Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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