Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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revolution for Mexico, but in some respects one of the most important social experiments undertaken anywhere in the world.”4
The fiscal and philosophical investment away from the metropolitan centers that the cultural mission represented made it the most exciting institutional development for the Americans during this time. The financial commitment the central government needed to maintain the platoons drew much attention. The scale of that work was not immense, but given that it operated in the rural arena where resources from the state were historically low, the consistent funding pattern was not unimpressive. Three years into Casauranc’s tenure with the SEP, in 1927, the Mexican state was providing support for six platoons of educators who had conducted a total of forty-five itinerant seminars lasting three weeks each over a terrain that included twenty of Mexico’s thirty-one states. The division of labor represented by these missions was not haphazard, but discrete and standardized. There were standardized duties for a platoon director, a social worker, a physical education teacher, an agricultural specialist, an animal technician, and a vocational arts instructor. There were the usual necessities for instruction, but also included had been agricultural implements and means of transportation to get the instructors into the field.
That a centrally coordinated effort was responsible for the division of labor of the cultural missions was another of its impressive features. It was not merely the large scale of each of the cultural missions that was worth noting, but that the fiscal resources for the missions were provided by the central government of the Mexican republic. The importance of central state financing is best understood not in the context of Mexican history, but in that of the historical tension in American history between the federal government and the various state governments. The Americans had been historical antagonists of states’ rights philosophies, since state control of educational resources had been a major historical impediment to the expansion of schools to the ethnic communities in whose name they fought. Thus, when the central coordination of the misión cultural out of Mexico City became evident to them, the Americans celebrated the different role of the central state in Mexico from that which they traditionally associated with the federal state in the United States. The presence of the misión cultural was the proof that the state was willing to place its institutional energy behind political transformation in an aggressive pursuit of a new moral vision. That the effort of the Mexican state was directed at the nation’s poorest and most ethnically marginalized communities only underscored the transformative moral vision to which the power of government had been harnessed. Such a vision seemed to validate a philosophy of government based on social welfare in an era that Daniel T. Rodgers has called the age of social politics.5
In the cultural mission the Americans saw a system that could be adapted to the Deweyan principles that made a new integrationist ethics possible. Loyd Tireman had only just moved from northern Iowa to New Mexico when, in the process of opening his laboratory school at the University of New Mexico, he was faced with the task of extending the results of his experimental labors to rural New Mexico’s 600 villages. To achieve the pedagogical outcome promised by Dewey’s philosophy was one of the labors he set for himself in 1927. But to replicate those results throughout the provinces of rural New Mexico was equally important. For him, the cultural missions in Mexico became the administrative platform for extending the reach of his ideas, just as extending the reach of the Mexican ministry of education had become the task Moisés Sáenz and Rafael Ramírez had assigned to the cultural missions in Michoacán and Tlaxcala. For George Sánchez, the missions became the instrument to create the community school in rural Louisiana from a seat of administrative power at Grambling University. After leaving his home state of New Mexico in 1937, but before starting his famed career at the University of Texas in 1940, he stopped in the Deep South to experiment in the rural schools of Louisiana. Under the philosophical gaze of John Dewey, it was there that he created Grambling’s equivalent of the cultural mission, radiating to the rural villages still residing in the long reach of Huey Long’s populist politics.
Figure 5. Cultural missionaries in the field at El Nith, one of the rural communities served by the normal school of Actopan, Hidalgo, 1932. Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (AHSEP), Mexico City, Mexico, Sección Dirección de Misiones Culturales, Serie Misión Cultural Permanente en Ixmiquilpan, Box 45, Folder 34 (Hidalgo).
Hundreds of communities became the objects of SEP attention, representing a chronological and geographical relationship of spectacular breadth beginning in 1921 that had no match anywhere in the hemisphere. The diversity of ethnic communities, the variations in the regional economies, the spectrum of political ideologies from supporters of the state to supporters of the Catholic Church, and the orientation of the SEP educators were some of the many factors that determined the fate of the state’s project in national consolidation via the instrument of the cultural mission. In the state of Chiapas, for example, the cultural missionaries were welcomed as agents of a moral order that promised to protect new agrarian rights against the landed hacendados whose power had been curtailed by the state. In Michoacán, the cultural missionaries represented a moral threat to the power of the church, whose authority had been confined and narrowed by the rise of the Sonoran Dynasty. Given such dramatic differences, the relationship of the cultural mission to the local community in Mexico was descriptive rather than normative, a matter of local experience and negotiation rather than distant control and top-down absolutes.
Under such differential conditions, the Americans witnessed missionary programs in Mexico that worked with the support of the local community when the federal state deliberately avoided places that were physically hostile to the presence of Mexico’s shock troops. This success explains the enthusiasm the Americans noted in the communities where the cultural mission was present, for there the community had been vetted and approved. The cultural missions became, in other words, a malleable instrument for rethinking the administrative power of the school and government’s relationship to rural communities in the United States. Tireman found residents eager to use the outreach power of the state government to improve the soil of their rural New Mexico communities. Likewise, rural residents in New Mexico were eager to use the school to learn English for their children, a task considered necessary to participate in the changing economy. In 1940s California, meanwhile, the cultural mission became the mechanism for assimilating immigrant children to a national culture of the United States that was being reformulated in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.
Actopan, or the Rural Normal School
Sixty miles northeast of Mexico City, as one moves out of the historical core where the SEP established its headquarters in 1921, Mexico’s highway system collapses from a pattern of north-south tributaries radiating out of the capital into an east-west federal interstate that veers sharply around the southern periphery of the Las Cruces Mountains. Follow the interstate east to the city of Puebla, eighty miles away; follow it west, and Querétaro can be reached one hundred miles away. But directly to the north, the Las Cruces Mountains remain largely impenetrable even today, effectively helping frame the northern tier of mountain ranges that give Mexico City its shape as a bowl.
It is on the flat plain that drops out of the northern side of the Las Cruces Mountains that the postrevolutionary Mexican state located the educational institution that received more commentary by the Americans than any other. Here, in the geographic center of the homeland where the indigenous Otomí people have lived for more than one thousand years, the SEP established the teacher training academy, or escuela normal rural, known as Actopan, in a converted Catholic monastery the Mexican government had stripped away from the Catholic Church. Rural normal schools as physically close to Mexico City as Actopan had also been located in the states of Tlaxcala, Puebla, and Morelos, part of a system of normal academies that had been established throughout the republic.6 But the density of indigenous communities so close to Mexico City made the state of Hidalgo a prime target for Mexico’s educational integration work. It was the site of the oldest misión cultural, for example, and SEP officials frequently steered American visitors who came to Mexico in the 1930s toward Actopan. It was here that child psychologist Loyd Tireman visited in 1931 and wrote of several months later. Educator George Sánchez visited here and