Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores

to examine from inside the Mexican territory the same questions about immigrants that Taylor and Bogardus were asking in universities in California and Texas. Hastings and Sturges realized that Mexico’s research institutes were asking the same kinds of questions about the relationship between cultural difference and the nation that academics were asking in the United States. It made as much sense for them to study immigrants at the origin points in Mexico of the migration arc to the United States, as it did to study them from Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas after the immigrants had arrived in the American West. Mexico’s own project in national integration thus allowed Hastings and Sturges to better understand similar questions of mobility, capacity, and character that had historically formed a part of the study of immigrants to the United States.

      Together, these institutional contributions by the Mexican state to an understanding of pluralism and social conflict epitomized the critique of the modern social hierarchy that John Dewey had made central to pragmatist thought. Usefully defined as an attack on Western systems of philosophy for defining ideas separately from the experiences people lived every day, pragmatism removed the breach between thought and action that the Americans and their Mexican colleagues believed had plagued nineteenth-century social theory. To pragmatism’s insistence that practice had to be brought into a discussion with theory, these Americans held up postrevolutionary Mexico as a province of experimentalism that was challenging outdated notions of social organization with new commitments to policy change.¹² To pragmatism’s criticism that nationalism had been idealized by ignoring the texture of local community, these Americans saw possibilities for national reconstruction in the added attention by the Mexican state to rural communities across the republic. “For the true pragmatists—for James and Dewey and all of their tribe—intellectuals played a creative role in history,” historian John Higham once wrote. “Ideas were precious tools for attaining practical ends. Consequently, being ‘practical’ meant continually and deliberately adapting institutions to changing problems.”¹³ For the Americans, Mexico’s policy programs represented the adapting institutions that pragmatism understood to be the fulcrums for translating ideas into social change. Disappointed by the absence of such impulse-generating institutions in the rural American West, the Americans found that postrevolutionary Mexico was acting on the push-and-pull of daily conflict as it sought practical answers to the social challenges of its national community. For the Americans, postrevolutionary Mexico’s new state became the practical mechanism that helped them chart the way forward out of the difficulties that separated them from the social justice that they sought in mid-century America. It put them in touch with the deeper values of pragmatism, what Higham described as “an appreciation of the crusading spirit, a responsiveness to indignation, a sense of injustice.”¹⁴

      No one exemplified the centrality of Mexico’s middle way to the history of American ethnic democracy more than educational philosopher George I. Sánchez, the long-time champion of American civil rights at the University of Texas, whose overlooked book Mexico: A Revolution by Education reflects the crucial influence of Mexican experimentalism on American politics.¹⁵ Sánchez returned to New Mexico in 1934 after earning his Ph.D. at Berkeley for a dissertation that used Dewey’s Democracy and Education to suggest educational reforms he believed could solve the problem of ethnic conflict in his home state.¹⁶ But several months later a recalcitrant legislature blocked his attempts to create new policies in the state’s schools. Crestfallen by the defeat, Sánchez embarked on a research tour of Mexico’s postrevolutionary rural schools, which were then in the thirteenth year of Mexico’s massive government effort to integrate the white, mestizo, and Indian communities into a unified bloc of citizens, or what anthropologist Manuel Gamio, twenty years earlier, had called “forjando patria” (forging the fatherland).¹⁷ Officials of Mexico’s federal ministry of education, the Secretaría de Educación Pública (Secretariat of Public Education, or SEP), escorted Sánchez throughout the country during his nine-month research trip in 1935, where he became close to Mexico’s leading Deweyite, Moisés Sáenz. He visited the states of Morelos and Puebla, where he studied the laboratory schools established by the Secretaría de Educación Pública and their relationship to the rural laborers who worked the land that surrounded them. Farther south, he traveled to the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca on the Pacific Coast before swinging north to Tabasco on the Caribbean Sea. Already he had studied Diego Rivera’s Mexico City murals of Mexico’s new schoolteachers, finding inspiration in them for his integration work in New Mexico. Sánchez also visited the north central and northern provinces of Mexico. He photographed the schools of Chihuahua, and the cultural missionaries of the Mexican state as they performed their outreach work in the state of Zacatecas.

      A year later, Sánchez lavishly praised the herculean efforts of the Mexican state to integrate the diverse communities of the nation into a unified group of citizens in his account of Mexico’s educational reform efforts, Mexico: A Revolution by Education.¹⁸ Through its itinerant platoons of teachers, known as las misiones culturales, and centralized administrative control of the rural schools from the national seat of power in Mexico City, Sánchez believed that the Mexican nation was proudly rising from the ashes of civil war and its aftermath. Most important, Sánchez believed, the educational ministry was courageously using John Dewey’s philosophy in an attempt to unify the diverse people of Mexico into a single nation through active state intervention in the affairs of local communities. Whereas state government in New Mexico had failed to use its schools to meet the challenges of diversity caused by rapid immigration, the government of Mexico, by contrast, had found the answer for creating Mexico’s own national melting pot. The “primary function [of the cultural missions] is that of ‘incorporation,’ ” he wrote in Mexico: A Revolution by Education. “They represent the most advanced thinking in Mexico and the actual application of social and educational theories in situ,… [that] must integrate the Mexican peoples and Mexican practices into a national fold and into a coordinated progressive trend.”¹⁹ Sánchez simultaneously leveled a critique of government inaction at President Roosevelt’s New Deal state. “The people of the United States have never seriously considered the use of their schools as organs for the propagation of ‘new deal’ beliefs, for example, nor as active social forces in contemporary reconstruction,” he wrote.²⁰ Not the United States, he argued, but postrevolutionary Mexico was setting the standard for social change. “The front-line place given to the educational missions in the [Mexican] plan of action adds to the importance of these institutions, both in their scholastic functions and in their role of a political New Deal.”²¹

      Sánchez never stopped celebrating Mexico’s use of the public schools to integrate the people of Mexico into a coordinated national constituency, throughout his career in New Mexico and Texas that spanned the New Deal on the one hand and the civil rights movement on the other. In between articles on American education and an active role in the 1940s school integration battles of the ACLU and the NAACP, he wrote new accounts of Mexico’s amalgamation projects that complemented the one he had written in 1936, explicitly comparing the challenges of integration in the United States to the challenges of integration in Mexico.²² Into the 1950s and 1960s, his regard for the Mexican experiments only intensified. “Nothing has affected my thinking and my feelings more than Mexico’s experience—redemption by armed Revolution, then Peace by Revolution,” he said in 1966. “This latter revolution still goes on, and I associate myself with it vicariously—from afar, and from close-up examination there as often as I can.”²³ And he never stopped believing that the United States and Mexico were comparable republics that both had to deal with the challenges of democratic practice amid broad ethnic diversity. “The Mexican people, just like people in many other countries, are not the product of just one culture. In the United States, for example, many cultures have contributed to the personality of the United States citizen: Italian, German, English, Polish, Dutch, and many, many others.… [I]n Mexico, the same is true: the Mexican is a product of many cultures.”²⁴

      Figure 1. The San Felipe Hidalgo federal rural school, in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico, in 1930. Mexico’s rural schools became the central mechanism used by the state for integrating the nation into a