Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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returns to the institution of the Freedman’s Bureau after the American Civil War, for it was there that the American state took responsibility for redefining the relationship to cultural communities that had been locked out of the American political experiment. Something similar in both its promise and its failures was at work in the Mexican terrain after the revolution. For Americans looking to multiply the resources of the state in the effort to create an integrated society, the effects of the misión cultural were irresistible. Loyd Tireman immediately copied the misión cultural when he returned home to New Mexico from Mexico in 1931, flinging out his own cultural mission from Albuquerque in a bid to tether the rural communities of New Mexico to the melting pot project that he was building there. George Sánchez experimented with the misión cultural in Louisiana, where he replicated it among the black communities of the American South in an institutional experiment that became part of the founding history of Grambling State University. It was only in the aftermath of this experiment that he returned to New Mexico, Texas, and civil rights fame.
Institutionally, the Mexican cultural missions acted as platoons of metropolitan intellectuals who traveled to rural communities in the provinces in the attempt to proselytize their members to the integrationist project of the state. Pictures show them radiating outward from the capital by truck or by donkey, laden with the equipment needed to establish a new political beachhead in former monasteries expropriated from the Catholic Church. As a unit of the state, the missionaries were entrusted to organize the local school in each community to which they came, with the assistance of the local inhabitants. They were the organizers of the rural schools that would perform the work of pedagogy and indoctrination in pursuit of the postrevolutionary republic’s integration project. At first, the missionaries moved from community to community at three-week intervals. The missionaries organized the school, helped to recruit a schoolteacher from the local community who had been trained in one of the state’s normal schools, and regularized an academic pattern of instruction that was formalized through the succeeding years of operation. As the work of the cultural missionaries expanded and the rural schools became a formal part of the rural environment, the work of the missions was modified to increase the efficiency of the government’s labors. The cultural missions were given permanent seats at the rural normal schools, for example, out of which they now radiated rather than returning to Mexico City each time. They began to journey repeatedly to each village for multiple trainings each year rather than a single one. And they modified their curriculum in accordance with the labor needs of the local community.
The misión cultural was one of the mythical institutions of twentieth-century Mexican history, in part because it seemed to be a reworking of an organic institution that dated to sixteenth-century Mexico. As the Spanish continued their conquest of Mexico in the aftermath of the Aztec defeat in 1521, they turned to the Spanish Catholic Church to aid in the cultural transformation of Mexico’s indigenous societies. It was then that the mendicant priests, dressed in their robes and carrying the Catholic cross, spread across central Mexico in the effort to proselytize the Native Americans to the Christian faith. In their twentieth-century guise, however, the cultural missions received their great institutional impulse in the state from José Vasconcelos, the conservative melting pot theorist who would offer his raza cósmica vision of Mexican society in 1925.2 Beginning in 1921, Vasconcelos launched a series of grand experiments within the federal Secretariat of Public Education that included itinerant platoons of educators whose role was to establish rural public schools under the direction of the federal government. Vasconcelos may indeed have been acting out of respect for the Spanish Catholic mendicant tradition, given his lifelong devotion to the Mexican Catholic Church. Historians have argued vigorously about whether the ministry’s ultimate aim was to create a democratic polity or to rebuild a national economy under the supervision of capitalist elites, just as they have argued about the relationship of the SEP to the communities where the misiones did their work. They disagree less over the character of that project, which Vasconcelos rooted in Catholic metaphysics and the classical education associated with ancient Greece and Rome.
But the centralizing work of José Manuel Puig Casauranc and Moisés Sáenz after 1924 was of greater importance to the history of integration in the American West. Vasconcelos provided the initial burst of institutional energy out of which emerged the cultural missions, but it was between 1924 and 1935 that the specific configuration of institutions, policy framework, and management structure emerged that won the accolades of the Americans. In my own estimation, the Americans would not have been nearly as impressed with the integrationist work of the Mexican state at any other moment after 1920. Prior to the centralizing work of Casauranc and Sáenz between 1924 and 1935, Vasconcelos’s emphasis on the classical curriculum impeded the Deweyan philosophy to which the Americans had committed themselves in the United States. After the departure of Casauranc in 1931 and Sáenz in 1933 and the subsequent accession of the socialist-inspired Narciso Bassols to the Secretariat of Public Education, experimentalism in progressive education was diluted in favor of socialist doctrine whose determinisms were every bit as unattractive to pragmatists as nineteenth-century científico science. And beginning in 1940, the increasingly conservative tone of the presidential administrations deflated the institutional enthusiasm that had given the postrevolutionary period its definition. It was only during the narrow moment of educational changes between 1924 and 1935 when the American westerners were swept away by Mexican reform. What occurred under Casauranc and Sáenz drew them to Mexico for the rest of their careers.
The greatest transformation was the profound philosophical shift of the misión cultural toward pragmatism under Moisés Sáenz after 1924. When he became SEP secretary in 1924, Puig Casauranc had hired Sáenz to assume supervision for the rural school campaign Vasconcelos had initiated three years earlier. Sáenz had trained to be a schoolteacher at Jalapa Normal School in the state of Veracruz, graduating there in 1915 before being elevated to the directorship of Mexico’s Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, the prominent preparatory academy that educated the children of Mexico’s elite.3 Then, at twenty-five, he left Mexico to study with Dewey at Columbia Teachers College in New York City, for reasons that remain unclear. The decision may have resulted from his immersion in the Protestant missionary circles of Mexico, part of a long tradition of Protestantism in his family. As children, he and his sister had attended Protestant schools in Mexico City and Laredo, Texas, for example, and Protestant preacher Isaac Boyce was among the family’s closest friends. These ties to Protestantism carried into his professional career. Even as he was directing the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, he was simultaneously helping to widen the influence of liberal Christianity in revolutionary Mexico. In 1918, the American missionary organization whose efforts were directed at proselytizing Mexicans to evangelical Christianity, the Protestant Cooperating Committee, had turned to Sáenz to edit its monthly newsletter El mundo cristiano. It is through the editorship of El mundo that Sáenz may have first been exposed to Dewey, for it regularly published articles on pedagogical practice in the United States. The translations of Dewey and work of American progressive educators would have reinforced the pedagogical training Sáenz had already received at Jalapa.
Sáenz expanded Mexico’s rural education system to new areas of the Mexican countryside by increasing the number of schoolteachers in the field and, alongside fellow Deweyite Rafael Ramírez, by instituting normal training academies to supervise schoolteacher fieldwork. But it was in Sáenz’s attention to pedagogy where the influence of Dewey was felt most deeply. Sáenz remolded Vasconcelos’s platoons of educators to emphasize Dewey’s experimentalist ethics rather than Christian metaphysics as the guiding philosophy of rural education. By replacing a classical curriculum with an experimentalist project in pragmatist education, Sáenz elevated local experience to a primary role in the public schools and imbued them with the opportunity to transform postrevolutionary society. How quickly Sáenz transformed Vasconcelos’s work is indicated by the enthusiasm Dewey noted for Mexico’s schools during a summer research trip to Mexico City in 1926, only two years after Sáenz had assumed control of the rural schools. Dewey famously declared his admiration for the efforts of the Mexican schools, concluding that Mexico’s education efforts were providing a model of rural education for the rest of the world. “The most interesting as well as the most important educational development is the rural schools,” he wrote: “This is the cherished preoccupation of the present regime; it signifies a revolution