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 as rich as those of any nation on the planet. For Lesley Byrd Simpson, the nation to the south of the Rio Grande River was not a single country, but “many Mexicos,” a title he gave to his first book.34 “[W]e must recognize that Mexicans are a brand new people—and that they are the products of tremendously diverse antecedents and circumstances,” wrote George I. Sánchez in the early 1940s. “The Mexican and his institutions … reflect a kaleidoscopic blending of many peoples, they reflect the coursing of a tortuous stream that is placid here turbid there—where the Moslem, the Jew, the Christian, the Maya, and the Aztec mix to build a new people, and those people new institutions.”35 “ ‘The Mexican’ does not exist,” wrote Mexican sociologist Carlos A. Echánove Trujillo in 1946, “because Mexico is constituted from a mosaic of diverse ethnic groups and from dissimilar cultural regions.”36
Some represented twentieth-century Mexico as a solution of peoples waiting to be synthesized into a mixture stronger than the sum of its parts. Others would call Mexico a mosaic, a weave of colored strands brought together on a giant loom. Still others would employ a biological metaphor. Mexico was a crossroads of people where the capacity to love the other translated itself into a sexual power capable of bringing the cosmic energy of the universe to the terrestrial earth. An era of universal harmony was at hand, wrote José Vasconcelos, where the utopian homeland of Latin American prophecy was to be created after two centuries of New World decline and the expansion of Protestant Europe into the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, as the postrevolutionary state stabilized later in the century and a government administrative structure had formed, sociologists reduced Gamio’s world-historical forge to a laboratory melting pot (crisol) where fusion was occurring daily. But the point was clear. Whether it was expressed in the language of biology, the weaver’s loom, or as the furnace and smelter, Mexico was a crucible of cultures whose future depended on the idea of blending.
Mestizaje and the Leviathan State
The representations of postrevolutionary national unity created by Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Sáenz have produced a celebration of Mexican mestizaje among scholars of the United States as the antithesis to U.S.-based notions of racial purity and what historian David Hollinger has called the “one-drop rule.”37 Mestizaje is properly defined as racial amalgamation, or the biological blend of Spanish and Indian in Latin America, and is conventionally portrayed in contemporary U.S. scholarship as the opposite of the U.S.-based notion of miscegenation.38 As the argument goes, the historical Mexican porosity to the biological crossing of Spaniard and Indian produced a social community that defined hybridity as an ethical virtue. Such an ethic was antithetical to the ethical injunction in U.S. history to avoid racial mixture, especially across the black-white color line. The contrasts in racial subjectivity across North America’s distinctive national communities are important to bear in mind historically, of course, especially in the twenty-first-century context of rapid immigration from Latin America to the United States.39
Yet American scholars have missed the political platforms on which Sánchez and Embree based their study of Mexican race relations because they have continued to position mestizaje as a biological process rather than an institutional and cultural one. It is true, clearly, that mestizaje included biological hybridity across the Mexican ethnic spectrum. But in contrast to many contemporary American interpretations of Mexican racial history, it was not biological mestizaje that Sánchez, Embree, and others celebrated. Rather, looking horizontally across the bureaucracies of the postrevolutionary Mexican state, these latter scholars were captivated by the institutional designs the Mexican federal government had created in order to foster cultural exchanges among Mexico’s diverse peoples. Such institutional designs were aimed at new forms of social exchange rather than at biological blending. These broader types of exchanges in Mexican race relations are critical to bear in mind, for they manifested institutional experiments in ethnic relations that Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Sáenz created as the analogues to their teleological visions of the Mexican melting pot.
When Vasconcelos wrote La raza cósmica, for example, he was speaking about racial fusion in Latin America only after three years of government service with the Secretariat of Public Education, which was attempting to fuse the peoples of Mexico into a united whole using platoons of schoolteachers called cultural missionaries. Gamio’s image of the smelter as a metaphor for postrevolutionary history in Forjando patria was an injunction to mix, but his text was one of the founding statements of twentieth-century Mexican statecraft for its argument about the application of social science to twentieth-century government in the interest of national unity. Moisés Sáenz described Mexico as a mosaic, a mariachi, and a choir, but he had done so on the leeward side of a ten-year career with the Mexican central state, spent trying to reconcile Mexico’s cultural diversity via a centralized political structure capable of addressing Mexico’s social ills through the institution of the public school.40 Thus, while U.S. scholars have emphasized the visual and linguistic metaphors of Mexico’s integrated community as evidence for the ethical superiority of biological mestizaje, it is in fact more important to underscore mestizaje as the policy outcome shaped by public intellectuals who are recognized in Mexican national history as the architects of Mexico’s postrevolutionary state. In contrast to romantic portrayals of biological mestizaje in Mexico among contemporary U.S. scholars, then, it is important to understand the careers of the civil rights Americans in the 1930s as more than the wanderings of orientalist intellectuals who imbued a foreign society with dreams of race mixture. Mexico came to represent for the Americans as much a province of policy work as a source of ethnic imagery as, beginning in 1920, Mexico mobilized its public policy resources and harnessed the power of the central state to fuse the nation culturally into a unified citizenry.
The same set of documents in which Sánchez and Embree discussed Rivera’s mural images also captured their interest in Mexico’s state-led policy projects for achieving the harmonious society. Sánchez had come to Mexico in 1935, two years into the massive reorganization of government Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated in 1932. And yet, during the quintessential episode in the growth of the American federal state, it was not the New Deal that represented the archetype of
