used by the Americans as a precursor to twentieth-century postrevolutionary government policy. Chávez agreed, as her 1926 final exam at the Tacámbaro rural normal school reflected: “The theme that was recommended to me has convinced me of the large similarity that exists between the pedagogy imparted by a group of benefactors after the conquest and the present-day rural schools,” she wrote. “Don Vasco de Quiroga … said that the Indian is a rational human being and a younger brother who waits for an education and who is worthy of it like anyone else.… Quiroga formed the rural schools whose trajectory to better the conditions of the Indians was very great. That tendency cannot be reduced to the social life of the Indians, but to Quiroga’s move to release them from the slavery in which they found themselves.”25
The monthly newspapers published by the rural normal schools displayed testimonials to potential social change, meanwhile. In Erongarícuaro, Michoacán, for example, a young fourth-grade student named Jesús published a short editorial consisting of the ten maxims that expressed the social ethics he was developing at the rural normal school there. “Our country cries for citizens who fight to be free. It is good to be independent,” he wrote. In a space left blank, he invited his readers to express their hopes for self-fulfillment as the administrators of the SEP in Mexico City attempted to build a national system of schools. “If you would create a brilliant career, fulfill your responsibility as student and you shall end by becoming a (fill-in-the-blank-as-you-choose).” In a third comment, Jesús directly targeted the Indians of Michoacán: “You [the Indian] have fought to liberate your race and died [for that cause] so that others later could defend their rights, thereby becoming free like the lion of the mountain and free like the birds of the skies.”26 A second example comes from the monthly newspaper of the rural normal school at Xocoyucan, Tlaxcala. In December 1926, the young student identified only as “A.G.A.” described the importance of paying attention to the interests of the child as the central consideration of the schoolteacher under whose supervision she would fall. “To study the talents of a child is fundamental and requires continuous and close observation of his spontaneous activities. One must watch the child at play and during her assigned tasks, where one can measure the satisfaction that occurs when she experiments with a difficult labor,” he wrote. Such work, wrote the student, was a labor of many years, since oftentimes one’s interests did not emerge until age twelve or fourteen. Yet such difficult labor was necessary because the world needed people of all types. “We take great notice of our mission, which is steadfastly opposed to transform our classrooms into warehouses for our students. Many students who were called good-for-nothings, stubborn, dense, dumb, or crazy were simply misunderstood; we tried to force square pegs into round holes.” Earlier in his essay, he had elaborated on just this very point. “It is well known that there are no two individuals who are exactly alike. That is why we say that nature breaks the mold each time that a new child is born.”27
These postrevolutionary challenges to traditional power structures do not invalidate contemporary historical criticism that Mexico’s postrevolutionary educational projects were efforts at social control. In Chávez’s own words is the evidence that the state could be a paternalistic influence on rural Mexico via education policies that rationalized the Indian as a member of the human race in the attempt merely to subvert his freedom anew. Chávez states that it was her schoolteacher who had recommended the topic of Vasco de Quiroga to her, for example. Quiroga was a Catholic priest who, as Chávez writes, was attempting to convert Mexico’s Native Americans to the Catholic faith rather than trying to increase their level of freedom to some precursor condition that antedated the Spanish conquest.28 Similar clues of control are found throughout the essays in the files of Tacámbaro, Michoacán. In the words of Agripina Magaña J., for example, the Indian was alcoholic, dirty, and lazy.29 According to Catalina Medina César, life in rural Mexico was a decayed civilization where new light had to be introduced as part of the postrevolutionary moral order.30 The rural normal school newspapers sometimes argued that the new Mexican school should become an arbiter of power no matter what the local community desired. These examples clearly confirm what scholars like Mary Kay Vaughan, Susana Quintanilla, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez have argued about postrevolutionary Mexico: through such instruments as El Maestro Rural, the state represented a heavy hand of authority that constrained the possibilities for rural people into prescribed channels rather than increasing the chances for lives free of authoritarian control.31
Yet as historian of Mexico Alexander Dawson has pointed out, emphasizing paternalistic control without underscoring the simultaneous presence of ideas that can be interpreted as challenges to authority structures is a good story that “relies on a vision of the past that distorts as much as it reveals.”32 Félix Gómez emphasized free choice in his essay, for example. Salvador León y Ortiz was clear that the SEP’s new education models emphasized interest in the task at hand rather than obligation as the source of work. And even as Chávez romanticized the career of a sixteenth-century priest whose politics was not neutral, she underscored the critique of the conventional view of the Indian that John Dewey and Franz Boas had helped to make central to twentieth-century social theory. The Indian was rational in the context of his own culture, and fitted to ideas just like anyone else, she wrote.33 Quiroga was a model not merely because he emphasized the expansion of freedom in the realm of civic intercourse, but because he emphasized political freedom as part of the hierarchy of power. One eminent historian of postrevolutionary education in Mexico, Elsie Rockwell, has put the spread of modernist ideas in the following way. “The SEP’s bulletins and journals carried the new educational philosophy into the states of the nation. The echo of those ideas is to be found in the texts and the discussions in the schools of Tlaxcala. Those ideas did not enter without much subsequent commentary, but at the very least, the educators of the SEP created new spaces in which these debates could take place.”34 These examples do not suggest Mexico had been transformed into a democratic nation. They support the more modest claim that new philosophical ideas were entering the provinces of the Mexican state through the influence of John Dewey and others, where they were recognized by the Americans who visited Mexico in the 1930s. The Americans who came to Mexico later were astonished to find such ideas at work there, because they were struggling to bring those same ideas to bear on the difficult social conditions of the rural American West where they worked.
Mexico’s schools also represented important experimental models of administrative practice for the Americans. Such concerns may seem quotidian, but the flow of resources from Mexico City to the rural normal schools required methodical planning, good communication between SEP headquarters and rural schools in the provinces, and a system for supervising the mandates directed by the state. Cultural missionaries had to find ways to organize rural students into discrete grades and classrooms, integrate teaching methodologies into the daily rituals of rural villagers, and convince supportive villages that new methods of instruction would prove beneficial to the economic and political inclinations of local families. None of these measures could be taken for granted, the Americans knew. Faced with metropolitan political bureaucracies at home that had little experience in managing new educational techniques in rural communities, the Americans were amazed by the extent to which Mexico’s central state had unfolded its educational projects in the provinces of the postrevolutionary republic. The expenditure of resources was deeply inadequate by Mexico’s own standard, covering only a fraction of the national territory. But to the Americans, those resources represented a formidable administrative project in the rural scene whose components could be profitably modified for use in the American West.
Third, Dewey in Mexico had currency for the Americans because he had succeeded in moving the understanding of the school in the direction of the study of psychology. Contextualizing Dewey within psychology is not an easy move to make in twentieth-century Mexican history, since debates about psychology and the school are not antiseptic discussions to be considered outside the deep political stakes involved in the decades following the Mexican Revolution. Yet any review of Dewey’s role in educational reform, political transformation, aesthetics, and ethics is not merely incomplete, but fundamentally flawed, if it does not first take into account his interest in how the mind creates knowledge out of experience in order to transform how knowledge is used politically. Psychology was central
