Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States

360 Pages·2014·5.228 MB·English

by  Ruben Flores

Backroads Pragmatists
POLITICSANDCULTUREINMODERNAMERICA
SeriesEditors
MargotCanaday,GlendaGilmore,MichaelKazin,andThomasJ.Sugrue
Volumesintheseriesnarrateandanalyzepoliticalandsocialchangeinthe
broadestdimensionsfrom1865tothepresent,includingideasabouttheways
peoplehavesoughtandwieldedpowerinthepublicsphereandthelanguageand
institutionsofpoliticsatalllevels—local,national,andtransnational.Theseries
ismotivatedbyadesiretoreversethefragmentationofmodernU.S.history
andtoencouragesyntheticperspectivesonsocialmovementsandthestate,on
gender,race,andlabor,andonintellectualhistoryandpopularculture.
Backroads Pragmatists
Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States
Ruben Flores
UNIVERSITY OF PE NNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA
Copyright(cid:2)2014UniversityofPennsylvaniaPress
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Flores,Ruben,1967–
Backroadspragmatists:Mexico’smeltingpotandcivilrightsintheUnitedStates/
RubenFlores.—1sted.
p. cm.—(PoliticsandcultureinmodernAmerica)
‘‘PublishedinassociationwiththeWilliamB.ClementsCenterforSouthwestStudies
atSouthernMethodistUniversity.’’
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978-0-8122-4620-9(hardcover:alk.paper)
1.Mexico—Politicsandgovernment—1910–1946.2.Culturalpluralism—
Mexico—History—20thcentury.3.Nationalism—Mexico—History—20thcentury.
4.Educationandstate—Mexico—History—20thcentury.5.Civilrights
movements—UnitedStates—History—20thcentury.6.Socialmovements—Southwest,
New—History—20thcentury.7.Socialreformers—Mexico—History—20thcentury.
8.Socialreformers—UnitedStates—History—20thcentury.I.WilliamP.Clements
CenterforSouthwestStudies.II.Title.III.Series:Politicsandcultureinmodern
America.
F1234.F685 2014
972.08(cid:2)2—dc23 2014004865

Publishedinassociationwiththe
WilliamB.ClementsCenterforSouthwestStudiesatSouthernMethodistUniversity
C o n t e n t s
Introduction 1
PartI.TheBelovedCommunities
1.ASymphonyofCultures 19
2.ShockTroops 54
PartII.TheScientificState
3.TheLanguageofExperience 95
4.TheSchoolandSociety 137
5.TheYaquiWayofLife 176
PartIII.MexicoandtheAttackonPlessy
6.‘‘TheSunHasExploded’’:IntegrationandtheCaliforniaSchool 209
7.TexasandtheParallelWorldsofCivilRights 240
Epilogue.PragmatismandtheDeclineofDewey 286

Notes 299
Index 339
Acknowledgments 349
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Between 1920 and1950, a group of influential socialscientists 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
socialconflictintheideaofthemeltingpot.Theinternationalconversation
the Americans established with the Mexicans transcended the unique his-
tories of their nations, creating a comparative history of state reform that
becamecentraltothehistoryofracerelationsinMexico,ontheonehand,
and to the development of civil rights in the United States, on the other.
TheirexchangeshowednotmerelyhowAmerica’shistoryofculturaldiffer-
ence 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
Thisinternationalexchange betweensocial scientistsandtheirbeliefin
the power of schools and government to fuse the peoples of their societies
together is the subject of this book. Committed to integrating the immi-
grant and ethnic enclaves of the American West into a single constituency
of citizens, the Americans among them looked on postrevolutionary Mex-
ico 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 eth-
nicities that struggled to create a national culture from the diverse strands

of its various peoples. Other American reformers more often studied the
seminalthinkersofearlytwentieth-centuryAmericanpluralismlikeHorace
Kallen and Randolph Bourne for ideas about American unity in a time of
2 Introduction
heavy immigration. Radicals looked to the Soviet Union for ideas about
socialtransformation,andlaterinthecentury,toChinaandCuba.
ButtheseAmericansstudiedtheworkofMexico’sintegrationtheorists,
instead, including Manuel Gamio’s Forjando patria, Jose´ Vasconcelos’s La
razaco´smica,andMoise´sSa´enz’sM´exico´ıntegro.2TheycounterposedMexi-
co’s melting pot metaphors—sinfon´ıa de culturas, crisol de razas y culturas,
mosaico de razas3—to America’s own ‘‘symphony of cultures,’’ ‘‘melting
pot,’’and‘‘assimilation.’’ They studiedMexico’sstatepolicies (integracio´n,
fusio´n, incorporacio´n) for mixing people together into a national body of
citizens, imported its educational institutions into the United States in the
efforttosolveAmerica’sraceproblem,andheldMexicoupasthepreemi-
nentmodelofculturalfusionwhentheyhadgivenuponAmerica’srhetoric
ofequality.Mexicowasforthemtheleading experimentin therelationship
betweendiversityandthenationintheindustrialera,aprogressivemiddle
waybetweenextremistpoliticsrepresentedbytheUnitedStatesontheone
handandtheSovietUnionontheother.
Asinmuchofthemodernizingworld,industrializationandethniccon-
flict were two of the central themes in U.S. and Mexican history at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In both places, massive economic and
political change had revived old questions about the relationship of the
nation’sculturalcommunitiestooneanother.InMexicobetween1920and
1950, local communities and the state alike struggled to rebuild a united
societyinthewakeofadevastatingcivilwarthatkilledmorethanamillion
people and became the founding event of its twentieth-century history. At
the same moment in the United States, early twentieth-century questions
about immigration and the expansion of capital merged with the social
conflicts generated by the Great Depression and World War II to produce
renewed debates about the relationship of America’s peoples to one
another. The black-white conflict of the New South and the place of the
EuropeanimmigrantinAmericansocietywereonlytwomajorexamplesof
the ethnictensions inAmerican society that scholars chartas fundamental
to American history. By themselves, however, the social transformations
taking place simultaneously in Mexico and the United States could not
fullyexplaintheconversationinthemeltingpotthattheAmericansjointly
established with the Mexicans. Industrialization and ethnic conflict were

not new in the twentieth century after all, and we are thus left to better
comprehend why the Americans and Mexicans established a conversation
withoneanotheratthisparticularjunctureinthehistoryofbothnations.
Introduction 3
The international relationship in books, letters, and personal friend-
ships developed not from the structural changes in the Mexican and U.S.
economic systems alone, but from the questions that the Americans and
Mexicans sharedin commonas theytried tomake sense of thosechanges.
In turn, the ideas of philosopher John Dewey and anthropologist Franz
Boas sustained the solutions the Mexicans and the Americans offered in
response to those questions, as one of the major revolutions in academic
thought was sweeping through the social sciences during the early decades
of the twentieth century.4 Together, the questions and answers that the
Americans and Mexicans shared with one another forged an intellectual
commongroundthatmediatedtheirunderstandingoftheplaceofdiversity
in the national community at a moment of heavy political and economic
change in the United States and Mexico.5 Mexican educator Moise´s Sa´enz
hadstudieddirectlyunderJohnDeweyandspreadtheideasofexperimen-
talism throughoutrural Mexicoin the 1920s alongside his Dewey-inspired
colleague Rafael Ram´ırez. Simultaneously, Americans George I. Sa´nchez
andLoydL.Tiremanwerestudyingpragmatismunderprofessorswhohad
trained with Dewey at Columbia University.6 When Sa´nchez and Tireman
arrived in Mexico to study reform work there in the early 1930s, they dis-
coveredacommonintellectualgroundthatdrewthemclosetotheintegra-
tion projects of their Mexican counterparts for the rest of their careers. A
similar conversation took place under the ideas of Franz Boas, uniting the
Mexicans and Americans in a mutual dialogue of cultural relativism.
Together, the cluster of ideas that had revolutionized social science and
theircorrespondingmodelsofsocialpracticeinMexicobecamefundamen-
tal examples for the Americans of how the twentieth-century industrial
nation could address the riddles of social and political community pre-
sentedbyethnicdiversity.Thisinternationalexchangeinpragmatistsocial
scienceandthepoliticsofnationalintegrationhasnotbeenstudied,butits
importance to the questions of democracy that the Americans were asking
of United States society underscores its importance to U.S. and Mexican
historyalike.
The Americans who believed that Mexico’s social scientists had some-
thing toteachtheUnitedStatesaboutethnicdemocracyinthe1930s were
transforming pragmatistphilosophyandBoasiananthropologyintoliberal

politics in remote provinces of the United States at the same time that
historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Charles Beard were using pragma-
tismtobuildanddefendtheNewDeal.7Buttiredofgovernmentinertiain