Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
Major consequences follow for our understanding of what Jacqueline Dowd Hall has called the “long civil rights movement.”36 Scholars have shown us that the social mobilizations of the Great Depression and World War II, the effects of Nazi social theory on American servicemen, and the economic boom of the 1940s were major factors in the development of civil rights in the American West. But none of these influences can account for the place of Mexico in the civil rights thought of the Americans charted here. Mexico must be given added attention in the formation of postwar integration movements in the American West that scholars have described almost exclusively in domestic terms or have limited internationally to the legal support of Mexico’s consulates in the civil rights litigation of the 1930s and 1940s. If it is also true that those campaigns influenced the work of the NAACP, ACLU, and American Jewish Congress in the years leading to Brown v. Board of Education, as some scholars of comparative civil rights have argued, then Mexico’s influence in the postwar United States may have even played a role in the development of civil rights movements in the American Deep South.37
Mexico’s history with diversity also tells us that there was a richer source of ideas beyond Europe from which Americans developed their ideas for reforming social relationships in American society. When progressive Americans who were struggling to understand the incorporation of immigrants from Mexico into the public schools of the American West reached into Mexico for ideas about reconstructing American society, they interjected the history of its southern neighbor into the development of American democracy in ways that became part of the fabric of U.S. political culture. Great American writers, looking back on the period between 1920 and 1950, were stunned by the enormity of the social dislocations at home and in Europe that had brought suffering and privation on a massive scale. Yet what strikes the interested reader about the Americans from Texas and New Mexico for whom Mexico became the premiere example of integration in the Western Hemisphere is that none of them considered World War I, the Great Depression, or World War II to be the signal moment of social change in the first half of America’s twentieth century. These Americans were instead struck by the inability of the young state governments in Arizona and New Mexico to manage social transformation. They watched the heavy movements of people from Mexico collide with rapid migration from the American East to open deep social fissures in the rural communities of the West to which they claimed allegiance.38 And they came of age intellectually within the ideological orbit of the twentieth-century ideas that had been spawned by the Mexican Revolution, not by the European or Russian battlegrounds. What strikes the reader is how deeply felt for these Americans were the great cataclysms of Mexico’s social changes, in contrast to anything that was happening domestically in the United States or in Europe. Similarly, as many civil rights reformers moved chronologically across mid-century America, they moved geographically to the Soviet Union, Cuba, Ghana, and Europe to find hope and new ideas about the relationship between race and the state in the United States.39 But these Americans found the analogies between integration in the United States and Mexico to be a defensible basis for sharing policy recommendations across the cultural divide that separated their country from Mexico, instead. Their sympathy for Mexico was rooted not merely in the philosophies that they shared with Mexico’s thinkers, but in the viability of Mexico’s models for the American West that those philosophies had made possible.
Yet for all the international features of the relationship to Mexico, this history of ideas and institutions was ultimately a narrative of nationalism rather than internationalism. Borderlands scholarship, the growth of international studies between Mexico and the United States in anthropology, sociology, and cultural criticism, and the internationalization and globalization of American history have all offered important reasons to question the national as the normative frame of analytical reference for understanding questions about the social community. But these Americans did not theorize the continuity of social identity between the United States and Mexico that characterizes much recent work on immigrant Mexican communities to the United States or the symbolic attachment to Mexico’s many cultures that is often noted as a characteristic of Mexican American communities in the United States. Similarly, the Americans operated in Mexico even as Soviet ideology provided a different model of international community and as Pan-Americanism and Inter-Americanism offered alternative visions of solidarity in the Western Hemisphere. But for them, the border marked a concrete site of difference they willingly reinforced rather than a porous membrane of convergence they sought to soften as the pathway to social reconstruction.40 Mexico’s melting pot may have been an alternative experiment in North American political history, but that fact did not mean that these American scholars had outgrown their nation-state as the political community to which they claimed their allegiance.
These Americans were instead articulate apologists for the United States in the form in which they constructed it—a racist, discriminatory, economically exploitative nation that was only half-formed in its quest for democracy, equality, and justice—who committed their thought and politics to transforming rather than to destroying or replacing it. Like civil rights activists Robert F. Williams and Thurgood Marshall, they looked outside the nation for ideas about social change without abandoning the United States in favor of the nations of Latin America or the internationalism of the Communist party. In short, these Americans were defenders of the U.S. national community who understood the Republic of Mexico as just another nation in the world whose political systems were opportune examples for the United States but not transcendent ones that deserved their political loyalty as contrasted to the systems they had associated themselves with at home.41 They understood Mexico as a place to be studied and emulated, not a place to be joined or replicated. This allegiance to the United States was not the expression of unbridled faith in the power of the American state to reformulate ethnic relations or to create order from chaos. Instead, like the concept of “doubleness” American studies scholar Leo Marx used to describe abolitionism and women’s rights or the Second Reconstruction idea historian C. Vann Woodward used to describe civil rights, their optimism was a guarded hope that the power of the American state could be harnessed to expand opportunities to those who had been denied it and those who searched for the political mechanism by which to change social relationships in the quest for more meaningful forms of social justice.42
“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,” anthropologist Ralph Beals once wrote of Mexico’s federal government agencies in 1943.43 He was on the cusp of the civil rights movement in southern California when he wrote those words, yet had been studying federal government policy in Mexico among the Yaqui Indians of Sonora since the early 1930s. Much later, he would recount a Yaqui rampage that had ended with the death of his companions as his first introduction to the indigenous people of Mexico. That murderous episode had not repulsed him from Mexico, but fascinated him instead to understand the relationship between ethnicity and the modern state. Like the other Americans profiled here, Beals too would find hope in Mexico’s postrevolutionary state for the answers to modern social conflict. He would carry those solutions into the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, putting them to use as he struggled with American racial liberalism. Others found inspiration in other places abroad. But it was in Mexico, the country that had spawned the first great social revolution of the twentieth century, where Beals and his fellow Americans found theirs.
PART I
The Beloved Communities
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