George I. Sánchez and his colleagues in the civil rights movement overcame America’s conventional orientalism toward Mexico by comparing three features of postrevolutionary Mexico to the United States.2 The first was that Mexico represented a country of enormous cultural diversity, not a source of uniform labor for American industry. “It is time now for the revolutionaries of Mexico to take up the hammer and wrap themselves in the blacksmith’s apron, in order to fashion the new nation composed of iron and bronze,” one of Mexico’s eminent twentieth-century public intellectuals, Manuel Gamio, had written of Mexico’s diversity in 1916.3 These Americans concurred, noting the presence of fifty indigenous groups whose distinctive cultures were vibrant contributors to the Mexican national community. The second feature was the central state as the mechanism for blending people into a united bloc of national citizens. Mexico had tried to use its central government to unify its cultural communities every few decades since independence in 1821. But only now, after the devastating Revolution of 1910, had social scientists come to believe that Mexico had finally found the way to national consolidation. As Gamio put it, a “powerful fatherland and a coherent and precisely defined nationality” would be the outcome for Mexico’s melting pot democracy, the result of new social sciences that had equipped the enlightened public official with the tools needed to achieve the perfect balance of a united public.4 The third was Mexico’s turn to the theorists at Columbia University to fashion social scientific solutions to the challenges posed by the institutional destruction of the revolution. Faced with an overwhelmingly rural population of extreme cultural diversity, Mexico’s state intellectuals faced a militaristic country to the north and the complete destruction of their own state amid ethnic and religious differences of vast proportions. These Mexican thinkers responded by turning to the work of John Dewey and Franz Boas, thus mirroring the responses of the Americans like Sánchez who had turned to Mexico in their search for ethnic consolidation and nation building in the rural American West.
Some of the Americans had come to Mexico in their teens, fleeing the World War I draft. Others came on study trips paid for by private philanthropies in Chicago and New York that saw potential solutions to America’s race problem in Mexico’s state policy. Yet others were young schoolteachers who backed into Mexico’s influence on the life of the American West as a result of youthful enthusiasm to leave homes in Michigan and Iowa for new ones in New Mexico and California. Whatever their trajectories to postrevolutionary Mexico, these Americans became more than tourists to America’s southern neighbor. Mexico’s own resemblance to pressing questions of social change in the United States made Mexico a lifelong example for them, despite careers that they developed almost exclusively in the American West.
A Symphony of Cultures
It was impressive to watch how much ground of the Mexican countryside George I. Sánchez had covered. Already he had made two trips to Mexico, one to Mexico City in April 1935 to plan his future scope of work there for the Rosenwald Fund and a second in May, marking his first foray outside the national capital. But it was in June that he appeared to encounter his first difficulties, as he followed the rural school officials who escorted him on his trip southward into Mexico’s tropics. Guerrero and “Vera Cruz”—he misspelled the name by writing it with two words, not one—came first late in the month, followed by Yucatán, Tabasco, and the remaining southern states in July. The trip to Puebla had been easy and brought him to the federal government’s rural teacher-training academy and the Escuela Regional Campesina, the adult magnet school for the region’s rural farmers. But the prospect of Yucatán and Campeche was a hard one. “I’m debating on an air trip to Yucatán and Campeche where the problems are quite different due to geography, topography, history, and races,” he wrote in June. “By land or sea the trip is prohibitive due to the inclement season, time, poor connections, and cost.”5
In Zacatecas two months later, he found the architecture stunning but the arrangements horrendous. “I’m taking a two-day field trip with the federal director of education—to contact rural areas,” he wrote. But the hotels were flea circuses, the water was contaminated, and the food questionable, Sánchez wrote. “Aside from [this], I really like this town.” On this latest trip, he had passed southward from the border with Texas and New Mexico, heading toward Mexico City while stopping in the states in between. He had visited the Tarahumara Indians in Chihuahua, noting the intensive mining and smelting in the state. He was headed for Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, and Querétaro thereafter. “If any mail is sent to me before September 20, please address it to me at the Hotel Regis in México, D.F., México. I’ll be there through about the 25th on my return trip to the West Coast,” he wrote.6
Sánchez was on his way to study Mexico’s postrevolutionary schools and the rural communities they served. He was twenty-eight, an educator with the state of New Mexico, and at the beginning of a career in education and civil rights that would last until the Vietnam era. Normally not associated with Mexico, Sánchez actually completed nearly half his academic output between 1935 and 1955 on postrevolutionary reform there. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, before his name became synonymous with the American civil rights movement in the American West, he wrote five articles on postrevolutionary reform and published two books. His 1935 trips to Mexico were the first series of forays he made during his career, studying its system of elementary and university education and the cultural diversity of the nation.
When Sánchez published his analysis of Mexico’s new revolutionary schools in 1936, he found Diego Rivera’s murals the best symbols of the revolutionary policy and social reforms he had gone to Mexico to study. “He is a master of character study—choosing his subjects from among the common people,” wrote Sánchez.7 “He paints them in all their pathos and tragedy, their colour and gaiety, their simplicity.” One could criticize Sánchez for his reductionism. Mexico’s “common people” shared little in common at all, and his claim about “simplicity” was plain wrong. There was nothing simple about Mexico’s peoples, as ten years of civil war two decades earlier had shown. The “simple” peoples of Mexico had helped bring down one government after another, had frustrated church and the civil state alike, and had continued to press their demands for political autonomy from the highlands in the north to the lowlands in the south.
But Sánchez had noted something else in Rivera’s work. Rather than just painting a monolithic representation of Mexico’s people, Rivera had portrayed the range of Mexico’s ethnic diversity. There were the Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Tarascans, Yaqui, and Tarahumara. Rivera had also captured the medium-hued mestizos that made up 60 percent of Mexico’s population. In his murals and paintings, he captured the range of Mexico’s distinctive ethnic communities using different skin tones, clothing patterns, and bodily features. This variety of people was one of the first observations that Sánchez made about Mexico as he traveled throughout the country for the first time in spring and summer 1935. Much later, as he looked back on a lifetime of visits to Mexico, he would describe the breadth of difference he noted in Mexico’s cultural tapestry by analogizing it to that of the United States. “The Mexican people, like people in many other countries, are not the product of just one culture,” he wrote. “In the United States … 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 the product of many cultures.”8
Edwin Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and committed to white-black relations in the American South, was also captivated by Rivera’s murals. He had visited Mexico in 1928, seven years before Sánchez, and his report to the Rosenwald board was especially heavy on the social themes reflected in Rivera’s murals. Embree was clearly moved by the open books that Rivera’s schoolteachers displayed before their rural pupils in the murals that Rivera had painted at the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City. One showed “the teacher bringing new light to Mexican peasants,” he wrote, while another depicted the “wicked priest and capitalist … frowning in the background.”9 And just as Sánchez later noted, Embree, too, noted that there was no cultural uniformity among the Mexican people that Rivera portrayed. “Ethnologically, present day Mexico presents … a heterogeneous picture,” he wrote. “The indigenous tribes include 49 well distinguished ethnical groups, speaking