social distance between those people configured as white and those configured as Native American and Black was rigid, Mexico’s mixed population represented half or more of the country’s entire population base. Vasconcelos called them the integral race of hybridized people whose birth in Mexico had been made possible by the fecund love of the Spanish. As descendants of both the Indian and European peoples of Mexico, Mexico’s state-builders designated them the mythic carriers of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism and imbued them with the project of leading the reconstruction of the twentieth-century nation. As representatives of both the European and the Native American lineages of twentieth-century Mexico, it is they who were believed to contain each of the originary strands out of which postrevolutionary nationalism was to be constructed.
At the top of the racial hierarchy were the criollos, or whites, who lived mostly in the large cities of the nation, including Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Puebla. The historical blending between Europeans and Indians in Mexico meant that whiteness had become less of a marker of elite society by the twentieth century than was membership in the country’s plutocracy. But those who claimed descent strictly from European society continued to wield cultural power in a nation where indigeneity had become a despised mark of identity. Whites were the smallest of Mexico’s ethnic groups, yet the sense of superior European civilization with which they were associated became a social marker that defined much of Mexico’s Porfirian era culture. French-inspired architecture and art, for example, were prominent in nineteenth-century Mexico, and the golden era of colonial Spain remained a large touchstone for those who believed that Mexico should develop its European heritage rather than its indigenous ethnicities as a marker of progress.
Mestizaje has been a perennial theme in the sociology of Mexico, just as amalgamation has been a perennial concern in the United States. As Milton Gordon pointed out many years ago, however, many variables can contribute to the centripetal acceleration of one group toward another. Peoples can be joined by marriage and sexual contact, but they may also be directed toward one another through the reorientation of cultural patterns, entrance into new organizations, and government efforts to control conflict toward one another.54 At stake in postrevolutionary Mexico was not merely the presumed endpoint of new experiments in cultural and political mixing, but the question of who was to provide the motor for such transformation. In Mexico, that motor became the postrevolutionary state, whose attempts to reorganize its people paralleled a similar interest by American reformers in the United States. In both places, at the same time, intellectuals and social scientists were widely debating the role of the federal state as a mediator of ethnic conflict.55 The Americans came to Mexico to study these debates beginning in the 1920s, and would continue to do so through the era of civil rights change in the United States that followed the end of World War II.
Pragmatism in Mexico and the United States
While businessmen and government officials in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., fretted over Mexico’s nationalist stance toward American capitalists in the 1930s, a different relationship between the United States and Mexico was evident as Embree, Sánchez, and other Americans came to Mexico at that time. For some Americans, periodic ruptures in diplomatic relations seemed to presage war if Mexico could not convince the United States that it would not expropriate American property in the aftermath of the Querétaro Constitution of 1917. But elsewhere, intellectuals from both sides were simultaneously engaging one another on philosophical common ground, representing an important moment in an intellectual rapprochement that became the discursive platform for the later entry of the American westerners into Mexico in the 1930s. That philosophical common ground was adequately represented by the visit by José Manuel Puig Casauranc, Mexico’s Minister of Education between 1924 and 1933, to Columbia University in 1926.
It is unclear how Puig Casauranc forged a friendship with Nicholas Butler Murray, president of Columbia University, but as the New York Times reported in March 1926, Casauranc had spoken at Teachers College to warm applause about Mexico’s efforts to expand public education to the peoples of Mexico.56 William F. Russell of Teachers College spoke of Mexico’s great educational advances since the end of the revolution, from which would flow economic prosperity for the peoples of the nation, as Samuel M. Vauclain, president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, had already explained. It was in such myriad ways that Mexico was reconstituting itself in the shadow of the United States. For some, Mexico was consolidating the nation through the expansion of the workforce. For others, it was through the schools. Yet others saw a new nation taking hold through the diminution of the Church’s power.
Casauranc’s meeting at Columbia was deeply symbolic, for it marked the beginning of a new wave of research collaboration between the Mexican state and Columbia University that reinforced the intellectual links that had become part of the institutional culture of Mexico’s postrevolutionary government ministries after 1920. Those links had started earlier, and though they were small, they were powerfully influential. Manuel Gamio himself, whose image of the smelter in Forjando patria had become a metaphor for Mexico’s assimilation projects, had earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia under Franz Boas in 1911. Manuel Gamio was explicit about the importance of the ideas he had learned in New York in Forjando patria. “In the interesting text The Mind of Primitive Man, in which Dr. Franz Boas published the summary of conferences he had delivered at Harvard and in Mexico, the chapter entitled ‘Racial Prejudices’ is of particular note. There [Boas] proves that there does not exist any innate inferiority that is sometimes attributed to some human groups relative to others,” he wrote. “The general statement of such logical ideas is indispensable among the Mexican people, who constitute a panoply of ethnically diverse social groups whose social evolution has been dissimilar and which continue to develop along divergent, not parallel paths.”57 On his return to Mexico, Gamio had begun applying Boas’s theory of cultural relativism to the case of Mexico’s indigenous peoples as an instrument for rebuilding the Mexican nation. Under the continuing tutelage of Boas, meanwhile, he developed Mexico’s twentieth-century institutions of anthropology. Scholars of Mexican anthropology still disagree over the extent to which Gamio truly abandoned the formalism of nineteenth-century anthropology, but they all agree that his scientific and administrative career marked the integration of Boasian relativism into the agencies of the Mexican state that had targeted ethnic relations as an arena of social transformation.
Moisés Sáenz, meanwhile, had been heavily influenced by the development at Columbia University of one of the central movements in American philosophical history, pragmatism. At its broadest, pragmatism was a critique of the abstract principles of Western philosophy for their detachment from the everyday experiences that shaped social life. Thinkers had turned ideas into rationalizations that bore little resemblance to what people were living, it argued, a dualism that had separated life into abstract principles on the one hand and social experience on the other. Sáenz used pragmatism as an intellectual wedge to reshape the deterministic ideas that had presided over Mexican social theory under Porfirio Díaz toward the more fluid, experimentalist tenets that came to characterize postrevolutionary social ethics after 1920. For him, pragmatism closed the breach between the old idealisms of Comte and Spencer and the use of lived experience as the test of ethics that he adopted in postrevolutionary society. Sáenz studied at Columbia between 1919 and 1921 directly under one of pragmatism’s central theorists, John Dewey, before going on to become Dewey’s most important Mexican student. When Puig Casauranc hired Sáenz in 1924 to assume supervision of the SEP rural school campaign Vasconcelos had originally established three years earlier, Sáenz began a career that would spread Dewey’s ideas throughout the Mexican countryside. Sáenz spoke of Dewey’s influence in Mexico before an audience of sociologists and anthropologists at the University of Chicago in 1926, for example. “John Dewey has gone to Mexico. He was first carried there by his pupils at Columbia; he went later in his books—School and Society is a book we know and love in Mexico.”58 But Sáenz’s pragmatist approach was most evident in his 1939 collection of essays, México íntegro, in which he spoke about the difficulties Dewey’s emphasis on experience had made for his attempt to reformulate Mexico’s postrevolutionary social contract:
For
