confused by the complexity of experience; our accomplishments contradict one another at every turn; they seem to put the most obvious and the most profound into war with one another. At the end of three weeks of studying my country you may now feel that you are prepared to write an authoritative text on Mexico; we, on the other hand, may have to wait another three years, maybe thirty years, and still we will not have written our Baedeker.59
Some will interpret Sáenz’s statement as a criticism of the orientalist American mind that Mexican intellectuals often felt occluded an understanding of Mexican history and society. Yet when it is reframed in the context of Deweyan philosophy, it is impossible not to be riveted by Sáenz’s allusion to the “complexity of experience.” As philosopher Gregory Pappas has underscored, “experience” was the fulcrum of Deweyan philosophy, and Sáenz, in choosing to use that precise term, turned the ethical complexity of postrevolutionary Mexico back onto itself, as he confessed the difficulty of arriving at the practical solutions to the challenges of nationalism posed by a society that was diverse, pluralistic, and historically complex.60 Sáenz would similarly underscore the difficulty of creating Mexico’s beloved community in the context of Deweyan philosophy in 1933, when he titled his analysis of Michoacán’s Tarascan Indians with a similar signifier, Carapan: The Outlines of an Experience.61 “We are walking on the edge of a knife,” Sáenz wrote there. “We must choose between excessive empiricism and excessive speculation.”62
Figure 3. Moisés Sáenz Garza at Long Beach, New York, 1922, just after graduating from study with John Dewey at Columbia University. New York was a Jewish city, Boston an Italian and Irish one, and Chicago, a “universe of a thousand races, all built into one,” Sáenz later wrote. Personal collection of the author.
Similarly, psychologists and teachers who, like Gamio and Sáenz, had also came under the spell of Columbia University now worked in Mexico’s Secretaría de Educación Pública. Rafael Ramírez, a long-time collaborator of Sáenz, lectured on Dewey’s understanding of psychology to audiences of young schoolteachers being trained to work in Sáenz’s corps of rural educators, for example.63 As the education ministry developed its capacity in anthropology as part of the attempt to organize historical narratives of Mexico’s indigenous groups, Mexico’s anthropologists reached toward Boas’s department of anthropology at Columbia for training in understanding “culture,” helping in the process to create the anthropological tradition of twentieth-century Mexican social science. It was the growing relationship between Columbia University and the postrevolutionary Mexican state that Puig Casauranc’s 1926 visit to Columbia University symbolized, even as public officials elsewhere seemed to pay more attention to Mexico’s economic relationship to the United States. After 1926, the links between Mexico City and Columbia University became more public, transformed by government administrators in Mexico from philosophical platforms for integrating the ethnic groups of the nation into political celebrations of administrative collaboration across North America. In the aftermath of Puig Casauranc’s visit to Columbia in 1926, John Dewey would lecture at UNAM in a summer tour that the Mexican ministry of education celebrated in its official propaganda. Famed Columbia University education theorist Isaac Leon Kandel would study Mexico’s educational system beginning in 1927 for a series of new articles on secondary education in Latin America and Europe. Nicholas Butler Murray would fete Casauranc in New York, initiating a correspondence that would last more than twenty years. Columbia University’s relationship with Mexico extended beyond these immediate personal links, as well, to scholarly associations that were themselves trying to extend the ideas at work in Teachers College throughout the continent. The Progressive Education Association maintained a relationship with Mexico’s ministry of education, for example, based on Dewey’s growing influence in Mexico’s rural provinces.64
One important corollary effect of Columbia’s influence on Mexico has gone unnoticed in the scholarship on the postrevolutionary state. While scholars of Mexican history have long known that Franz Boas and John Dewey were large influences on postrevolutionary Mexican statecraft, they have not noted that it was from the career of pragmatism in Mexico that Sánchez and other Americans fashioned their experiments in assimilation for the 1930s United States.65 It was from the Mexican pole of pragmatist ideas that assimilation projects in the American West took many of their important clues about the role of the state and education in social change. This relationship was not accidental, but a by-product of the fact that the Americans had themselves trained in the public universities of the American West in the same set of ideas the Mexicans had learned at Columbia University. Sánchez’s dissertation had depended on Dewey’s Democracy and Education, for example, while New Mexican Loyd Tireman, who traveled to Mexico in 1931, had depended on Dewey’s How We Think.66 Both sets of scholars, not only the Mexicans, were using pragmatism as a platform for social reform. Americans and Mexicans made an important intellectual connection with one another in the 1930s that made a difference to American political history because they were each wrestling with the challenge of translating Deweyan and Boasian ideas from the world of philosophy to the world of politics.67
Figure 4. John Dewey (third from right) in Mexico City in 1926, when he lectured at UNAM at the behest of his former student, SEP subsecretary Moisés Sáenz (standing, second from left). Dewey’s visit symbolized the transmission of pragmatist ideas from Columbia University to Mexico City’s government ministries in the twenty years after the Mexican Revolution. Archivo General de la Nación, Centro de Información Gráfica, Archivo Fotográfico Enrique Díaz, Delgado y García, Curso de verano de 1926.
This link in social science between Mexico’s state builders and the Americans who would go on to help shape the American civil rights movement was more than a curiosity of modernist ideas. Instead, it converted Gamio’s and Sáenz’s application of science to social philosophy in postrevolutionary Mexico into a fulcrum of institutional experimentation for rural Americans who had sought the solutions to modern ethical conflict in The Mind of Primitive Man and Democracy and Education. As the Americans took note of the political projects that Gamio and Sáenz had designed, they used them to engender a political relationship with the Mexicans. And as they helped to spread pragmatism’s reach into the back alleys and dirt roads of the American West, Mexico’s experiments shaped the American response to ethnic conflict in the United States. In the context of the United States, New Deal advocates like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Rexford Tugwell would later argue that pragmatism had become a philosophical basis for the New Deal state.68 But because the transfer of Deweyan ideas for use by the state came a decade earlier in Mexico, it was a foreign pole of administrative activity from which American intellectuals in the American West took their cue for the transformation of American society in the 1930s. Not pragmatism in the United States but pragmatism in Mexico became the model for institutional experimentalism in the American West.
The Mexican social scientists reflected the thrill of discovering that the Americans had recognized their philosophical departures in social reconstruction when the Americans returned home to write about the postrevolutionary state. “[George Sánchez] places in the hands of the spectator the eyeglasses of history, to the end that the reader may perceive with full clarity all the scenes as they succeed one another on the Mexican stage,” wrote one Mexican official who followed Deweyan philosophy after the Mexican Revolution.69 Here was an allusion to the importance of history and context as the guiding rationale of the modernist movement of ideas of which pragmatism was a part.70 Meanwhile, the Americans most often recorded their appreciation for Mexico’s use of those ideas through allusions in their work to the institutional implications of the social analyses that the Mexicans had produced. “As one looks back on [Mexico’s rural] experiments,” wrote Loyd Tireman, “he is impressed with the ways in which the Mexican government has attacked [its social] problems.”71 Ralph Beals was more explicit:
Mexico
