offers an unusually good opportunity for studies in the applied field, both for suggesting action programs and for examining the results of programs. The active interference of governmental agencies in Mexico in the native mixed culture has of late often been in accordance with definite concepts of social problem and structure. Study of the effects of government programs should be fruitful both in testing theories and formulating programs.72
Sánchez, meanwhile, compared Mexico’s reform projects to the missionary zeal of the sixteenth-century mendicant friars. “Their function and methods of procedure have varied from time to time, owing to their exploratory character and their ability to adapt to changing conditions.”73 Dewey himself had been impressed with Mexico’s schools as institutions of social transformation during his 1926 visit there: “there is no educational movement in the world which exhibits more of the spirit of intimate union of school activities with those of the community than is found in [Mexico],” he wrote.74
The link in Dewey and Boas between the Americans and the Mexicans extended beyond the period of the 1930s and into the civil rights era after World War II. It attuned the Americans to Mexico’s postrevolutionary experiments not for a period of one or two years, but for decades, making Mexico an example for renewed social relations in the United States that extended into the late 1950s. It connected the rural experiments in progressive education in Mexico to rural experiments in progressive education in the United States, providing the Americans with models of interethnic relations that became a canonical part of their construction of the American melting pot. And it provided one of the most visceral examples of a long-held tenet of Deweyan pragmatism. Rather than being an arcane set of experiments in academic social science, the connection to Mexico represented Dewey’s maxim that the role of philosophy in the modern era was instrumental. If the role of philosophy represented, as Dewey believed, the use of lived experience as part of the search for ways to transform the violence, contradictions, and destructiveness of industrial society, no one was trying harder to institutionalize those ideas than the circle of Americans and Mexicans who found commonality with one another for the three decades between 1920 and 1950 across the international boundary that separated their nations.75
The philosophical shift in Mexico that Gamio and Sáenz represented broadens our understanding of the transatlantic geography of progressive statecraft. Recent work in American intellectual history has illuminated the philosophical and political relationships that connected modernist American thinkers to their European counterparts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The via media of James Kloppenberg, for example, brought Americans into a transatlantic circulation of philosophical ideas that shaped American reform movements. Daniel T. Rodgers, meanwhile, has charted the institutional examples that progressive European social reform became for American intellectuals.76 Gamio and Sáenz show us that exchanges in progressive statecraft were not endemic to the United States and Europe alone, but flowed simultaneously across the United States and Mexico at the same moment that pragmatism was bringing intellectuals into contact with one another across the Atlantic Ocean. Mexico was part of the expansion of a web of ideas that had spread across Europe and North America at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing us that the international political conversation about the role of the state in modern industrial society was not unique to the transatlatlantic alliance. It enveloped Latin America, as well, in ways that shaped political practice in the United States.
Convergence in Comparative History
Juxtaposing the Republic of Mexico and the United States of America as melting pot societies, nations searching for unity through the instrument of the state, and homes to social science thinkers who were using pragmatism to reconstruct their national communities does not mean denying the radical differences between the two societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mexico was a prostrate country economically even as the United States was fast rising to superpower status in the decades following the Spanish-American War.77 The Mexican state had been destroyed after the revolution, whereas the aftermath of the American Civil War had enabled the consolidation of federal power in the United States. The United States remained a country primarily of immigrants from Europe, whereas Mexico was primarily a country of indigenous-descended Americans. National consolidation in Mexico emanated from the top down under the tangible fear of American imperialism, whereas consolidation in the United States emanated from the bottom up by marginalized citizens seeking to expand the privileges of citizenship.
But we do not have to insist that the United States and Mexico were equivalent societies in order to juxtapose them alongside each other. Instead, we must merely recognize that intellectuals in two distinctive national traditions were simultaneously reconstructing their social contracts by remolding the state’s relationship to the distinct peoples of their societies using the same sets of ideas. These nationalist projects did not imply equivalent visions of the nation, but rather, distinctive ones that were nonetheless shaped bynonetheless shaped by similar policy debates about blending distinct cultural communities into unified blocs of citizens. These policy juxtapositions underscore a point Daniel Rodgers has made. Convergences between nations get left out of historiography, Rodgers has argued, because comparative history deepens differences in the act of placing nations alongside one another. But while similarities get left behind and unremembered, the contingent convergences in ideas and social policy they represented are as important to underscore as the differences.78
The term melting pot was one point of convergence. Melting pot appears less frequently in the historical record of twentieth-century Mexico than it does in that of the United States. While crisol (melting pot, or crucible) does not appear often, however, mestizaje, fusión, batir, asimilación, and conglomerado social were all prominent in postrevolutionary scholarship. For Manuel Gamio and José Vasconcelos, for example, the terms batir (to mix) and fusión (fusion) implied cultural and biological blending under the direction of public institutions. For Moisés Sáenz, meanwhile, the term integración implied a greater attention to the blending of distinct cultural structures without the necessity of amalgamation across the color and race line. Mexico’s social scientists, moreover, used metaphors and descriptions that would have been easily recognizable to the theorists of the U.S. melting pot. Moisés Sáenz described his ideal society as a sinfonía de culturas (symphony of cultures), for example, using a term that is easily recognizable to American scholars as one of Horace Kallen’s central metaphors for the blending of cultures in the twentieth-century United States.79 Similarly, Luis Villoro reprised a variant of the debate between Kallen and Randolph Bourne over the ideal character the American melting pot should assume when he reviewed the long history of Mexico’s relationship to its indigenous cultures. Just as Kallen and Bourne had debated the relative merits of pluralism versus cosmopolitanism, so did Villoro see the same debate at work in postrevolutionary Mexico. Some, he argued, would have created a society in which the Indians maintained the characteristics of their individual cultures as part of a larger society, while others preferred a more synthetic ideal.80 Thus, while the term melting pot is less frequently used in Mexico’s twentieth-century debates, the ideas behind it were found just as readily there as they were in the United States. One can find many of the same ideas about the melting pot in Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán’s survey of integration in twentieth-century Mexican society that one can find in Russell Kazal’s treatment of the subject in the context of U.S. society.81
The use of state policy to achieve social integration was another point of convergence. Vasconcelos’s aesthetic vision was one of the canonical romances of postrevolutionary Mexico, shaped by cultural communities different from those of the United States, but the the Americans who came to Mexico to study his tenure with the Secretaría de Educación Pública were not primarily interested in his portrayal of the Latin American paradise. They wrote far more about the platoons of educators that he hired to translate his vision into the Mexican political scene than they wrote about La raza cósmica. Whatever they believed about Vasconcelos’s ideal world, the Americans understood that it meant little until it had been translated into political action. This was, of course, a much harder bargain to
