Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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south of the Rio Grande River was not a single country, but “many Mexicos,” a title he gave to his first book.34 “[W]e must recognize that Mexicans are a brand new people—and that they are the products of tremendously diverse antecedents and circumstances,” wrote George I. Sánchez in the early 1940s. “The Mexican and his institutions … reflect a kaleidoscopic blending of many peoples, they reflect the coursing of a tortuous stream that is placid here turbid there—where the Moslem, the Jew, the Christian, the Maya, and the Aztec mix to build a new people, and those people new institutions.”35 “ ‘The Mexican’ does not exist,” wrote Mexican sociologist Carlos A. Echánove Trujillo in 1946, “because Mexico is constituted from a mosaic of diverse ethnic groups and from dissimilar cultural regions.”36
Some represented twentieth-century Mexico as a solution of peoples waiting to be synthesized into a mixture stronger than the sum of its parts. Others would call Mexico a mosaic, a weave of colored strands brought together on a giant loom. Still others would employ a biological metaphor. Mexico was a crossroads of people where the capacity to love the other translated itself into a sexual power capable of bringing the cosmic energy of the universe to the terrestrial earth. An era of universal harmony was at hand, wrote José Vasconcelos, where the utopian homeland of Latin American prophecy was to be created after two centuries of New World decline and the expansion of Protestant Europe into the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, as the postrevolutionary state stabilized later in the century and a government administrative structure had formed, sociologists reduced Gamio’s world-historical forge to a laboratory melting pot (crisol) where fusion was occurring daily. But the point was clear. Whether it was expressed in the language of biology, the weaver’s loom, or as the furnace and smelter, Mexico was a crucible of cultures whose future depended on the idea of blending.
Mestizaje and the Leviathan State
The representations of postrevolutionary national unity created by Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Sáenz have produced a celebration of Mexican mestizaje among scholars of the United States as the antithesis to U.S.-based notions of racial purity and what historian David Hollinger has called the “one-drop rule.”37 Mestizaje is properly defined as racial amalgamation, or the biological blend of Spanish and Indian in Latin America, and is conventionally portrayed in contemporary U.S. scholarship as the opposite of the U.S.-based notion of miscegenation.38 As the argument goes, the historical Mexican porosity to the biological crossing of Spaniard and Indian produced a social community that defined hybridity as an ethical virtue. Such an ethic was antithetical to the ethical injunction in U.S. history to avoid racial mixture, especially across the black-white color line. The contrasts in racial subjectivity across North America’s distinctive national communities are important to bear in mind historically, of course, especially in the twenty-first-century context of rapid immigration from Latin America to the United States.39
Yet American scholars have missed the political platforms on which Sánchez and Embree based their study of Mexican race relations because they have continued to position mestizaje as a biological process rather than an institutional and cultural one. It is true, clearly, that mestizaje included biological hybridity across the Mexican ethnic spectrum. But in contrast to many contemporary American interpretations of Mexican racial history, it was not biological mestizaje that Sánchez, Embree, and others celebrated. Rather, looking horizontally across the bureaucracies of the postrevolutionary Mexican state, these latter scholars were captivated by the institutional designs the Mexican federal government had created in order to foster cultural exchanges among Mexico’s diverse peoples. Such institutional designs were aimed at new forms of social exchange rather than at biological blending. These broader types of exchanges in Mexican race relations are critical to bear in mind, for they manifested institutional experiments in ethnic relations that Gamio, Vasconcelos, and Sáenz created as the analogues to their teleological visions of the Mexican melting pot.
When Vasconcelos wrote La raza cósmica, for example, he was speaking about racial fusion in Latin America only after three years of government service with the Secretariat of Public Education, which was attempting to fuse the peoples of Mexico into a united whole using platoons of schoolteachers called cultural missionaries. Gamio’s image of the smelter as a metaphor for postrevolutionary history in Forjando patria was an injunction to mix, but his text was one of the founding statements of twentieth-century Mexican statecraft for its argument about the application of social science to twentieth-century government in the interest of national unity. Moisés Sáenz described Mexico as a mosaic, a mariachi, and a choir, but he had done so on the leeward side of a ten-year career with the Mexican central state, spent trying to reconcile Mexico’s cultural diversity via a centralized political structure capable of addressing Mexico’s social ills through the institution of the public school.40 Thus, while U.S. scholars have emphasized the visual and linguistic metaphors of Mexico’s integrated community as evidence for the ethical superiority of biological mestizaje, it is in fact more important to underscore mestizaje as the policy outcome shaped by public intellectuals who are recognized in Mexican national history as the architects of Mexico’s postrevolutionary state. In contrast to romantic portrayals of biological mestizaje in Mexico among contemporary U.S. scholars, then, it is important to understand the careers of the civil rights Americans in the 1930s as more than the wanderings of orientalist intellectuals who imbued a foreign society with dreams of race mixture. Mexico came to represent for the Americans as much a province of policy work as a source of ethnic imagery as, beginning in 1920, Mexico mobilized its public policy resources and harnessed the power of the central state to fuse the nation culturally into a unified citizenry.
The same set of documents in which Sánchez and Embree discussed Rivera’s mural images also captured their interest in Mexico’s state-led policy projects for achieving the harmonious society. Sánchez had come to Mexico in 1935, two years into the massive reorganization of government Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated in 1932. And yet, during the quintessential episode in the growth of the American federal state, it was not the New Deal that represented the archetype of the activist state for George Sánchez. When he returned from Mexico in 1935, it was Mexico’s central state growth after 1920 that he celebrated for its postrevolutionary ‘new deal’ efforts, not that of the United States.41 Edwin Embree had long been involved in the Rosenwald Fund project to build schools for Blacks in the American Deep South. But Mexico’s public mechanism for constructing educational institutions in rural Mexico provided a novel model for thinking about the role of public government in modern society rather than that of private philanthropy.42 For these Americans, Rivera’s images had provided proof that the United States was not alone in conceiving of itself as a society of disparate cultures needing to be fused into a common whole. But those images functioned primarily as symbols of a monumental government attempt to harness the power of the central state in the pursuit of social reform, not as images of the romantic racial utopia.
The history of state involvement in the relationship between the Europeans who colonized Mexico and the native Americans they encountered there was not original to the postrevolutionary writings of Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz. Such thought has always been one of the dominant strands in Mexican intellectual history. In his assessment of the differences between social projects that came before and after the revolution, for example, Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro traced a line of antecedent projects that had attempted to merge Mexico’s indigenous cultures into the life of the nation-state as far back as the sixteenth century.43 Hernán Cortés, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, and Manuel Orozco y Berra—these and more had all attempted to reformulate the relationship of Mexico’s native Americans to the European power structures established by the Spanish invaders.44 These ideas about the relationship between the Indian and the European were a broad spectrum of models that stretched as far back in Mexican history as one cared to look, Villoro argued. One important precursor to postrevolutionary thought about the relationship of Mexico’s peoples to one another that had been reached in the late nineteenth century, for example, when the Porfirian era work of Francisco Pimentel, Francisco Bulnes, and Andrés Molina Enríquez had reformulated the Native American from a novelty to an integral sociological unit of the Mexican nation. “Before we