society. It was there where the nation was to be forged. A recent book by one of Mexico’s leading scholars of postrevolutionary education has adequately captured the hope that was infused into the rural school: To Build the School, To Build the State.14 Sánchez implicitly recognized the true import of the rural school in the Mexican hierarchy of power and social transformation. It was the rural school that was to carry the heaviest burden of Mexico’s integration project, and in this sense, it was the most important institution of the state after 1920, just as Sánchez’s photographs reflect.
In theory, the purpose of la casa del pueblo was to close the political gap between Mexico City and the thousands of rural villages that composed the postrevolutionary nation. The extent to which the state was promoting the cultural life of the villages as part of the reconstituted nation has been the topic of some of the finest scholarship in Latin American history over the last thirty years. Some forty years ago, Josefina Zoraida Vázquez noted that the textbooks used by the federal state promoted a vision of Mexico that favored the dictates of the SEP over the cultural practices of the local communities.15 A large body of important scholarship subsequently argued that Mexico’s state builders, including the Columbia University graduates Manuel Gamio and Moisés Sáenz, sometimes failed to uphold the designs of local communities in establishing the new equilibrium between the local and the national during the process of national consolidation. Even if no transcendent ethical platform existed on which to construct the new nation, as pragmatism and cultural relativism held, it did not matter anyhow, these scholars have argued, since public officials in Mexico City were unwilling to modify their presumptions to align themselves more closely with the wishes of the local community. More recently, new scholarship has deepened our understanding of the local experiments in nation building from which the Mexican melting pot was forged. Local communities often supported the state schools, thereby establishing new avenues for social movement that became important for social mobility in later generations. And the melting pot project may have witnessed its first hesitant movement toward cultural pluralism during the 1930s under the banner of the SEP schools.16
Figures 8 and 9. George I. Sánchez’s photographs of rural public schools in Mexico and New Mexico. While the discursive framework of integration across Mexico and the American West was made possible by the pragmatist ideas Mexican and American social scientists shared, the political movements toward integration were reflected in the institution of the elementary school as a site of cultural consolidation across distinctive cultural communities. At the top, for instance, Indian and mestizo schoolchildren attended postrevolutionary Mexico’s new public schools after 1921; at the bottom, Mexico-descended and European immigrant children went to school together in the schools of rural New Mexico. These projects in national consolidation did not occur independently of one another. Top: George I. Sánchez, Mexico: A Revolution by Education (New York: Viking, 1936), 202; Bottom: Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
A universal statement about these petit projects within la casa del pueblo is elusive given the diversity of postrevolutionary Mexico’s rural communities, but there can be no doubt of the enormous scope of the work they performed. Looking back on the years between 1920 and 1940, one could see the establishment of thousands of new schools in the Republic of Mexico at the hands of the federal government and the local community alike. Like the Rosenwald schools of the American Deep South and the progressive education movement in the United States, this institutional project was one of the grandest educational chapters in the twentieth-century history of the Western Hemisphere. In every state of the Mexican republic, new rural schools were constructed by the hundreds. Whereas prior to 1910 and the downfall of Porfirio Díaz, schooling had taken place exclusively in the metropolitan centers of the republic, by 1940 nearly every community in the country could claim a rural school of its own. The French state took notice and replicated Mexico’s efforts by 1960.17 Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Bolivia also copied the example. This international example may have reached its apogee in the late 1940s, when UNESCO turned to Mexico’s revolutionary schools as models for development in many parts of the world.
Ultimately, however, it is less important that we come to a universal resolution on the quality of Mexico’s schools than it is to understand why the rural schools became a powerful example off which Americans reflected their spectrum of thought as they wrestled with the place of the public school in the rural American West. First, the relationship between the local community and the national government in Mexico was an example for the Americans of how to rethink the relationship between the state and rural America in the 1930s. Nothing drew their attention more than the willingness of some communities to use their resource bases to construct public schools and provide for the maintenance of the local schoolteachers. Such a funding mechanism for the rural schools was an example, the Americans thought, for the system of schools in the American West, where village schoolhouses still operated without the financial support of state government and outside the supervision of state boards of education. Second, the Americans were interested in the comprehensiveness and uniformity with which pedagogical instruction was carried out away from the metropolitan centers of the nation. The communities that they had come from in the United States were not merely minority communities, but, more important, rural communities whose relationship to the metropole was uncertain and underfinanced. In the context of the small size of the federal state before President Roosevelt and state resources that failed to protect the educational resources of the rural American West, the question of implementing reform was among the most important topics of concern for these Americans. As we shall see, they had committed their careers to the public school as an instrument of ethnic democracy. But such ethical commitments meant almost nothing if institutions could not be produced to carry forth the rejuvenation of industrial society that they imagined. Third, Mexico’s use of the local natural environment as an adjunct space of pedagogy that could be harnessed to the classroom was an important model of instruction. Agriculture, ravines, mountains, flora, animals—all these and more formed a part of the organic environment the Americans surveyed as they journeyed through the provinces of the Mexican countryside. It should be remembered that they had been trained in the pedagogy of pragmatism, and so were constantly on the lookout for methods in learning that they could put into practice in the context of the rural American West.
John Dewey and the Mexican State
Moisés Sáenz had imported pragmatist education to Mexico from Columbia University at the height of John Dewey’s influence in North America. He had studied with Dewey only three years after the publication of Democracy and Education, and he began studying at Columbia the same year, 1919, as the founding of the Progressive Education Association. When he helped to create a province of experimentalist schools for the postrevolutionary state, then, Sáenz transformed the thousands of new schools that began operating in Mexico into a new province of experimentalist education in North America at the very moment new schools inspired by Dewey were simultaneously opening in the United States. Yet timing alone cannot explain the attraction Mexico’s institutions had for the Americans.
The use of Deweyan pragmatism as a system of social transformation in Mexico suffered from important shortcomings, moreover. The expansion of modernist ideas on Mexican soil appears to have been unsystematic, applied across a variety of institutions in various forms rather than on any single level of the federal system, and not limited to any single theory of new education or any single theorist. Pragmatist theory appeared more prominently in the curriculum units of the escuelas normales regionales and the misiones culturales than it did a level below, in the rural elementary schools where the children were attending school. Even in the normal school, however, one is struck by small evidence of direct discussions of pragmatism in comparison to the room given to matters of hygiene, the agricultural economy, and rudimentary pedagogy in mathematics, language instruction, history, and physical science. Similarly, it is difficult to measure systematically
