Chapter 2

      Shock Troops

      The Mexican state attempted to integrate the peoples of Mexico into a single bloc of citizens not through a timeless process of biological mestizaje, but through instruments of statecraft that included patronage of the arts, a new infrastructure network, and a renewed focus on national symbols like the flag, the Indian, and folkloric dress.¹ However, it was three institutions of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP), institutions symbolized by the schoolteacher depicted in Rivera’s murals, that the Americans found amenable to the work of integration and civil rights in the American West. When the Americans returned home, they duplicated the intellectual and political labor of these institutions. They wrote of them as models for the United States in the aftermath of institutional failures that had led them to Mexico in the first place. They took photographs of them, juxtaposed them to their own schools in New Mexico and Texas, and described them as the agents of cultural regeneration for a Mexican nation on the move. These institutions became the policy units through which the Americans refracted their pragmatism-inspired experiments in the United States.

      The first was the cultural mission. As the name suggested, la misión cultural (cultural mission) was an adaptation of the sixteenth-century practice through which the mendicant orders had attempted to proselytize the indigenous communities of Mexico to the Spanish Catholic Church. The mendicants learned the language of the Indian nations to which they had been assigned, then moved into their communities during temporary journeys of exile from their Catholic monasteries as they sought to transform indigenous Mexico into Catholic Mexico. José Vasconcelos adapted this model as the outreach campaign of the postrevolutionary Mexican state when he became secretary of public education in 1921. Under Vasconcelos, the cultural mission became a secular organ of the state, not a religious one, although the millenarian project on which it was embarked shared the hallmarks of the erstwhile projects of the Spanish mendicant orders. Vasconcelos organized libraries of classical European texts that he sent into the provinces of the nation via cultural missionaries who were tasked with social reform work in the form of formal seminars conducted in the rural countryside. Schoolteachers from the rural schools were obligated to attend the seminars for three weeks at a time, where they were introduced to the pedagogical techniques that Mexico City had directed them to try.

      The second was the escuela normal rural (rural normal school), which was a permanent teacher training academy at which the rural schoolteacher trained to be an educator in the service of the state. The normal school was the centerpiece of rural education, for it was there that first-time teachers were introduced to the pedagogy of the state. As a central repository of state resources directed from Mexico City, its physical plant sometimes became the location at which the cultural mission performed its three-week seminars for rural schoolteachers. But the rural normal school provided the original imprint of what the postrevolutionary educator was supposed to be, a role that was enriched thereafter by the cultural missions.

      The third was the rural school. Forming the base of a pyramid whose apex was represented by the federal secretariat in Mexico City, it was the closest institution to the young schoolchildren and their parents whose lives were the targets of reform work by the postrevolutionary state. Beautiful images taken by photographers of the SEP while accompanying federal inspectors detail the discrete acts of labor through which the rural schools resocialized their students into the revolutionary nationalism Diego Rivera had captured in his Mexico City murals. There are students marching through small towns in remote areas while carrying the Mexican flag that had become the symbol of regeneration across the country. Primary school students are shown playing basketball as rural schoolteachers work to instill athletic games imported from the United States. In other photographs, young men and women stand in front of school buildings as they read from schoolbooks brought to them from Mexico City, or they offload bricks from trucks brought in to help with village construction projects. The rural school was what the Americans came to call the “House of the People,” after the nickname the Secretariat of Public Education had given to the school, la casa del pueblo. From the 1930s until the 1950s, the Mexican rural school would provide the primary model for the Americans of what the public school in rural America should be.

      Together, the personnel of these three institutions were the shock troops of the postrevolutionary Mexican state. They were schoolteachers and school administrators, inspectors and vocational experts whose labors in education may have appeared docile and beneficent. But in the photographs that captured their work, they appear as nothing so much as Green Beret soldiers who had been sent to resocialize the rural communities of the nation into the policy platform of the state. They operated as platoons of teachers, trained in a variety of skills that were put to use in the service of creating a new economy and a new relationship of the individual to the school. They operated in remote communities where schools had been built for the first time in the history of the country. They traveled to municipal seats of power at regular intervals, where they were greeted by federal inspectors who monitored their work and advised them on the newest advances in science and pedagogy. For the Americans, they came to represent the caring state. In the federal government’s interest in moving the villages of the nation toward national integration, the Americans saw a central state that cared enough to bring the promises of the public school to the remotest areas of the country.

       The Cultural Missions

      Of Mexico’s federal institutions for integrating the nation into one, the misión cultural was the model that the Americans found most practical to replicate at home. The excitement for the Americans resided in the metaphor that the mission represented. The mission was not merely attached to the metropolitan center of the nation. It was that the center of the nation had flung itself outward toward the provinces, like some giant exhalation of energy that was the embodiment of social change itself. In the mission’s centrifugal movement outward, the Americans detected the promise of state responsibility to cultural frontiers that had long been forgotten. My own attempt