Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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been configured as a vital element of our national character,” wrote Villoro. “The Indian is now considered to be a living, breathing factor in our social life, an input into our nation whose efficient contribution we are all now in search of.”45 Operating from the vantage point of 1900, when the view of Mexican history seemed only to magnify Mexico’s military and economic weaknesses before the growth of the United States, Villoro wrote, Pimentel and others had accepted the assumption that only a reconfigured relationship of Mexico’s people to one another could produce a strong nation capable of withstanding foreign military power. While they stopped short of giving Indians autonomy within the nation, they nonetheless triumphed Native Americans as integral to fin de siècle Mexico. “A nation is an assemblage of men who share a common set of beliefs, who are guided by a single idea, and who labor toward the same goal,” wrote Pimentel in 1864. “So long as our Indians are segregated as they are today, Mexico cannot reach the rank of true nationhood.”46
But it was the heavy growth of the postrevolutionary federal state after 1920 that dramatically transformed the relationship of Mexico’s people to one another. The expansion of the postrevolutionary state was so rapid, in fact, that an important historiography dating to the 1970s began referring to the postrevolutionary Mexican government as the “Leviathan state.” The state had transformed itself into a top-down behemoth that imposed its will on the people of the nation, these scholars argued, as represented by the PRI party’s seventy-year dominance of Mexican politics across the twentieth century. Subsequent scholarship argued strongly that postrevolutionary state growth was real but not necessarily evidence in itself of an increasingly powerful federal government.47 But even those scholars who disputed the strength of Mexico’s central state agreed that the period 1920–1940 represented a moment of radical reformulation for the Mexican melting pot. The institutional state became the site of social transformation via policy work that sought to rebalance Mexican society in the aftermath of its terrible civil war. As Alan Knight has argued, “The revolutionaries’ discovery of the Indian … was paralleled by their commitment to state- and nation-building.”48 This was the institutional state from which Vasconcelos, Gamio, and Sáenz launched their policy projects in social fusion.
The generation who built Mexico’s central state in the years following the Mexican Revolution spoke of building a harmonic national symphony from a triptych of peoples. In the context of the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau and others have condensed America’s diverse ethnic and racial communities into what David Hollinger has called the twentieth-century racial pentagon.49 That formation is characterized by symbolic red, black, brown, yellow, and white hues, corresponding to the distinctive communities in North America, Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe from which America’s people are descended. In Mexico, the analogue consisted of the criollos, mestizos, and indígenas.50 Of a total population of 14 million persons the year before the beginning of the Mexican Revolution (1909), 2.25 million were criollos, or white foreigners born in Spain or to Spanish parents living in Mexico. These were Mexicans who had never intermarried with either the indígenas or the mestizos.51 The indígenas (Indians) numbered a total of 4.75 million persons, roughly 35 percent of the population, while 7 million persons representing 50 percent of the population were of mixed white and Indian blood, or mestizos. In the work of postrevolutionary social theorists, mid-century Mexican sociologists and anthropologists, and historians of twentieth-century Mexico, this triptych became the standard shorthand representation of Mexico’s peoples.
No one had identified the ethnic range of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, the indígenas, perhaps more than Andrés Molina Enríquez, who had once printed a list of 752 distinct tribes who he argued had left anthropological records of their presence in Mexico at the moment of the Spanish conquest.52 But the smaller number of fifty or so Indian groups became the conventional number for Mexico’s Indian cultures in the century of scholarship that followed after the revolution. No one could agree on precisely what constituted the definition of “indigenous.” Early in the century, affiliation based on phenotype was common, but as biological arguments for race became less defensible after 1900, cultural characteristics such as language and dress became more common markers. Statistics could fluctuate widely at any one moment as well, depending on the definition of language ability. The 1930 census counted 2.6 million speakers of indigenous languages, for example, 17 percent of a population base of 16.5 million people, but half of these were monolingual in one indigenous language and the other half bilingual in combination with Spanish.53 Indians could be reduced to 8.5 percent of the population, in other words, if monolingualism was the defining characteristic of indígena society.
Less in dispute in postrevolutionary society was the social distance that separated Mexico’s indigenous groups from the metropolis that had emerged as the agent of national consolidation. The Maya Indians of the Yucatán peninsula had managed to sustain a forty-year low-intensity conflict against the Porfirian state that had not ended until 1890, and these Maya, after the triumph of the revolutionary armies, remained dominant across a vast expanse of mountain and jungle that remains forbidding even today. In the far north, in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa immediately south of Arizona, the Yaqui Indians remained a marauding presence whose war parties continued to disrupt the economic projects of the national state. The Otomí people lived in the mountains of Hidalgo state, less than one hundred miles from Mexico City, yet they were largely independent from the political and economic projects of the state. Around Mexico City proper were the Aztec peoples, descendants of the original settlers of Tenochtitlán, while in eastern Michoacán, surrounding the vastness of Lake Pátzcuaro, were the Tarascan Indians. Each of the communities had a different relationship to the national state, just as individual Indian nations did to the federal government in the United States, yet in general they were characterized by independent economic and political systems that remained in place alongside the accelerating projects in nation building that surrounded them.
The mestizos were noteworthy for the sheer volume as a percentage of Mexico’s population that they represented. At a moment in U.S. history when the social distance between those people configured as white and those configured as Native American and Black was rigid, Mexico’s mixed population represented half or more of the country’s entire population base. Vasconcelos called them the integral race of hybridized people whose birth in Mexico had been made possible by the fecund love of the Spanish. As descendants of both the Indian and European peoples of Mexico, Mexico’s state-builders designated them the mythic carriers of postrevolutionary Mexican nationalism and imbued them with the project of leading the reconstruction of the twentieth-century nation. As representatives of both the European and the Native American lineages of twentieth-century Mexico, it is they who were believed to contain each of the originary strands out of which postrevolutionary nationalism was to be constructed.
At the top of the racial hierarchy were the criollos, or whites, who lived mostly in the large cities of the nation, including Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Puebla. The historical blending between Europeans and Indians in Mexico meant that whiteness had become less of a marker of elite society by the twentieth century than was membership in the country’s plutocracy. But those who claimed descent strictly from European society continued to wield cultural power in a nation where indigeneity had become a despised mark of identity. Whites were the smallest of Mexico’s ethnic groups, yet the sense of superior European civilization with which they were associated became a social marker that defined much of Mexico’s Porfirian era culture. French-inspired architecture and art, for example, were prominent in nineteenth-century Mexico, and the golden era of colonial Spain remained a large touchstone for those who believed that Mexico should develop its European heritage rather than its indigenous ethnicities as a marker of progress.
Mestizaje has been a perennial theme in the sociology of Mexico, just as amalgamation has been a perennial concern in the United States. As Milton Gordon pointed out many years ago, however, many variables can contribute to the centripetal acceleration of one group toward another. Peoples can be joined by marriage and sexual contact, but they may also be directed toward one another through the reorientation of cultural patterns, entrance into new organizations, and government efforts to control conflict toward one another.54 At stake in postrevolutionary Mexico was not merely the presumed endpoint of new experiments in