Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States

6. ‘‘The Sun Has Exploded’’: Integration and the California School

C h a p t e r 6 ‘‘The Sun Has Exploded’’: Integration and the California School Mexico’s bureaucracies had transformed school policy in New Mexico and Louisiana in the 1930s. But that influence continued into World War II America. Even as Mexican nationalism reached what one historian has called the most integrated moment of its twentieth-century history in the 1940s, it was shaping one of the canonical chapters of the American civil rights movement.1 The international influences on mid-century American racial liberalism have been charted elsewhere by Mary Dudziak and other scholars.2 But it was Mexico’s scientific state that shaped the canonical desegregation campaigns in the American West. There were other factors influencing desegregation, including migration from Mexico, mobilization for war, and transformations in federal jurisprudence. The growth of the social sciences and changing conceptions of American democracy were also important. But tracing the careers of George I. Sánchez and Ralph Beals into the 1940s shows us that the international exchange with postrevolutionary Mexico’s educational projects was a central component of what Jacqueline Dowd Hall has called the ‘‘long civil rights movement.’’3 They show us that the history of school desegregation in the American West was an offshoot of Mexico’s struggle with ethnic diversity as much as it was a domestic story of American social transformation. How Mexico’s nationalist experiments in psychology, philosophy, and anthropology became an institutional bridge to one of the central moments in the history of racial liberalism in the American West becomes evident if we examine the way Sánchez and his colleagues converged into the school desegregation cases. Through America’s entry into World War II and the 210 Chapter 6 emergence of the civil rights lawsuits, the Americans who had visited Actopan and Tlaxcala continued pushing the same faith they had earlier developed in pragmatism and the state to integrate the schools of the rural West. What becomes evident is the continuity of the work that these Americans completed between the New Deal era and World War II, across Mexico and the United States, even as lawyers began calling on them to provide the scientific rationale against Jim Crow in the desegregation lawsuits. The continuity of their work from earlier moments in Mexico and New Mexico represented a parallel world of civil rights, hidden in the shadows of the legal campaigns charted by the judges and the lawyers. In this parallel world, Loyd Tireman continued to push Mexico within his laboratory school as an antidote to segregation in New Mexico as late as 1948, even as he participated in the educational lawsuits in Texas. Here, George Sánchez continued his Mexico-descended efforts in administrative reform beyond the Deep South, into Texas and California. And Ralph Beals continued to study the relationship of the Mexican state to Native Americans in Sonora and Michoacán through the 1940s, even as he participated in the legal case that desegregated the public schools of California. These Americans continued to struggle with the challenges of the language barrier separating English and Spanish speakers from one another, and with education systems that could not be easily modified. But they had positioned themselves to use social science as an instrument of racial change by the advent of the World War II school desegregation cases because they had been experimenting with questions of assimilation and integration in Mexico and the American West for more than twenty years. It was at this moment that they converged from the earlier moment of assimilation projects into the campaigns of the postwar civil rights movement. It may seem jarring to chart the influence of Mexico’s rural school over desegregation campaigns that historians have charted as a domestic story of the American West. Yet none of the philosophical and political characteristics that had brought the American experimentalists to Mexico were irreconcilable with the philosophical tendencies of the desegregation movements that followed World War II. Canonical to the civil rights movement, for example, was the goal of bringing Mexican Americans and whites together in the elementary schools of Texas, Arizona, and California. Yet the Americans profiled here had been using the school in Mexico and the United States to fuse together the ethnic fragments of the nation into a united whole since the 1930s. Meanwhile, if the school became a primary ‘‘The Sun Has...