changes between 1924 and 1935 when the American westerners were swept away by Mexican reform. What occurred under Casauranc and Sáenz drew them to Mexico for the rest of their careers.
The greatest transformation was the profound philosophical shift of the misión cultural toward pragmatism under Moisés Sáenz after 1924. When he became SEP secretary in 1924, Puig Casauranc had hired Sáenz to assume supervision for the rural school campaign Vasconcelos had initiated three years earlier. Sáenz had trained to be a schoolteacher at Jalapa Normal School in the state of Veracruz, graduating there in 1915 before being elevated to the directorship of Mexico’s Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, the prominent preparatory academy that educated the children of Mexico’s elite.3 Then, at twenty-five, he left Mexico to study with Dewey at Columbia Teachers College in New York City, for reasons that remain unclear. The decision may have resulted from his immersion in the Protestant missionary circles of Mexico, part of a long tradition of Protestantism in his family. As children, he and his sister had attended Protestant schools in Mexico City and Laredo, Texas, for example, and Protestant preacher Isaac Boyce was among the family’s closest friends. These ties to Protestantism carried into his professional career. Even as he was directing the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, he was simultaneously helping to widen the influence of liberal Christianity in revolutionary Mexico. In 1918, the American missionary organization whose efforts were directed at proselytizing Mexicans to evangelical Christianity, the Protestant Cooperating Committee, had turned to Sáenz to edit its monthly newsletter El mundo cristiano. It is through the editorship of El mundo that Sáenz may have first been exposed to Dewey, for it regularly published articles on pedagogical practice in the United States. The translations of Dewey and work of American progressive educators would have reinforced the pedagogical training Sáenz had already received at Jalapa.
Sáenz expanded Mexico’s rural education system to new areas of the Mexican countryside by increasing the number of schoolteachers in the field and, alongside fellow Deweyite Rafael Ramírez, by instituting normal training academies to supervise schoolteacher fieldwork. But it was in Sáenz’s attention to pedagogy where the influence of Dewey was felt most deeply. Sáenz remolded Vasconcelos’s platoons of educators to emphasize Dewey’s experimentalist ethics rather than Christian metaphysics as the guiding philosophy of rural education. By replacing a classical curriculum with an experimentalist project in pragmatist education, Sáenz elevated local experience to a primary role in the public schools and imbued them with the opportunity to transform postrevolutionary society. How quickly Sáenz transformed Vasconcelos’s work is indicated by the enthusiasm Dewey noted for Mexico’s schools during a summer research trip to Mexico City in 1926, only two years after Sáenz had assumed control of the rural schools. Dewey famously declared his admiration for the efforts of the Mexican schools, concluding that Mexico’s education efforts were providing a model of rural education for the rest of the world. “The most interesting as well as the most important educational development is the rural schools,” he wrote: “This is the cherished preoccupation of the present regime; it signifies a revolution rather than renaissance. It is not only a revolution for Mexico, but in some respects one of the most important social experiments undertaken anywhere in the world.”4
The fiscal and philosophical investment away from the metropolitan centers that the cultural mission represented made it the most exciting institutional development for the Americans during this time. The financial commitment the central government needed to maintain the platoons drew much attention. The scale of that work was not immense, but given that it operated in the rural arena where resources from the state were historically low, the consistent funding pattern was not unimpressive. Three years into Casauranc’s tenure with the SEP, in 1927, the Mexican state was providing support for six platoons of educators who had conducted a total of forty-five itinerant seminars lasting three weeks each over a terrain that included twenty of Mexico’s thirty-one states. The division of labor represented by these missions was not haphazard, but discrete and standardized. There were standardized duties for a platoon director, a social worker, a physical education teacher, an agricultural specialist, an animal technician, and a vocational arts instructor. There were the usual necessities for instruction, but also included had been agricultural implements and means of transportation to get the instructors into the field.
That a centrally coordinated effort was responsible for the division of labor of the cultural missions was another of its impressive features. It was not merely the large scale of each of the cultural missions that was worth noting, but that the fiscal resources for the missions were provided by the central government of the Mexican republic. The importance of central state financing is best understood not in the context of Mexican history, but in that of the historical tension in American history between the federal government and the various state governments. The Americans had been historical antagonists of states’ rights philosophies, since state control of educational resources had been a major historical impediment to the expansion of schools to the ethnic communities in whose name they fought. Thus, when the central coordination of the misión cultural out of Mexico City became evident to them, the Americans celebrated the different role of the central state in Mexico from that which they traditionally associated with the federal state in the United States. The presence of the misión cultural was the proof that the state was willing to place its institutional energy behind political transformation in an aggressive pursuit of a new moral vision. That the effort of the Mexican state was directed at the nation’s poorest and most ethnically marginalized communities only underscored the transformative moral vision to which the power of government had been harnessed. Such a vision seemed to validate a philosophy of government based on social welfare in an era that Daniel T. Rodgers has called the age of social politics.5
In the cultural mission the Americans saw a system that could be adapted to the Deweyan principles that made a new integrationist ethics possible. Loyd Tireman had only just moved from northern Iowa to New Mexico when, in the process of opening his laboratory school at the University of New Mexico, he was faced with the task of extending the results of his experimental labors to rural New Mexico’s 600 villages. To achieve the pedagogical outcome promised by Dewey’s philosophy was one of the labors he set for himself in 1927. But to replicate those results throughout the provinces of rural New Mexico was equally important. For him, the cultural missions in Mexico became the administrative platform for extending the reach of his ideas, just as extending the reach of the Mexican ministry of education had become the task Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez had assigned to the cultural missions in Michoacán and Tlaxcala. For George Sánchez, the missions became the instrument to create the community school in rural Louisiana from a seat of administrative power at Grambling University. After leaving his home state of New Mexico in 1937, but before starting his famed career at the University of Texas in 1940, he stopped in the Deep South to experiment in the rural schools of Louisiana. Under the philosophical gaze of John Dewey, it was there that he created Grambling’s equivalent of the cultural mission, radiating to the rural villages still residing in the long reach of Huey Long’s populist politics.
Figure 5. Cultural missionaries in the field at El Nith, one of the rural communities served by the normal school of Actopan, Hidalgo, 1932. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Misión Cultural Permanente en Ixmiquilpan, Box 45, Folder 34 (Hidalgo).
Hundreds of communities became the objects of SEP attention, representing a chronological and geographical relationship of spectacular breadth beginning in 1921 that had no match anywhere in the hemisphere. The diversity of ethnic communities, the variations in the regional economies, the spectrum of political ideologies from supporters of the state to supporters of the Catholic Church, and the orientation of the SEP educators were some of the many factors that determined the fate of the state’s project in national consolidation via the instrument of the cultural mission. In the state of Chiapas, for example, the cultural missionaries were welcomed as agents of a moral order that promised to protect new agrarian rights against the landed hacendados
