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

1. A Symphony of Cultures

C h a p t e r 1 A Symphony of Cultures If the essence of comparative history is to find differences rather than to highlight convergences, as Daniel T. Rodgers has argued, then the relationship between the United States and Mexico may be a better case study in comparative history than the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.1 Scholars have contrasted Mexico’s economic underdevelopment to America’s industrial leviathan, for example. They have idealized Latin America as a series of politically conservative Catholic societies in contrast to a Protestant United States that they have seen as politically progressive. The Mexican practice of race mixing known as mestizaje has been held up as an antithesis to the antimixing politics in the United States regarding miscegenation. Political instability has seemed to define Mexico, whereas America is held as the archetype of political stability. George I. Sánchez and his colleagues in the civil rights movement overcame America’s conventional orientalism toward Mexico by comparing three features of postrevolutionary Mexico to the United States.2 The first was that Mexico represented a country of enormous cultural diversity, not a source of uniform labor for American industry. ‘‘It is time now for the revolutionaries of Mexico to take up the hammer and wrap themselves in the blacksmith’s apron, in order to fashion the new nation composed of iron and bronze,’’ one of Mexico’s eminent twentieth-century public intellectuals , Manuel Gamio, had written of Mexico’s diversity in 1916.3 These Americans concurred, noting the presence of fifty indigenous groups whose distinctive cultures were vibrant contributors to the Mexican national community . The second feature was the central state as the mechanism for blending people into a united bloc of national citizens. Mexico had tried to 20 Chapter 1 use its central government to unify its cultural communities every few decades since independence in 1821. But only now, after the devastating Revolution of 1910, had social scientists come to believe that Mexico had finally found the way to national consolidation. As Gamio put it, a ‘‘powerful fatherland and a coherent and precisely defined nationality’’ would be the outcome for Mexico’s melting pot democracy, the result of new social sciences that had equipped the enlightened public official with the tools needed to achieve the perfect balance of a united public.4 The third was Mexico’s turn to the theorists at Columbia University to fashion social scienti fic solutions to the challenges posed by the institutional destruction of the revolution. Faced with an overwhelmingly rural population of extreme cultural diversity, Mexico’s state intellectuals faced a militaristic country to the north and the complete destruction of their own state amid ethnic and religious differences of vast proportions. These Mexican thinkers responded by turning to the work of John Dewey and Franz Boas, thus mirroring the responses of the Americans like Sánchez who had turned to Mexico in their search for ethnic consolidation and nation building in the rural American West. Some of the Americans had come to Mexico in their teens, fleeing the World War I draft. Others came on study trips paid for by private philanthropies in Chicago and New York that saw potential solutions to America’s race problem in Mexico’s state policy. Yet others were young schoolteachers who backed into Mexico’s influence on the life of the American West as a result of youthful enthusiasm to leave homes in Michigan and Iowa for new ones in New Mexico and California. Whatever their trajectories to postrevolutionary Mexico, these Americans became more than tourists to America’s southern neighbor. Mexico’s own resemblance to pressing questions of social change in the United States made Mexico a lifelong example for them, despite careers that they developed almost exclusively in the American West. A Symphony of Cultures It was impressive to watch how much ground of the Mexican countryside George I. Sánchez had covered. Already he had made two trips to Mexico, one to Mexico City in April 1935 to plan his future scope of work there for the Rosenwald Fund and a second in May, marking his first foray outside A Symphony of Cultures 21 the national capital. But it was in June that he appeared to encounter his first difficulties, as he followed the rural school officials who escorted him on his trip southward into Mexico...