Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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