Convergence in Comparative History
Juxtaposing the Republic of Mexico and the United States of America as melting pot societies, nations searching for unity through the instrument of the state, and homes to social science thinkers who were using pragmatism to reconstruct their national communities does not mean denying the radical differences between the two societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mexico was a prostrate country economically even as the United States was fast rising to superpower status in the decades following the Spanish-American War.77 The Mexican state had been destroyed after the revolution, whereas the aftermath of the American Civil War had enabled the consolidation of federal power in the United States. The United States remained a country primarily of immigrants from Europe, whereas Mexico was primarily a country of indigenous-descended Americans. National consolidation in Mexico emanated from the top down under the tangible fear of American imperialism, whereas consolidation in the United States emanated from the bottom up by marginalized citizens seeking to expand the privileges of citizenship.
But we do not have to insist that the United States and Mexico were equivalent societies in order to juxtapose them alongside each other. Instead, we must merely recognize that intellectuals in two distinctive national traditions were simultaneously reconstructing their social contracts by remolding the state’s relationship to the distinct peoples of their societies using the same sets of ideas. These nationalist projects did not imply equivalent visions of the nation, but rather, distinctive ones that were nonetheless shaped bynonetheless shaped by similar policy debates about blending distinct cultural communities into unified blocs of citizens. These policy juxtapositions underscore a point Daniel Rodgers has made. Convergences between nations get left out of historiography, Rodgers has argued, because comparative history deepens differences in the act of placing nations alongside one another. But while similarities get left behind and unremembered, the contingent convergences in ideas and social policy they represented are as important to underscore as the differences.78
The term melting pot was one point of convergence. Melting pot appears less frequently in the historical record of twentieth-century Mexico than it does in that of the United States. While crisol (melting pot, or crucible) does not appear often, however, mestizaje, fusión, batir, asimilación, and conglomerado social were all prominent in postrevolutionary scholarship. For Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos, for example, the terms batir (to mix) and fusión (fusion) implied cultural and biological blending under the direction of public institutions. For Moisés Sáenz, meanwhile, the term integración implied a greater attention to the blending of distinct cultural structures without the necessity of amalgamation across the color and race line. Mexico’s social scientists, moreover, used metaphors and descriptions that would have been easily recognizable to the theorists of the U.S. melting pot. Moisés Sáenz described his ideal society as a sinfonía de culturas (symphony of cultures), for example, using a term that is easily recognizable to American scholars as one of Horace Kallen’s central metaphors for the blending of cultures in the twentieth-century United States.79 Similarly, Luis Villoro reprised a variant of the debate between Kallen and Randolph Bourne over the ideal character the American melting pot should assume when he reviewed the long history of Mexico’s relationship to its indigenous cultures. Just as Kallen and Bourne had debated the relative merits of pluralism versus cosmopolitanism, so did Villoro see the same debate at work in postrevolutionary Mexico. Some, he argued, would have created a society in which the Indians maintained the characteristics of their individual cultures as part of a larger society, while others preferred a more synthetic ideal.80 Thus, while the term melting pot is less frequently used in Mexico’s twentieth-century debates, the ideas behind it were found just as readily there as they were in the United States. One can find many of the same ideas about the melting pot in Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s survey of integration in twentieth-century Mexican society that one can find in Russell Kazal’s treatment of the subject in the context of U.S. society.81
The use of state policy to achieve social integration was another point of convergence. Vasconcelos’s aesthetic vision was one of the canonical romances of postrevolutionary Mexico, shaped by cultural communities different from those of the United States, but the the Americans who came to Mexico to study his tenure with the Secretaría de Educación Pública were not primarily interested in his portrayal of the Latin American paradise. They wrote far more about the platoons of educators that he hired to translate his vision into the Mexican political scene than they wrote about La raza cósmica. Whatever they believed about Vasconcelos’s ideal world, the Americans understood that it meant little until it had been translated into political action. This was, of course, a much harder bargain to achieve than was the writing of a millenarian prophecy that was more metaphoric than institutional. But there existed no ideal worlds for the Americans, and they never considered the rhetorical constructions lying on the surface of society without also considering the structure of society’s institutions.
The state policies of Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz mattered because analogous policies were already the subject of much debate in the United States. The Secretaría de Educación Pública was not the only educational agency to produce new policies about integrating society, but only one of many government agencies around the world that were similarly struggling with the costs generated by industrialization amid the forces of local communities. There was, in other words, context. Had the Americans not already been wrestling with educational policy at home before they plunged into postrevolutionary Mexico, they could have been hypnotized by the SEP’s educators. They were not so taken, precisely because they were already immersed in the difficulties of achieving change via the institution of the school and the agencies of government. Intellectuals in the United States had been fighting since at least the mid-nineteenth century over the quality and goals of the public schools amid the horrific history of segregation and violence. For this reason, the Americans who studied in Mexico had little reason to believe in utopias.
A third point of convergence was the modernist understanding of the primacy of institutions rather than biology in determining social values and social hierarchy. In this, the Mexicans and the Americans agreed with Franz Boas that biology did not make people different from one another in any meaningful way, and with Dewey that the challenge of modern society was the moral question of how to reconcile modern technological advances with communities that suffered their costs as much as they experienced their benefits. In the United States, men and women may not have come to believe that all people were intrinsically equal until after World War II. But in this belief, they lagged far behind the Americans profiled here. Sánchez, Beals, Sturges, and others had been convinced of the fact as graduate students in the 1920s and as they pursued their political projects in the two decades before World War II. They never escaped the essentialisms of race altogether, but they were acting out of the impulse that increasingly sought to marginalize natural definitions of race in favor of social constructions of race that they knew were reflections of particular arrangements of power and wealth.
Comparative history’s urgency to draw distinctions rather than convergences is one argument for scrutinizing the ideas of cultural blending from two distinct national traditions as part of two separate historical contexts. But while no exact comparison can be made between the use of the phrase melting pot in two distinctive national traditions, it is my intention to show that two groups of thinkers saw enough similarity with one another despite those differences to claim that they could speak to one another