by the federal secretariat in Mexico City, it was the closest institution to the young schoolchildren and their parents whose lives were the targets of reform work by the postrevolutionary state. Beautiful images taken by photographers of the SEP while accompanying federal inspectors detail the discrete acts of labor through which the rural schools resocialized their students into the revolutionary nationalism Diego Rivera had captured in his Mexico City murals. There are students marching through small towns in remote areas while carrying the Mexican flag that had become the symbol of regeneration across the country. Primary school students are shown playing basketball as rural schoolteachers work to instill athletic games imported from the United States. In other photographs, young men and women stand in front of school buildings as they read from schoolbooks brought to them from Mexico City, or they offload bricks from trucks brought in to help with village construction projects. The rural school was what the Americans came to call the “House of the People,” after the nickname the Secretariat of Public Education had given to the school, la casa del pueblo. From the 1930s until the 1950s, the Mexican rural school would provide the primary model for the Americans of what the public school in rural America should be.
Together, the personnel of these three institutions were the shock troops of the postrevolutionary Mexican state. They were schoolteachers and school administrators, inspectors and vocational experts whose labors in education may have appeared docile and beneficent. But in the photographs that captured their work, they appear as nothing so much as Green Beret soldiers who had been sent to resocialize the rural communities of the nation into the policy platform of the state. They operated as platoons of teachers, trained in a variety of skills that were put to use in the service of creating a new economy and a new relationship of the individual to the school. They operated in remote communities where schools had been built for the first time in the history of the country. They traveled to municipal seats of power at regular intervals, where they were greeted by federal inspectors who monitored their work and advised them on the newest advances in science and pedagogy. For the Americans, they came to represent the caring state. In the federal government’s interest in moving the villages of the nation toward national integration, the Americans saw a central state that cared enough to bring the promises of the public school to the remotest areas of the country.
The Cultural Missions
Of Mexico’s federal institutions for integrating the nation into one, the misión cultural was the model that the Americans found most practical to replicate at home. The excitement for the Americans resided in the metaphor that the mission represented. The mission was not merely attached to the metropolitan center of the nation. It was that the center of the nation had flung itself outward toward the provinces, like some giant exhalation of energy that was the embodiment of social change itself. In the mission’s centrifugal movement outward, the Americans detected the promise of state responsibility to cultural frontiers that had long been forgotten. My own attempt to translate the institution of the mission to the American scene always returns to the institution of the Freedman’s Bureau after the American Civil War, for it was there that the American state took responsibility for redefining the relationship to cultural communities that had been locked out of the American political experiment. Something similar in both its promise and its failures was at work in the Mexican terrain after the revolution. For Americans looking to multiply the resources of the state in the effort to create an integrated society, the effects of the misión cultural were irresistible. Loyd Tireman immediately copied the misión cultural when he returned home to New Mexico from Mexico in 1931, flinging out his own cultural mission from Albuquerque in a bid to tether the rural communities of New Mexico to the melting pot project that he was building there. George Sánchez experimented with the misión cultural in Louisiana, where he replicated it among the black communities of the American South in an institutional experiment that became part of the founding history of Grambling State University. It was only in the aftermath of this experiment that he returned to New Mexico, Texas, and civil rights fame.
Institutionally, the Mexican cultural missions acted as platoons of metropolitan intellectuals who traveled to rural communities in the provinces in the attempt to proselytize their members to the integrationist project of the state. Pictures show them radiating outward from the capital by truck or by donkey, laden with the equipment needed to establish a new political beachhead in former monasteries expropriated from the Catholic Church. As a unit of the state, the missionaries were entrusted to organize the local school in each community to which they came, with the assistance of the local inhabitants. They were the organizers of the rural schools that would perform the work of pedagogy and indoctrination in pursuit of the postrevolutionary republic’s integration project. At first, the missionaries moved from community to community at three-week intervals. The missionaries organized the school, helped to recruit a schoolteacher from the local community who had been trained in one of the state’s normal schools, and regularized an academic pattern of instruction that was formalized through the succeeding years of operation. As the work of the cultural missionaries expanded and the rural schools became a formal part of the rural environment, the work of the missions was modified to increase the efficiency of the government’s labors. The cultural missions were given permanent seats at the rural normal schools, for example, out of which they now radiated rather than returning to Mexico City each time. They began to journey repeatedly to each village for multiple trainings each year rather than a single one. And they modified their curriculum in accordance with the labor needs of the local community.
The misión cultural was one of the mythical institutions of twentieth-century Mexican history, in part because it seemed to be a reworking of an organic institution that dated to sixteenth-century Mexico. As the Spanish continued their conquest of Mexico in the aftermath of the Aztec defeat in 1521, they turned to the Spanish Catholic Church to aid in the cultural transformation of Mexico’s indigenous societies. It was then that the mendicant priests, dressed in their robes and carrying the Catholic cross, spread across central Mexico in the effort to proselytize the Native Americans to the Christian faith. In their twentieth-century guise, however, the cultural missions received their great institutional impulse in the state from José Vasconcelos, the conservative melting pot theorist who would offer his raza cósmica vision of Mexican society in 1925.2 Beginning in 1921, Vasconcelos launched a series of grand experiments within the federal Secretariat of Public Education that included itinerant platoons of educators whose role was to establish rural public schools under the direction of the federal government. Vasconcelos may indeed have been acting out of respect for the Spanish Catholic mendicant tradition, given his lifelong devotion to the Mexican Catholic Church. Historians have argued vigorously about whether the ministry’s ultimate aim was to create a democratic polity or to rebuild a national economy under the supervision of capitalist elites, just as they have argued about the relationship of the SEP to the communities where the misiones did their work. They disagree less over the character of that project, which Vasconcelos rooted in Catholic metaphysics and the classical education associated with ancient Greece and Rome.
But the centralizing work of José Manuel Puig Casauranc and Moisés Sáenz after 1924 was of greater importance to the history of integration in the American West. Vasconcelos provided the initial burst of institutional energy out of which emerged the cultural missions, but it was between 1924 and 1935 that the specific configuration of institutions, policy framework, and management structure emerged that won the accolades of the Americans. In my own estimation, the Americans would not have been nearly as impressed with the integrationist work of the Mexican state at any other moment after 1920. Prior to the centralizing work of Casauranc and Sáenz between 1924 and 1935, Vasconcelos’s emphasis on the classical curriculum impeded the Deweyan philosophy to which the Americans had committed themselves in the United States. After the departure of Casauranc in 1931 and Sáenz in 1933 and the subsequent accession of the socialist-inspired Narciso Bassols to the Secretariat of Public Education, experimentalism in progressive education was diluted in favor of socialist doctrine whose determinisms were every bit as unattractive to pragmatists as nineteenth-century científico science. And beginning in 1940, the increasingly conservative tone of the presidential administrations deflated the institutional enthusiasm that had given the postrevolutionary
