Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States by Ruben Flores (review)

In Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States, intellectual and cultural historian Ruben Flores addresses the influences that post-revolutionary Mexico had on American social scientists working to improve community and educational conditions in the American West during the early twentieth century. With his research background focusing on the relationship between the local population and the national state as a supportive foundation, Flores compares and contrasts the implementation of social science (primarily in the form of Deweyan pragmatism) in Mexico and the United States as both nations grappled with the task of unifying their diverse peoples. At the parallel time of Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives and Mexico's first few decades after the Mexican Revolution, it appeared that there was far more dissonance than common ground in the state approach to integrating the variety of ethnic backgrounds in each respective nation. However, by tracing the careers of key American social scientists who worked and researched in both the American West and Mexico during this period, Flores illuminates the similarities of the situations as well as highlights the initiatives the Mexican state took in applying progressive ideas towards social conditions. Flores argues that "together, the cluster of ideas that had revolutionized social science and their corresponding models of social practice in Mexico became fundamental examples for the Americans of how the twentieth-century industrial nation could address the riddles of social and political community presented by ethnic diversity" (3). These reforms not only encouraged state unification but also provided inspiration for the American scholars to observe, learn from, and take back to the United States as potential solutions.

As the book covers several decades of scholarship, Flores has organized Backroad Pragmatists into three parts. The first part addresses both Mexico's ethnic diversity and the efforts of the post-revolutionary central state to work towards "blending people into a united bloc of national citizens" through the use of social scientific solutions inspired by Columbia University theorists John Dewey and Franz Boas (19). He relates the experiences of scholar George Sánchez's years of exploring Mexico's rural schools and communities, learning about the nation's cultural diversity and state-implemented institutions designed to integrate these various communities. In the second part of the book, Flores looks at the interaction between American social scientists and the Mexican government's implementation of these theories (95). He introduces anthropologists Montana Hastings and Ralph Beals as well as educator Loyd Tireman as examples of scholars dissatisfied with American policy who "retreated into postrevolutionary Mexico" and found examples of Dewey's theories at work to take back to the American West during the New Deal and World War II (95). The third section illustrates the connection between the research these American social scientists had both studied in Mexico and implemented in the United States and their involvement in World War II-era school desegregation cases in the American West. Twenty years of experimenting and observing social science in action allowed these scholars to use it as "an instrument of racial change" in the courts (210).

A clear strength of the book is the attention Flores pays to the personal details and stories of his subjects while reinforcing his argument. The pleasant variety of anecdotes and scholarship he integrates make the book readable and attention-getting. By tracing the same scholars throughout the book, Flores continues his line of argument over a series of episodes and periods that jump between their university experience, early jobs, time in Mexico, and later careers in the United States. In addition, he adds cultural context and local history of the areas discussed throughout each chapter to add depth to the strength of his examples. A potential weakness is the variety of topics covered in each chapter as they can detract from the central themes and argument of the book at times. However, this can also be viewed as a...