different skin tones, clothing patterns, and bodily features. This variety of people was one of the first observations that Sánchez made about Mexico as he traveled throughout the country for the first time in spring and summer 1935. Much later, as he looked back on a lifetime of visits to Mexico, he would describe the breadth of difference he noted in Mexico’s cultural tapestry by analogizing it to that of the United States. “The Mexican people, like people in many other countries, are not the product of just one culture,” he wrote. “In the United States … many cultures have contributed to the personality of the United States citizen: Italian, German, English, Polish, Dutch, and many, many others.… [I]n Mexico, the same is true: the Mexican is the product of many cultures.”8
Edwin Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and committed to white-black relations in the American South, was also captivated by Rivera’s murals. He had visited Mexico in 1928, seven years before Sánchez, and his report to the Rosenwald board was especially heavy on the social themes reflected in Rivera’s murals. Embree was clearly moved by the open books that Rivera’s schoolteachers displayed before their rural pupils in the murals that Rivera had painted at the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City. One showed “the teacher bringing new light to Mexican peasants,” he wrote, while another depicted the “wicked priest and capitalist … frowning in the background.”9 And just as Sánchez later noted, Embree, too, noted that there was no cultural uniformity among the Mexican people that Rivera portrayed. “Ethnologically, present day Mexico presents … a heterogeneous picture,” he wrote. “The indigenous tribes include 49 well distinguished ethnical groups, speaking 100 distinct languages or dialects, and exhibiting markedly different customs and habits of life.” These were only part of the many groups, wrote Embree, that composed this single nation.10
Rivera’s murals reflected the major concerns that had brought two of the central figures of twentieth-century American race relations to study the social reforms of the postrevolutionary Mexican state in the 1920s and 1930s. The first was Mexico’s ethnic diversity, which reflected the ethnic diversity of the states in the American West and South where Sánchez and Embree were committed to working. The American West had Mexican-descended mestizos, Indians, and whites, while the Deep South had blacks and whites. But it was the fact of ethnic diversity rather than its specific particularity that made postrevolutionary Mexico important to these Americans. A second was Rivera’s representation of the Mexican state. In the Secretaría de Educación Pública murals Rivera captured the state in the form of a federal schoolteacher imparting the wisdom of the nationalist project to indigenous and labor groups arrayed around her, or alternately, as a mounted federal soldier watching over the educational labors of the teacher before rural farmers. For the Americans, Rivera’s images of the state symbolized an interested government that saw its responsibilities as extending to the reformulation of ethnic relations in the modern nation. The third concern that Rivera captured was the rural countryside. The teacher and the soldier were portrayed not just anywhere, but in rural Mexico. Since Sánchez and Embree were principally concerned with rural New Mexico and the rural South, they wished to study the labors of Mexico’s public officials in the agrarian villages of the nation.
Rivera’s art coincided with one of the recognized moments in U.S. history when public discussions about race relations and ethnic diversity in American society seemed to reach a crest. In The Souls of Black Folk, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois had declared to America that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”11 Not long after, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race gave Americans a canonical installment in the conservative concern with immigration and nativism.12 Franz Boas had startled the academy in 1911 with one of the definitive statements of the falsity of racial typologies, The Mind of Primitive Man.13 But it was two images of the American melting pot produced shortly before Rivera painted his representations of ethnic diversity in Mexico City that arguably became even more archetypal in American culture. In 1915, philosopher Horace Kallen announced in The Nation that the arrival of non-British immigrants to the United States was creating a federation of peoples whose diversity would destroy the insipid national culture that the heirs of British America had created there.14 Israel Zangwill had been wrong in his turn-of-the-century play, The Melting Pot, that immigrant diversity was destined to collapse into a melting pot that had obliterated the defining features of European immigrants to the United States.15 Instead, a great moment in American history had been reached at the beginning of the twentieth century, wrote Kallen. The widening of American national character that was happening de facto every day as new immigrants came to the United States represented a “cacophony” that could go one of two ways. It could become a sterile, uniform ethic—what Kallen called a “unison”—if conservative Americans refused to transform the accepted basis for an American national culture. Or it could become a “harmony” of peoples who willingly joined each other’s differences to one another to create a richer, more vital American community.16 In his 1916 “Trans-National America,” meanwhile, young New York essayist Randolph Bourne created a second canonical image of American diversity.17 Kallen had insisted that the American mosaic was to be fashioned from distinctive cultures whose ultimate quality was insularity that emanated from their intrinsic uniqueness. These could not mix, as Kallen insisted, since the individual could never separate himself out of the distinctive history that his ancestors had bequeathed to him. By contrast, Bourne argued that America was becoming “transnational, a weaving back and forth … of many threads of all sizes and colors.” What made America rich was the impulse toward cultural sharing and the transformation of ethnic cultures that resulted. Kallen stressed the inertial properties of ethnic cultures, arguing that the American federation would be held in place by the pressure of ethnic cultures pushing against one another but never synthesizing. Bourne downplayed the primacy of ethnic cohesion. What mattered was not the intrinsic properties of any one culture, but the decision to share those qualities across cultures. “Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision,” he wrote. Kallen’s harmony was rooted in the group, its intrinsic distinctiveness in need of protection because that difference was the root of identity. Bourne was less excited by the vibrancy of particular cultures. For him, the amalgam of borrowed ideas and practices was more important than the cohesion of tradition.
Yet despite their canonical position in the history of American race relations and ethnic diversity, these archetypal metaphors of American pluralism never appeared in the work of the Americans who came of age in the 1920s and helped build the civil rights movement in the American West a generation later. For these far-off western Americans, it was the canonical melting pot images crafted in Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution that had instead captured their attention as they tried to understand American pluralism during the 1920s and beyond. Crafted in the aftermath of social conflict in Mexico that rivaled similar episodes of ethnic tension in the United States, images from Mexico like those that Rivera had emblazoned on the walls of the Mexican ministry of education became the primary symbols of national integration in the United States for western Americans whose regional communities in New Mexico, Texas, and California were undergoing the same dramatic demographic changes that Kallen and Bourne had described for the American East. In his 1934 Ph.D. dissertation, for example, New Mexico educational philosopher George I. Sánchez identified the fabled American melting pot as the telos to which state government and public schools should direct their resources. But when he searched for the best example of institutional labors in pursuit of national integration, it was Mexico’s melting pot images that he pointed to, not those of the United States. For Carey McWilliams’s North from Mexico, still considered one the seminal studies of Mexican migration to the United States after sixty years in print, the idea of ethnic fusion created by Mexican intellectual Manuel Gamio in 1916 became the explanatory framework for a narrative of social unity amid the extremes of ethnic tensions that characterized World War II California.18 For the bureaucrats of the New Deal Office of Education, Mexico’s melting pot images provided the template for attempts to reduce social conflict on Western and Great Plains Indian reservations during the Great Depression. For Americans like Sánchez and Embree, it was Mexico’s history of diversity
