writing of a millenarian prophecy that was more metaphoric than institutional. But there existed no ideal worlds for the Americans, and they never considered the rhetorical constructions lying on the surface of society without also considering the structure of society’s institutions.
The state policies of Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz mattered because analogous policies were already the subject of much debate in the United States. The Secretaría de Educación Pública was not the only educational agency to produce new policies about integrating society, but only one of many government agencies around the world that were similarly struggling with the costs generated by industrialization amid the forces of local communities. There was, in other words, context. Had the Americans not already been wrestling with educational policy at home before they plunged into postrevolutionary Mexico, they could have been hypnotized by the SEP’s educators. They were not so taken, precisely because they were already immersed in the difficulties of achieving change via the institution of the school and the agencies of government. Intellectuals in the United States had been fighting since at least the mid-nineteenth century over the quality and goals of the public schools amid the horrific history of segregation and violence. For this reason, the Americans who studied in Mexico had little reason to believe in utopias.
A third point of convergence was the modernist understanding of the primacy of institutions rather than biology in determining social values and social hierarchy. In this, the Mexicans and the Americans agreed with Franz Boas that biology did not make people different from one another in any meaningful way, and with Dewey that the challenge of modern society was the moral question of how to reconcile modern technological advances with communities that suffered their costs as much as they experienced their benefits. In the United States, men and women may not have come to believe that all people were intrinsically equal until after World War II. But in this belief, they lagged far behind the Americans profiled here. Sánchez, Beals, Sturges, and others had been convinced of the fact as graduate students in the 1920s and as they pursued their political projects in the two decades before World War II. They never escaped the essentialisms of race altogether, but they were acting out of the impulse that increasingly sought to marginalize natural definitions of race in favor of social constructions of race that they knew were reflections of particular arrangements of power and wealth.
Comparative history’s urgency to draw distinctions rather than convergences is one argument for scrutinizing the ideas of cultural blending from two distinct national traditions as part of two separate historical contexts. But while no exact comparison can be made between the use of the phrase melting pot in two distinctive national traditions, it is my intention to show that two groups of thinkers saw enough similarity with one another despite those differences to claim that they could speak to one another about the relationship of ethnic pluralism to the nation-state. Scholars have shown us the weaknesses of the thought of these individuals within their particular national contexts. But they have not shown us why these thinkers believed they could speak to one another across their nations about a phenomenon as filled with the possibilities of failure as the mixing of people under the aegis of government. Yet these thinkers believed that they shared similar questions about the relationship of ethnic difference to the institutions of the state, and thereby created a dialogue that transcended the differences that separated their countries. Moreover, they built long-lasting relationships based on those assumptions. When the Mexican ministry of education argued that the desegregation movement in the United States represented the same political project in incorporación that it had been embarked on since 1920, they explicitly compared two distinct national projects in integration to one another.82 Similarly, when George I. Sánchez argued in 1940 that the United States and Mexico both represented synthetic cultures composed of distinct cultural communities, he made a comparative claim about two nations that should be taken seriously by scholars. Whether they were right or wrong in drawing the analogies between concepts of cultural fusion in one nation with concepts from the other is a question to be examined. But that these scientists believed those comparisons could be made does not mean that an absolute convergence must be established by scholars today between the ideas of the melting pot in one tradition with ideas of the melting pot in the other.
It was the Americans profiled here who originally juxtaposed the structures of ethnic diversity from the United States and Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s in the first place. Had the Americans never traveled to Mexico before I insisted on a parallel analysis of U.S. and Mexican societies, scholars could rightly criticize my comparison as wrong-headed. But Sánchez went to Mexico and continued going there for the rest of his life. Beals became important in the legal segregation cases of the United States, but his understanding of race and ethnicity was born from a fifty-year career dedicated to understanding Mexico, not the United States. I am not alone in making the comparison, for these American intellectuals made it at an earlier moment in the twentieth century. Their juxtaposition is a historical artifact that needs debate and analysis, whatever conclusions we might come to today about its philosophical and political validity.
Chapter 2
Shock Troops
The Mexican state attempted to integrate the peoples of Mexico into a single bloc of citizens not through a timeless process of biological mestizaje, but through instruments of statecraft that included patronage of the arts, a new infrastructure network, and a renewed focus on national symbols like the flag, the Indian, and folkloric dress.1 However, it was three institutions of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), institutions symbolized by the schoolteacher depicted in Rivera’s murals, that the Americans found amenable to the work of integration and civil rights in the American West. When the Americans returned home, they duplicated the intellectual and political labor of these institutions. They wrote of them as models for the United States in the aftermath of institutional failures that had led them to Mexico in the first place. They took photographs of them, juxtaposed them to their own schools in New Mexico and Texas, and described them as the agents of cultural regeneration for a Mexican nation on the move. These institutions became the policy units through which the Americans refracted their pragmatism-inspired experiments in the United States.
The first was the cultural mission. As the name suggested, la misión cultural (cultural mission) was an adaptation of the sixteenth-century practice through which the mendicant orders had attempted to proselytize the indigenous communities of Mexico to the Spanish Catholic Church. The mendicants learned the language of the Indian nations to which they had been assigned, then moved into their communities during temporary journeys of exile from their Catholic monasteries as they sought to transform indigenous Mexico into Catholic Mexico. José Vasconcelos adapted this model as the outreach campaign of the postrevolutionary Mexican state when he became secretary of public education in 1921. Under Vasconcelos, the cultural mission became a secular organ of the state, not a religious one, although the millenarian project on which it was embarked shared the hallmarks of the erstwhile projects of the Spanish mendicant orders. Vasconcelos organized libraries of classical European texts that he sent into the provinces of the nation via cultural missionaries who were tasked with social reform work in the form of formal seminars conducted in the rural countryside. Schoolteachers from the rural schools were obligated to attend the seminars for three weeks at a time, where they were introduced to the pedagogical techniques that Mexico City had directed them to try.
The second was the escuela normal rural (rural normal school), which was a permanent teacher training academy at which the rural schoolteacher trained to be an educator in the service of the state. The normal school was the centerpiece of rural education, for it was there that first-time teachers were introduced to the pedagogy of the state. As a central repository of state resources directed from Mexico City, its physical plant sometimes became the location at which the cultural mission performed its three-week seminars for rural schoolteachers. But the rural normal school provided the original imprint of what the postrevolutionary educator was supposed to be, a role that was enriched thereafter by the cultural missions.
The third was the rural school. Forming the base
