Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
Читать онлайн книгу.
Zacatecas in August 1935, New Mexican George Sánchez began capturing the visual record of the analogy in integration he made between rural Mexico and the rural American West during the 1930s. Already he had captured images of instruction in regional dancing, waterworks, and manual labor that was happening at the escuela normal rural in Oaxtepec, Morelos.11 Sánchez had captured scenes from the annex schools attached to the other normal academies he had already visited, as well. There was a community park with a new fountain in one photograph. In another, there was a collection of farm animals taken in the company of a trainee learning animal husbandry in the state of Puebla. He also recorded his impressions of daily life. In one, he recorded the thatch huts of Morelos’s peasants, under a canopy of sky that was framed by the volcanos Popocatépetl and Ixtaccihuatl in the background.12 Here, in Anenecuilco twenty-five years earlier, Zapata had begun the revolutionary movement of sugar workers whose rebellion against the state became a central component of armed confrontation in Mexico between 1911 and 1920. In these photographs taken in Mexico’s rural valleys, away from the metropolitan centers of the postrevolutionary nation, one can see Sánchez’s impressions of rural Mexico.
But it was after he arrived in the state of Zacatecas in the desert north that Sánchez took the photograph that provided the finest visual metaphor for the integrationist work of the Mexican state he had come to study. Sánchez was making an inspection tour of Mexico’s northern schools in the company of one of the regional directors of federal education. He had already visited Chihuahua, and was headed next to Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, and Querétaro before turning east toward Yucatán.13 In front of an adobe structure with a single door and two large windows, he arranged a group of Zacatecan elementary school students in front of their rural school. They were arranged by gender and size, with women to the left, men to the right, and smaller children to the front. At the far left, Sánchez placed the schoolteacher. As adobe structures go, the school was an impressive achievement. The large adobe bricks depend on stone arches for support. The style is territorial as New Mexicans understood it, with rock lining the edges of the roof for architectural display. This was a building into which some resources had been devoted, indicating that it must have functioned ceremoniously in the high deserts of the Mexican altiplano.
Sánchez had collected a similar group of photographs in New Mexico one year earlier. He had embarked on a study tour of northern New Mexico’s own rural schools, and just as he would later do in Zacatecas, he arranged the students of northern New Mexico’s rural schools into the same pattern he would later follow in Mexico. In the New Mexico photographs, as well, Sánchez lined up the schoolchildren in front of their own school, with the schoolteacher to their immediate left. Behind them towers the rural school, while in the background one can detect something of the environmental isolation in which these communities were located. The New Mexico schools are more modest than those in the Mexican photographs. But the larger statement is the same as the one at work in the Zacatecas photo. Here is the rural school as an instrument of national integration. The children are arrayed close together, as if in some statement of unity. The teacher and the school watch over the group, as if to protect them and guide them toward the social ideal of the progressive reformer. That one would have difficulty separating the photos taken in New Mexico from those taken in Mexico is perhaps the greatest statement of the single project in unification that united Sánchez’s career across Mexico and the United States.
What George Sánchez had photographed in Zacatecas was the rural school, la casa del pueblo. It was at the bottom of the SEP’s institutional pyramid, or, depending on one’s point of view, at the top. In the SEP archives in Mexico City, no institutions built during the 1920s have received less attention than the rural schools. Their paper trail to Mexico City is far thinner than it is for the cultural missions and the rural normal schools, with large gaps in the chronological sequences of the documents collected. The information gathered is sporadic and haphazard. One finds little evidence of the high officials of the SEP, and little attention devoted to the questions of pedagogy that one finds among the records of the rural normal schools. Such inattention is perhaps to be expected, given that some 10,000 of these rural schools had been established in the decade of the 1920s. With so many schools operating in such a small span of time, it is easy to see why any particular one did not receive much attention. Yet Sánchez’s photographs indicate that he understood the heavy responsibility of the rural school in Mexico’s integration project. The cultural missions and rural normal schools were tactically important as the platforms for the delivery of ideologies and resources through which the melting pot was to create itself in the Mexican territory. They received the most resources and attention from foreigners and state officials alike. But the central state had aimed the cultural missions and the rural normal schools at the rural school. It was through the rural school that hundreds of thousands of Mexico’s schoolchildren were to be fused together into a united society. It was there where the nation was to be forged. A recent book by one of Mexico’s leading scholars of postrevolutionary education has adequately captured the hope that was infused into the rural school: To Build the School, To Build the State.14 Sánchez implicitly recognized the true import of the rural school in the Mexican hierarchy of power and social transformation. It was the rural school that was to carry the heaviest burden of Mexico’s integration project, and in this sense, it was the most important institution of the state after 1920, just as Sánchez’s photographs reflect.
In theory, the purpose of la casa del pueblo was to close the political gap between Mexico City and the thousands of rural villages that composed the postrevolutionary nation. The extent to which the state was promoting the cultural life of the villages as part of the reconstituted nation has been the topic of some of the finest scholarship in Latin American history over the last thirty years. Some forty years ago, Josefina Zoraida Vázquez noted that the textbooks used by the federal state promoted a vision of Mexico that favored the dictates of the SEP over the cultural practices of the local communities.15 A large body of important scholarship subsequently argued that Mexico’s state builders, including the Columbia University graduates Manuel Gamio and Moisés Sáenz, sometimes failed to uphold the designs of local communities in establishing the new equilibrium between the local and the national during the process of national consolidation. Even if no transcendent ethical platform existed on which to construct the new nation, as pragmatism and cultural relativism held, it did not matter anyhow, these scholars have argued, since public officials in Mexico City were unwilling to modify their presumptions to align themselves more closely with the wishes of the local community. More recently, new scholarship has deepened our understanding of the local experiments in nation building from which the Mexican melting pot was forged. Local communities often supported the state schools, thereby establishing new avenues for social movement that became important for social mobility in later generations. And the melting pot project may have witnessed its first hesitant movement toward cultural pluralism during the 1930s under the banner of the SEP schools.16
Figures 8 and 9. George I. Sánchez’s photographs of rural public schools in Mexico and New Mexico. While the discursive framework of integration across Mexico and the American West was made possible by the pragmatist ideas Mexican and American social scientists shared, the political movements toward integration were reflected in the institution of the elementary school as a site of cultural consolidation across distinctive cultural communities. At the top, for instance, Indian and mestizo schoolchildren attended postrevolutionary Mexico’s new public schools after 1921; at the bottom, Mexico-descended and European immigrant children went to school together in the schools of rural New Mexico. These projects in national consolidation did not occur independently of one another. Top: George I. Sánchez, Mexico: A Revolution by Education (New York: Viking, 1936), 202; Bottom: Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.
A universal statement about these petit projects within la casa del pueblo is elusive given the diversity of postrevolutionary Mexico’s rural communities, but there can be no doubt of the enormous scope of the work they performed. Looking back on the years between 1920 and 1940, one could