In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h a p t e r 3 The Language of Experience The difference Mexico’s postrevolutionary state made to American integration history becomes evident when we examine the encounters of American social scientists with the policy experiments of the Mexican government. These Americans retreated into postrevolutionary Mexico when government in the United States could not provide solutions to the problems of racial conflict in the American West. In Mexico, they found a central state using Dewey’s ideas to reconstruct the Mexican melting pot across the rural provinces of the republic. Mexico’s scientific state became the most important model of social change for them during the New Deal and World War II. As Gregory Pappas has argued, science became a metaphor for them, a way of searching for new possibilities rather than prescribing set truths for social action in the United States.1 Their resulting attempts to integrate the West in the aftermath of their time in Mexico were among the most creative social science experiments in the nation. Some championed language reform as an instrument toward the lessening of social conflict across ethnic difference. Others built the most successful laboratory schools in the American West, hoping to understand the role of the school in shaping ethnic democracy. For others, anthropology became a way to study the process of ‘‘acculturation,’’ or how people from one culture absorbed the lifeways of people from another culture. Was it possible, they wondered, to manage that process as part of an administrative attempt to create the beloved community in the United States? Montana Hastings and Psychology in Mexico City The relationship of Mexican integration policy to the integration movements of the American West started to become evident in one of California ’s canonical legal battles in the early 1930s, just at the moment that 96 Chapter 3 school experimentation in Mexico was about to reach the height of reform. It was late 1931, and Mexico’s state department, the Secretarı́a de Relaciones Exteriores (Secretariat of Foreign Affairs; SRE), had just reported that widespread segregationist practices in the United States had begun to draw the attention of Mexico’s consular officials in California, Arizona, and Texas. Just to the east of San Diego, the public school separation of immigrant Mexicans and white Americans had brought immigrant Mexicans into conflict with school officials. The superintendent had directed immigrant schoolchildren to enroll in ‘‘Mexican-only schools’’ located outside the neighborhoods where they would have otherwise attended school, but they had revolted. ‘‘The San Diego consulate,’’ reported the SRE, ‘‘protested to district officials, and sought out a larger rationale for the actions of the school district.’’2 Lemon Grove would become one of the canonical flashpoints of racial conflict in the twentieth-century American West, but from the perspective of the Mexican state there was nothing especially compelling about the Lemon Grove incident. Many other incidents stretching from California to Texas had been described by the SRE. In South San Antonio, an Americanization academy for Mexican immigrants had been burned to the ground. Mexican pupils had been denied access to the elementary schools of Mission, Texas. In Del Rio (Texas), Carpinteria (California), and Somerton (Arizona), students who had come to the United States from Mexico had been denied entry into the public schools or placed in segregated academies whose facilities did not match those provided to nonMexican youth. Racial hostility seemed to have become a normal part of social organization everywhere that immigrants from Mexico had recently arrived in the United States. That Mexico’s broader scientific state, rather than its consulate alone, was interested in the Lemon Grove case was evident in the joint policy reports Mexico’s federal government issued in response in 1931. In one, the SRE reported that Mexico’s diplomatic corps had commissioned its sister ministry, the Secretariat of Public Education, to study the arc of con- flict from California to Texas that was becoming a central feature of immigration from Mexico to the United States. ‘‘In view of the plethora of racist incidents, the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs saw fit to solicit from the SEP that the question of segregation in the public schools of the United States be submitted for special consideration by a corpus of Mexican experts on the matter,’’ the memo read. The SEP was the same ministry that had institutionalized Mexico’s melting pot projects beginning in 1921 with José [18.222.115.179] Project MUSE...

Share