Backroads Pragmatists
POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA
Series Editors
Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, and Thomas J. Sugrue
Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.
Backroads Pragmatists
Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States
Ruben Flores
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flores, Ruben, 1967–
Backroads pragmatists : Mexico’s melting pot and civil rights in the United States / Ruben Flores. —1st ed.
p. cm. — (Politics and culture in modern America)
“Published in association with the William B. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4620-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Mexico—Politics and government—1910–1946. 2. Cultural pluralism—Mexico—History—20th century. 3. Nationalism—Mexico—History—20th century. 4. Education and state—Mexico—History—20th century. 5. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century. 6. Social movements—Southwest, New—History—20th century. 7. Social reformers—Mexico—History—20th century. 8. Social reformers—United States—History—20th century. I. William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. II. Title. III. Series: Politics and culture in modern America.
| F1234.F685 2014 | |
| 972.08′2—dc23 | 2014004865 |
Published in association with the
William B. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University
Contents
Part I. The Beloved Communities
Part III. Mexico and the Attack on Plessy
6. “The Sun Has Exploded”: Integration and the California School
7. Texas and the Parallel Worlds of Civil Rights
Epilogue. Pragmatism and the Decline of Dewey
Introduction
Between 1920 and 1950, a group of influential social scientists who helped build the civil rights movement in the United States believed that a like-minded group from the Republic of Mexico had found the solution to social conflict in the idea of the melting pot. The international conversation the Americans established with the Mexicans transcended the unique histories of their nations, creating a comparative history of state reform that became central to the history of race relations in Mexico, on the one hand, and to the development of civil rights in the United States, on the other. Their exchange showed not merely how America’s history of cultural difference influenced the history of pluralism in Mexico, but also how Mexico’s own melting pot was integral to the history of democracy in the United States.1
This international exchange between social scientists and their belief in the power of schools and government to fuse the peoples of their societies together is the subject of this book. Committed to integrating the immigrant and ethnic enclaves of the American West into a single constituency of citizens, the Americans among them looked on postrevolutionary Mexico as a grand experiment in state reform and cultural fusion that they studied as they struggled to understand diversity and social conflict in American society. They transcended the commonplace wisdom that the United States was a fundamentally different society from Mexico, denying that Mexico’s communities of mestizos and Native Americans made its society antithetical to America’s culture of immigrants. Like the United States, Mexico for them represented a panethnic republic of multiple ethnicities that struggled to create a national culture from the diverse strands of its various peoples. Other American reformers more often studied the seminal thinkers of early twentieth-century American pluralism like Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne for ideas about American unity in a time of heavy immigration. Radicals looked to the Soviet Union for ideas about social transformation, and later in the century, to China and Cuba.
But these Americans studied the work of Mexico’s integration theorists, instead, including Manuel Gamio’s Forjando patria, José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica, and Moisés Sáenz’s México íntegro.2 They counterposed Mexico’s melting pot metaphors—sinfonía de culturas, crisol de razas y culturas, mosaico de razas3—to America’s own “symphony of cultures,” “melting pot,” and “assimilation.” They studied Mexico’s state policies (integración,