Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección General de Educación Primaria en los Estados y Territorios, Folder Escuela Federal Rural de San Felipe Hidalgo (Calpulalpan, Tlaxcala).
Other westerners who would participate in the civil rights movement mirrored Sánchez’s enthusiasm for Mexico’s melting pot projects just as sharply. In 1931, Loyd Tireman traveled to Mexico to study the model of progressive education that Mexico’s rural schools might become for the state of New Mexico as he sought, as Sánchez would later, the answer to ethnic conflict in the isolated rural hamlets of the state. In the subsequent report that he circulated nationally, The Rural Schools of Mexico, Tireman described the institutional models that he soon adapted from Mexico for use in New Mexico’s rural north.25 Mexico’s schools “presented a picture that will long linger in my mind,” he said in 1932. “This was proof, to me, of what one might expect in our own southwestern states if the people were given a like opportunity.”26 After receiving her MA from Columbia University in 1920, meanwhile, psychologist Montana Hastings found the research programs of Mexico’s Secretaría de Educación Pública to be the ideal laboratory for her to examine one of the central questions over which social scientists fought in the early decades of the twentieth century: were immigrant children from Mexico genetically inferior to American children of European extraction, and hence not capable of being integrated into the rural schools of the United States? When Mexico’s ministry of education forwarded her report, Clasificación y estudio estadístico, to San Diego’s Mexican consulate as part of the consulate’s support for one of the canonical educational integration lawsuits in the American West, Lemon Grove v. Alvarez, in 1931, Hastings became one of the first Americans to attack the rationale that buttressed California’s segregated educational system.27
As they studied schools in Mexico, these westerners crossed paths with a wider set of iconic reformers whose struggles with race in other provinces of the United States had brought them to study race relations in New Mexico and beyond. Mexico had proved important for the American West because experiments in diversity in New Mexico and California seemed to mirror so many of Mexico’s own rural experiments. Mexico remained 80 percent rural as its consolidationist program accelerated to national scale between 1920 and 1930 and did not become primarily metropolitan until 1960. Of the more than 15,000 public schools Mexico constructed in the twenty-year period that ended in 1940, 70 percent were built in the agrarian villages of the nation. The similarity between the rural provinces of Mexico and those of the United States was overwhelming for these western Americans. But Mexico’s rural projects resonated similarly among influential Americans who struggled with social conflict in the rural Deep South and rural Midwest. Sánchez had been sent to study the Mexican schools by Chicago’s Julius Rosenwald Fund, the Jewish philanthropy that financed the construction of 5,000 public schools in the rural American South between 1912 and 1932 in an effort to solve the original American dilemma, segregation in the Deep South.28 The Rosenwald schools may have become an influential educational and race relations model in the United States, but simultaneously, it was the Mexican state that had become an educational model for the Rosenwald Fund. In the middle of his Depression-era campaign to solve the problem of white-Indian relations on the rural Great Plains, meanwhile, Bureau of Indian Affairs director John Collier praised Mexico’s experiments in race relations as much as anyone ever did. “Mexico has lessons to teach the United States in the matter of schools and Indian administration, lessons which are revolutionary and which may be epoch-making,” he wrote in 1932.29 John Dewey, too, believed that Mexico’s rural practices had a wide range of applicability to the immigrant communities of the United States, both rural and metropolitan. While visiting Mexico’s rural schools in 1926, he famously declared his respect for the efforts of the Mexican state. “The most interesting as well as the most important educational development is the rural schools,” Dewey wrote in the New Republic. “This is the cherished preoccupation of the present regime; it signifies a revolution rather than renaissance. It is not only a revolution for Mexico, but in some respects one of the most important social experiments undertaken anywhere in the world.”30
Mexico’s influence on American social theorists tells us that the American melting pot was part of a larger North American experience of cultural diversity that was shaped by Mexico’s efforts to consolidate its peoples into a national bloc of citizens. Mexico’s history with polyglot ethnicity served as a philosophical and political platform from which intellectuals in the American West developed their ideas about diversity, and from which others like the Rosenwald Fund and the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought to repair American democracy as they confronted the legacies of slavery and Indian wars. Seen this way, Mexico’s history with diversity is inextricable from the major debates about ethnic pluralism in the twentieth-century United States, and from the political efforts to broaden American democracy that followed in their wake. “Imagined communities” is the name Benedict Anderson has given to the development of civic nationalisms in the Americas, while John Dewey once described the search for a more enlightened nation as the quest for the “Great Community.”31 Following a formulation first used by Deweyite and essayist Randolph Bourne in 1916 but still in use today, I shall call the search for a reconstituted nation amid great cultural diversity and social conflict the quest for the “beloved community.”32 And I shall refer to the social scientists who moved between Mexico and the American West as the “backroads pragmatists,” in recognition of their use of John Dewey’s idea in the rural communities where they struggled to understand the meaning of the modern nation in the context of localism and difference.
Mexico’s search for its beloved community provided the Americans with an example of an activist state government whose administrative units were focused on national consolidation amid deep ethnic divisions, at a moment when the role of the state in social welfare and individual political rights was being reformulated in twentieth-century America. As Mexico channeled resources into government relief programs, it provided a sense of possibility for what America’s federal government might do in the United States.33 Its use of social scientists as agents of social transformation provided the Americans with a model for the relationship of academics to public government in the United States. Mexico’s distribution of state resources to rural communities provided them an example for how government might intervene in the communities of rural New Mexico, Texas, and California. At a moment in the 1930s when Roosevelt’s New Deal state was still an idea and not a policy, these Americans formed intellectual alliances with Mexican social scientists who had been creating an alternative model of activist government different from that of the Soviet Union.34
That relationship also became a conduit for the transmission of ideas in progressive education that shaped American efforts to transform ethnic democracy in the U.S. West. Since at least the 1950s, the role of John Dewey in the creation of Mexico’s postrevolutionary educational system has been a central theme among scholars of Mexican history.35 But the reciprocal influence of Mexico’s Deweyan experiments on the intellectual development of progressive educators in the United States has never been studied. Likewise, why Mexico’s progressive schools became the institutional models for the leading laboratory schools in New Mexico and California is a question that has never received attention. Yet these Americans were deeply impressed by a national state that could establish thousands of new public schools throughout the national territory using ideas that had been transferred there directly from Columbia University. At the height of America’s progressive education movement, these scholars visited Mexico’s schools, worked for Mexico’s ministry of education, and researched ethnic divisions in Mexico as an analogue to ethnic divisions in the United States.
Mexico’s postrevolutionary melting pot shaped the American civil rights movement, as well. As the United States transitioned into the postwar civil rights era, the Americans who had first gone to Mexico in the 1930s continued to invoke Mexico’s administrative systems, theories of democracy, and scientific institutions as models for desegregation as they became the leading social science actors in the legal campaigns that dismantled the system of segregated public schools in the American West. By analogizing America’s project in desegregation to Mexico’s projects in national integration, the Americans used Mexico’s melting pot ideas to transition from the school as a laboratory for social change in the 1930s to the school as an institution