. Our emotions occlude our vision; we become confused by the complexity of experience; our accomplishments contradict one another at every turn; they seem to put the most obvious and the most profound into war with one another. At the end of three weeks of studying my country you may now feel that you are prepared to write an authoritative text on Mexico; we, on the other hand, may have to wait another three years, maybe thirty years, and still we will not have written our Baedeker.⁵⁹

Some will interpret Sáenz’s statement as a criticism of the orientalist American mind that Mexican intellectuals often felt occluded an understanding of Mexican history and society. Yet when it is reframed in the context of Deweyan philosophy, it is impossible not to be riveted by Sáenz’s allusion to the “complexity of experience.” As philosopher Gregory Pappas has underscored, “experience” was the fulcrum of Deweyan philosophy, and Sáenz, in choosing to use that precise term, turned the ethical complexity of postrevolutionary Mexico back onto itself, as he confessed the difficulty of arriving at the practical solutions to the challenges of nationalism posed by a society that was diverse, pluralistic, and historically complex.⁶⁰ Sáenz would similarly underscore the difficulty of creating Mexico’s beloved community in the context of Deweyan philosophy in 1933, when he titled his analysis of Michoacán’s Tarascan Indians with a similar signifier, Carapan: The Outlines of an Experience.⁶¹ “We are walking on the edge of a knife,” Sáenz wrote there. “We must choose between excessive empiricism and excessive speculation.”⁶²

Figure 3. Moisés Sáenz Garza at Long Beach, New York, 1922, just after graduating from study with John Dewey at Columbia University. New York was a Jewish city, Boston an Italian and Irish one, and Chicago, a “universe of a thousand races, all built into one,” Sáenz later wrote. Personal collection of the author.

Similarly, psychologists and teachers who, like Gamio and Sáenz, had also came under the spell of Columbia University now worked in Mexico’s Secretaría de Educación Pública. Rafael Ramírez, a long-time collaborator of Sáenz, lectured on Dewey’s understanding of psychology to audiences of young schoolteachers being trained to work in Sáenz’s corps of rural educators, for example.⁶³ As the education ministry developed its capacity in anthropology as part of the attempt to organize historical narratives of Mexico’s indigenous groups, Mexico’s anthropologists reached toward Boas’s department of anthropology at Columbia for training in understanding “culture,” helping in the process to create the anthropological tradition of twentieth-century Mexican social science. It was the growing relationship between Columbia University and the postrevolutionary Mexican state that Puig Casauranc’s 1926 visit to Columbia University symbolized, even as public officials elsewhere seemed to pay more attention to Mexico’s economic relationship to the United States. After 1926, the links between Mexico City and Columbia University became more public, transformed by government administrators in Mexico from philosophical platforms for integrating the ethnic groups of the nation into political celebrations of administrative collaboration across North America. In the aftermath of Puig Casauranc’s visit to Columbia in 1926, John Dewey would lecture at UNAM in a summer tour that the Mexican ministry of education celebrated in its official propaganda. Famed Columbia University education theorist Isaac Leon Kandel would study Mexico’s educational system beginning in 1927 for a series of new articles on secondary education in Latin America and Europe. Nicholas Butler Murray would fete Casauranc in New York, initiating a correspondence that would last more than twenty years. Columbia University’s relationship with Mexico extended beyond these immediate personal links, as well, to scholarly associations that were themselves trying to extend the ideas at work in Teachers College throughout the continent. The Progressive Education Association maintained a relationship with Mexico’s ministry of education, for example, based on Dewey’s growing influence in Mexico’s rural provinces.⁶⁴

One important corollary effect of Columbia’s influence on Mexico has gone unnoticed in the scholarship on the postrevolutionary state. While scholars of Mexican history have long known that Franz Boas and John Dewey were large influences on postrevolutionary Mexican statecraft, they have not noted that it was from the career of pragmatism in Mexico that Sánchez and other Americans fashioned their experiments in assimilation for the 1930s United States.⁶⁵ It was from the Mexican pole of pragmatist ideas that assimilation projects in the American West took many of their important clues about the role of the state and education in social change. This relationship was not accidental, but a by-product of the fact that the Americans had themselves trained in the public universities of the American West in the same set of ideas the Mexicans had learned at Columbia University. Sánchez’s dissertation had depended on Dewey’s Democracy and Education, for example, while New Mexican Loyd Tireman, who traveled to Mexico in 1931, had depended on Dewey’s How We Think.⁶⁶ Both sets of scholars, not only the Mexicans, were using pragmatism as a platform for social reform. Americans and Mexicans made an important intellectual connection with one another in the 1930s that made a difference to American political history because they were each wrestling with the challenge of translating Deweyan and Boasian ideas from the world of philosophy to the world of politics.⁶⁷

Figure 4. John Dewey (third from right) in Mexico City in 1926, when he lectured at UNAM at the behest of his former student, SEP subsecretary Moisés Sáenz (standing, second from left). Dewey’s visit symbolized the transmission of pragmatist ideas from Columbia University to Mexico City’s government ministries in the twenty years after the Mexican Revolution. Archivo General de la Nación, Centro de Información Gráfica, Archivo Fotográfico Enrique Díaz, Delgado y García, Curso de verano de 1926.

This link in social science between Mexico’s state builders and the Americans who would go on to help shape the American civil rights movement was more than a curiosity of modernist ideas. Instead, it converted Gamio’s and Sáenz’s application of science to social philosophy in postrevolutionary Mexico into a fulcrum of institutional experimentation for rural Americans who had sought the solutions to modern ethical conflict in The Mind of Primitive Man and Democracy and Education. As the Americans took note of the political projects that Gamio and Sáenz had designed, they used them to engender a political relationship with the Mexicans. And as they helped to spread pragmatism’s reach into the back alleys and dirt roads of the American West, Mexico’s experiments shaped the American response to ethnic conflict in the United States. In the context of the United States, New Deal advocates like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Rexford Tugwell would later argue that pragmatism had become a philosophical basis for the New Deal state.⁶⁸ But because the transfer of Deweyan ideas for use by the state came a decade earlier in Mexico, it was a foreign pole of administrative activity from which American intellectuals in the American West took their cue for the transformation of American society in the 1930s. Not pragmatism in the United States but pragmatism in Mexico became the model for institutional experimentalism in the American West.

The Mexican social scientists reflected the thrill of discovering that the Americans had recognized their philosophical departures in social reconstruction when the Americans returned home to write about the postrevolutionary state. “[George Sánchez] places in the hands of the spectator the eyeglasses of history, to the end that the reader may perceive with full clarity all the scenes as they succeed one another on the Mexican stage,” wrote one Mexican official who followed Deweyan philosophy after the Mexican Revolution.⁶⁹ Here was an allusion to the importance of history and context as the guiding rationale of the modernist movement of ideas of which pragmatism was a part.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, the Americans most often recorded their appreciation for Mexico’s use of those ideas through allusions in their work to the institutional implications of the social analyses that the Mexicans had produced. “As one looks back on [Mexico’s rural] experiments,” wrote Loyd Tireman, “he is impressed with the ways in which the Mexican government has attacked [its social] problems.”⁷¹ Ralph Beals was more explicit:

Mexico especially offers an unusually good opportunity for studies in the applied field, both for suggesting action programs and for examining the results of programs. The active interference of governmental agencies in Mexico in the native mixed culture has of late often been in accordance with definite concepts of social problem and structure. Study of the effects of government programs should be fruitful both in testing theories and formulating programs.⁷²

Sánchez, meanwhile, compared Mexico’s reform projects to the missionary zeal of the sixteenth-century mendicant friars. “Their function and methods of procedure have varied from time to time, owing to their exploratory character and their ability to adapt to changing conditions.”⁷³ Dewey himself had been impressed with Mexico’s schools as institutions of social transformation during his 1926 visit there: “there is no educational movement in the world which exhibits more of the spirit of intimate union of school activities with those of the community than is found in [Mexico],” he wrote.⁷⁴

The link in Dewey and Boas between the Americans and the Mexicans extended beyond the period of the 1930s and into the civil rights era after World War II. It attuned the Americans to Mexico’s postrevolutionary experiments not for a period of one or two years, but for decades, making Mexico an example for renewed social relations in the United States that extended into the late 1950s. It connected the rural experiments in progressive education in Mexico to rural experiments in progressive education in the United States, providing the Americans with models of interethnic relations that became a canonical part of their construction of the American melting pot. And it provided one of the most visceral examples of a long-held tenet of Deweyan pragmatism. Rather than being an arcane set of experiments in academic social science, the connection to Mexico represented Dewey’s maxim that the role of philosophy in the modern era was instrumental. If the role of philosophy represented, as Dewey believed, the use of lived experience as part of the search for ways to transform the violence, contradictions, and destructiveness of industrial society, no one was trying harder to institutionalize those ideas than the circle of Americans and Mexicans who found commonality with one another for the three decades between 1920 and 1950 across the international boundary that separated their nations.⁷⁵

The philosophical shift in Mexico that Gamio and Sáenz represented broadens our understanding of the transatlantic geography of progressive statecraft. Recent work in American intellectual history has illuminated the philosophical and political relationships that connected modernist American thinkers to their European counterparts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The via media of James Kloppenberg, for example, brought Americans into a transatlantic circulation of philosophical ideas that shaped American reform movements. Daniel T. Rodgers, meanwhile, has charted the institutional examples that progressive European social reform became for American intellectuals.⁷⁶ Gamio and Sáenz show us that exchanges in progressive statecraft were not endemic to the United States and Europe alone, but flowed simultaneously across the United States and Mexico at the same moment that pragmatism was bringing intellectuals into contact with one another across the Atlantic Ocean. Mexico was part of the expansion of a web of ideas that had spread across Europe and North America at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing us that the international political conversation about the role of the state in modern industrial society was not unique to the transatlatlantic alliance. It enveloped Latin America, as well, in ways that shaped political practice in the United States.

Convergence in Comparative History

Juxtaposing the Republic of Mexico and the United States of America as melting pot societies, nations searching for unity through the instrument of the state, and homes to social science thinkers who were using pragmatism to reconstruct their national communities does not mean denying the radical differences between the two societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mexico was a prostrate country economically even as the United States was fast rising to superpower status in the decades following the Spanish-American War.⁷⁷ The Mexican state had been destroyed after the revolution, whereas the aftermath of the American Civil War had enabled the consolidation of federal power in the United States. The United States remained a country primarily of immigrants from Europe, whereas Mexico was primarily a country of indigenous-descended Americans. National consolidation in Mexico emanated from the top down under the tangible fear of American imperialism, whereas consolidation in the United States emanated from the bottom up by marginalized citizens seeking to expand the privileges of citizenship.

But we do not have to insist that the United States and Mexico were equivalent societies in order to juxtapose them alongside each other. Instead, we must merely recognize that intellectuals in two distinctive national traditions were simultaneously reconstructing their social contracts by remolding the state’s relationship to the distinct peoples of their societies using the same sets of ideas. These nationalist projects did not imply equivalent visions of the nation, but rather, distinctive ones that were nonetheless shaped bynonetheless shaped by similar policy debates about blending distinct cultural communities into unified blocs of citizens. These policy juxtapositions underscore a point Daniel Rodgers has made. Convergences between nations get left out of historiography, Rodgers has argued, because comparative history deepens differences in the act of placing nations alongside one another. But while similarities get left behind and unremembered, the contingent convergences in ideas and social policy they represented are as important to underscore as the differences.⁷⁸

The term melting pot was one point of convergence. Melting pot appears less frequently in the historical record of twentieth-century Mexico than it does in that of the United States. While crisol (melting pot, or crucible) does not appear often, however, mestizaje, fusión, batir, asimilación, and conglomerado social were all prominent in postrevolutionary scholarship. For Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos, for example, the terms batir (to mix) and fusión (fusion) implied cultural and biological blending under the direction of public institutions. For Moisés Sáenz, meanwhile, the term integración implied a greater attention to the blending of distinct cultural structures without the necessity of amalgamation across the color and race line. Mexico’s social scientists, moreover, used metaphors and descriptions that would have been easily recognizable to the theorists of the U.S. melting pot. Moisés Sáenz described his ideal society as a sinfonía de culturas (symphony of cultures), for example, using a term that is easily recognizable to American scholars as one of Horace Kallen’s central metaphors for the blending of cultures in the twentieth-century United States.⁷⁹ Similarly, Luis Villoro reprised a variant of the debate between Kallen and Randolph Bourne over the ideal character the American melting pot should assume when he reviewed the long history of Mexico’s relationship to its indigenous cultures. Just as Kallen and Bourne had debated the relative merits of pluralism versus cosmopolitanism, so did Villoro see the same debate at work in postrevolutionary Mexico. Some, he argued, would have created a society in which the Indians maintained the characteristics of their individual cultures as part of a larger society, while others preferred a more synthetic ideal.⁸⁰ Thus, while the term melting pot is less frequently used in Mexico’s twentieth-century debates, the ideas behind it were found just as readily there as they were in the United States. One can find many of the same ideas about the melting pot in Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s survey of integration in twentieth-century Mexican society that one can find in Russell Kazal’s treatment of the subject in the context of U.S. society.⁸¹

The use of state policy to achieve social integration was another point of convergence. Vasconcelos’s aesthetic vision was one of the canonical romances of postrevolutionary Mexico, shaped by cultural communities different from those of the United States, but the the Americans who came to Mexico to study his tenure with the Secretaría de Educación Pública were not primarily interested in his portrayal of the Latin American paradise. They wrote far more about the platoons of educators that he hired to translate his vision into the Mexican political scene than they wrote about La raza cósmica. Whatever they believed about Vasconcelos’s ideal world, the Americans understood that it meant little until it had been translated into political action. This was, of course, a much harder bargain to achieve than was the writing of a millenarian prophecy that was more metaphoric than institutional. But there existed no ideal worlds for the Americans, and they never considered the rhetorical constructions lying on the surface of society without also considering the structure of society’s institutions.

The state policies of Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz mattered because analogous policies were already the subject of much debate in the United States. The Secretaría de Educación Pública was not the only educational agency to produce new policies about integrating society, but only one of many government agencies around the world that were similarly struggling with the costs generated by industrialization amid the forces of local communities. There was, in other words, context. Had the Americans not already been wrestling with educational policy at home before they plunged into postrevolutionary Mexico, they could have been hypnotized by the SEP’s educators. They were not so taken, precisely because they were already immersed in the difficulties of achieving change via the institution of the school and the agencies of government. Intellectuals in the United States had been fighting since at least the mid-nineteenth century over the quality and goals of the public schools amid the horrific history of segregation and violence. For this reason, the Americans who studied in Mexico had little reason to believe in utopias.

A third point of convergence was the modernist understanding of the primacy of institutions rather than biology in determining social values and social hierarchy. In this, the Mexicans and the Americans agreed with Franz Boas that biology did not make people different from one another in any meaningful way, and with Dewey that the challenge of modern society was the moral question of how to reconcile modern technological advances with communities that suffered their costs as much as they experienced their benefits. In the United States, men and women may not have come to believe that all people were intrinsically equal until after World War II. But in this belief, they lagged far behind the Americans profiled here. Sánchez, Beals, Sturges, and others had been convinced of the fact as graduate students in the 1920s and as they pursued their political projects in the two decades before World War II. They never escaped the essentialisms of race altogether, but they were acting out of the impulse that increasingly sought to marginalize natural definitions of race in favor of social constructions of race that they knew were reflections of particular arrangements of power and wealth.

Comparative history’s urgency to draw distinctions rather than convergences is one argument for scrutinizing the ideas of cultural blending from two distinct national traditions as part of two separate historical contexts. But while no exact comparison can be made between the use of the phrase melting pot in two distinctive national traditions, it is my intention to show that two groups of thinkers saw enough similarity with one another despite those differences to claim that they could speak to one another about the relationship of ethnic pluralism to the nation-state. Scholars have shown us the weaknesses of the thought of these individuals within their particular national contexts. But they have not shown us why these thinkers believed they could speak to one another across their nations about a phenomenon as filled with the possibilities of failure as the mixing of people under the aegis of government. Yet these thinkers believed that they shared similar questions about the relationship of ethnic difference to the institutions of the state, and thereby created a dialogue that transcended the differences that separated their countries. Moreover, they built long-lasting relationships based on those assumptions. When the Mexican ministry of education argued that the desegregation movement in the United States represented the same political project in incorporación that it had been embarked on since 1920, they explicitly compared two distinct national projects in integration to one another.⁸² Similarly, when George I. Sánchez argued in 1940 that the United States and Mexico both represented synthetic cultures composed of distinct cultural communities, he made a comparative claim about two nations that should be taken seriously by scholars. Whether they were right or wrong in drawing the analogies between concepts of cultural fusion in one nation with concepts from the other is a question to be examined. But that these scientists believed those comparisons could be made does not mean that an absolute convergence must be established by scholars today between the ideas of the melting pot in one tradition with ideas of the melting pot in the other.

It was the Americans profiled here who originally juxtaposed the structures of ethnic diversity from the United States and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s in the first place. Had the Americans never traveled to Mexico before I insisted on a parallel analysis of U.S. and Mexican societies, scholars could rightly criticize my comparison as wrong-headed. But Sánchez went to Mexico and continued going there for the rest of his life. Beals became important in the legal segregation cases of the United States, but his understanding of race and ethnicity was born from a fifty-year career dedicated to understanding Mexico, not the United States. I am not alone in making the comparison, for these American intellectuals made it at an earlier moment in the twentieth century. Their juxtaposition is a historical artifact that needs debate and analysis, whatever conclusions we might come to today about its philosophical and political validity.