Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores

Itzá and Palenque were proof that the greatest civilization ever seen had flourished in the Western Hemisphere before being transported—he did not say how—to Egypt, India, China, and Greece. To Greece had fallen the task of reconstructing the once-grand civilizations of Middle America, a project initiated by the migration of Spanish and British whites to America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Britain’s whites had been triumphant through the beginning of the twentieth century owing to Anglo unity amid the challenges of colonization. But Spanish disunity was equally to blame. Incompetent rulers and the rise of provincial nationalisms after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain had fractured the once-dominant Iberian peoples into a collection of competitors. While the Protestant descendants of Britain retained their spiritual unity with England, allowing them to expand a hemispheric mission of political dominance, Spain’s Catholic tradition had failed before the selfish pursuit of earthly, not transcendent aims.

      Vasconcelos’s idealized melting pot would rise anew in Latin America as the result of a mortal sin committed by Anglo America, however. Despite its political successes in the hemisphere, England’s great weakness in the New World had been the sin of destroying the “dissimilar” races of man that it had encountered there. In the northern half of the Western Hemisphere, British whites had mixed only with other whites, had exterminated the Native Americans they encountered, and had sought physical control of the Chinese and black races, Vasconcelos argued. In the southern half, by contrast, Spanish whites had exhibited an “abundance of love” for Indians and blacks that had resulted in the creation of mixed races. Spain’s “greater capacity for sympathy toward strangers” continued to be consummated through the sexual mixture of races that is ongoing through the present day. Vasconcelos switched metaphors at this point, from biology to music. The exclusionary history of white North American represented a vigorous allegro march in the direction of the ethics of purity that had been handed to them by their British forebears. By contrast, the Ibero-American path represented the profound scherzo of a bottomless symphony that mixed together all the races. Within that symphony could be discerned the faces of the Native American, Chinese Mongol, white European, and Jewish and Muslim. “What is going to emerge there is the definitive race, the synthetical race, the integral race,” wrote Vasconcelos. This race, which he termed the cosmic race, would be “possessed of the genius and the blood of all peoples and, for that reason, would be more capable of true human fraternity and a true universal vision.”²⁷

      A mural painted in 1979 by artist Aarón Piña Mora in the deserts far north of Mexico City was a visual reminder that Vasconcelos’s vision was not cultural pluralism but a uniform melting pot.²⁸ As Piña accurately captured by painting a single human archetype emerging from webs of energy that radiated outward from four distinct people, Vasconcelos did not celebrate distinctive cultural communities working in harmony with one another. Instead, Piña Mora captured a synthetic race whose distinctive cultural and biological features had been absorbed into a homogeneous civilization. Vasconcelos’s ideal cosmic society was a sexual blend of human beings capped by the cultural forms of classical Greece and Rome and the metaphysics of the Roman Catholic Church. “Love” had produced the mestizo strength of this ideal society, but unlike Randolph Bourne’s plea that the United States was to be a cosmopolitan agglomeration of distinct cultures, Vasconcelos did not envision an eclectic mixture of people. La raza cósmica represented a melting pot ideal in a destructive sense of the word, as the obliteration of cultural difference as the price of collective strength directed by the Church from above. One of the remarkable ironies of twentieth-century Latin American history is that this autocratic vision posed by a Catholic metaphysician became the institutional foundation for the role of social science in mediating the middle ground between ideas and institutions in postrevolutionary Mexican society.

      Musical metaphors were Moisés Sáenz’s preferred images for describing Mexico’s mixing of peoples into a harmonic assembly of national citizens, as well. At the moment that Kallen was witnessing the heavy movement of European immigrants into the United States that inspired “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” Sáenz was studying diversity in New York City at Columbia University and taking deep notice of ethnic democracy in American society as he struggled to make sense of Mexico’s own history of ethnic difference. In San Antonio he noted the Mexicans, he wrote, while Nordic whites in Texas seemed to constitute their own race of humanity. In California, those who claimed affiliation to the colonial Spanish empire struck him the most. In Oregon, British Americans, who he argued had been forced out of Boston by the Irish, now lived among Swedes, and Danes. As for metropolitan U.S. society, New York was a Jewish city, Boston an Italian and Irish one, and Chicago a “universe of a thousand races, all built into one.”²⁹ Kallen’s analysis had been limited to Europe’s ethnic cultures, but as a foreigner, Sáenz noted America’s Blacks and Native Americans, as well. These latter groups represented the great problems of the American ethnic order, he wrote, and not the quarrel between British and Jewish America, as Kallen had written. Locked away on reservations or ignored altogether, Blacks and Indians provided the greatest test of the American definition of cultural democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

      Sáenz’s musical metaphors of the Mexican melting pot were written in a series of essays that were published in 1939 under the title México íntegro, which given the book’s emphasis on national consolidation might be loosely translated as A Unified Mexico.³⁰ As in the writings of both Vasconcelos and Kallen, the image of the symphony orchestra was interspersed throughout the text. Mexico was a grand symphony, he wrote at one point, “where distinctive villages and cultures mix and where the prehistoric lives alongside the feudalism of Europe and the progressivism of the United States.”³¹ Sáenz also favored the image of a choir organized from all the peoples of the Mexican republic, singing the postrevolutionary songs of nationalism in unison and pride. Each morning as they trained in Mexico City for the task of unification that was at hand, the schoolteachers that Rivera had painted at the Secretaría de Educación Pública sang the national songs of Mexico alongside the government officials who had hired them. “It seemed as if the entire country was singing,” described Sáenz in México íntegro. “At the same time, Rivera was painting those strange images on the walls of the public buildings of the capital.… We all understood the language of the heart that those images and those songs conveyed.… The music was us.… We were united.”³²

      It was ultimately vernacular rather than foreign images of music, however, that Sáenz favored, a choice that he recorded in México íntegro in the form of the mariachi. The mariachis sprang from the rural west of Mexico, especially the state of Jalisco, from individuals who had once spoken the Indian languages but who by 1930 were understood by the people of the nation to represent the hybrid culture of Mexico that had been in the making as a result of the Spanish encounter with the Indian. The mariachis had once been provincial, but now they were interspersed throughout the country. They sang a panoply of song types, not a single one. The music was original, picaresque, and crude all at once. The instruments were European, but the dances they stimulated resembled those of the indigenous communities. The mariachis were, in short, a hybrid art form, neither indigenous nor European, but purely Mexican. They represented the “armies of popular artists in Mexico who had instinctively undertaken the cultural reconstruction of the nation since the advent of the catastrophic conquest.”³³ The mariachis symbolized the process of cultural unification that had yet to be fulfilled in postrevolutionary Mexico, argued Sáenz, an art form that had emerged from the originary cultures that had been foreign to one another before the arrival of the Spanish. They represented the task of unification that had yet to be consummated on a national scale.

      Nearly a century has elapsed since these melting pot images were introduced to Mexican politics, yet they have remained largely unknown to American scholars interested in Mexico’s role in the history of North America. Scholars have more often been interested in Mexico’s peoples as laborers and immigrants rather than as members of ethnic cultures with complex relationships to one another and to their national state. Similarly, they have used the term “Mexican” freely, without considering the complicated connotations of that term. But across the twentieth century, the weave of Mexico’s peoples was in evidence to a selected range of American scholars who studied Mexico not as an adjunct to the United States, but as a nation unto itself with particularities