Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores
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new murals in various locations throughout Mexico City. No one better captured in visual form the work of the Mexican state as it sought to create Mexico’s melting pot ideal from the spectrum of ethnic groups that composed the Mexican nation.
Rivera painted two murals on the walls of the secretariat that captured the relationship of the reconstituted Mexican state to the melting pot ideal. In Alfabetización: Aprendiendo a leer, a female schoolteacher looks with pride on a group of students surrounding her whose complexions and dress represent the diverse cultures of the Mexican peoples. A dark-skinned woman with African features sits next to a Maya Indian who is accepting a schoolbook from the teacher. Behind them stand two young men, one a light-skinned resident of the city wearing a gray beret, the other a ruddy-skinned mestizo wearing a straw hat typical of rural Mexico. Above the schoolteacher and her provincials stand three revolutionary soldiers, watching over the process of conversion signified in the textbooks being distributed by the teacher. They wear the bandoliers of the revolution, just recently concluded but still a tangible presence in the life of the country. Rivera painted a more dramatic image of the revolutionary melting pot project at the secretariat headquarters, as well. Whereas the first image of the state’s schoolteacher provides no clues about the geographic context for the education lesson that she is imparting, it is clear in La maestra rural that the schoolteacher has ventured away from metropolitan Mexico and into the countryside where Mexico’s agrarian workers cultivated their fields. Here, the schoolteacher is dressed in red, immediately training the eye on the nine individuals who surround her and the book that she has stretched out before them. They represent three generations, grandparent, parent, and child, sitting in a serene repose as the teacher underscores her latest point with an outstretched hand. But whereas the teacher and her circle had taken up two-thirds of the mural in Alfabetización, in the present one, two-thirds of the mural is an agrarian landscape framed by towering mountains in the background, with two teams of horses plowing a field in front of rural laborers who follow them, and an armed federal soldier mounted on horseback who guards the schoolteacher with a carbine rifle that he points at the sky. The state is present in each of the Rivera murals in the form of a teacher and a soldier, but in the latter mural, the melting pot ideal has been transformed from a metaphoric representation of unity into a dynamic panorama where the work that the state has set out for itself is more accurately rendered.
Rivera’s murals portrayed Mexico’s ethnic communities in their uniqueness as part of the project of national reconciliation that the postrevolutionary state builders had outlined for themselves. Represented quite clearly in his murals are the distinctive clothing, different skin tones, a diverse set of occupational labors, and both men and women as actors in the postrevolutionary drama. Rivera’s images suggest that he believed their discrete identities should be allowed to flourish as part of the reconstituted nation. The teacher is positioned as an agent of consolidation, but Rivera did not render consolidation as a threat to the regional cultures that were the constituent elements of the new Mexican nation. Difference abounds and is celebrated, even as books and public officials of the state are portrayed sympathetically. His depiction of the school as an agent of transformation also appears nonthreatening. Although Rivera assigned a centripetal function to the school, its task seems limited to creating bonds of citizenship among Mexico’s people, not destroying the variety of cultural forms of the twentieth-century republic. For Rivera, nationality seemed to reside above and alongside regional culture, not as a substitute for it or as a superior force to that of the provincial centers.
Figure 2. Alfabetización. Aprendiendo a leer, Diego Rivera, 1929. Secretaría de Educación Pública headquarters, Mexico City. 2014 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Three other images crafted by Mexico’s leading social theorists proved equally influential to race relations in the American West between 1930 and 1960. Manuel Gamio had crafted his image of cultural heterogeneity in a 1916 text, Forjando patria, that originated the phrase that scholars use to this day to describe the postrevolutionary project to rebuild the Mexican nation, forjar patria. Gamio opened Forjando patria with the image of a giant smelter in which Mexico’s diverse cultural communities were being melted into a single synthetic ore. The American continents had always acted as a giant forge in which indigenous Americans mixed with one another to form new communities. Only the arrival of Columbus had prevented a single indigenous superpower aggregated from America’s distinct native cultures from forming. That forge had overturned with the arrival of the Europeans, spilling the blend before it had hardened, however. The Europeans—the “men of steel,” as Gamio tagged them—refused to mix with the Native Americans—whom Gamio called the “men of bronze”—during the colonial era. Suddenly, however, the independence movements of early nineteenth-century nationalism had presaged a return to a universal mix of peoples. Gamio represented Bolívar, Morelos, and San Martín as Olympic titans, donning the blacksmith’s apron and taking up the hammer to forge an original metallic statue that contained all the metals of America’s peoples. That statue would have been immense, corresponding to the panhemispheric nation that the liberators would have forged from the ruins of the Spanish empire.20
The early idealism of independence was not to be. As the nineteenth century unfolded, smaller national communities had been established across the hemisphere, instead. A new monument had been forged, but rather than containing all Latin America’s ores, the statue had been forged out of iron—out of Europeans, in other words—and placed over a pedestal made of bronze—the Native Americans. This was Gamio’s way of critiquing the social segregation of Latin America in the national era and its failure to reach toward the equality of its ethnic communities. This era of a stillborn mixture had to an end with the Mexican Revolution, Gamio argued. Now that the revolutionaries of Mexico had deposed Porfirio Díaz and taken up the role of blacksmith, they would consummate the task of blending the iron of Europe and the bronze of America into an indestructible synthetic ore. The new nation would rise to challenge the might of Europe and the power of the United States. “There is the iron … and there is the bronze,” Gamio wrote in Forjando patria at the halfway point of the Mexican Revolution. “I implore you to mix, my countrymen!” he commanded Mexico’s people, hopeful that Mexico’s rise to continental prominence after a decade of bloody war was at hand.21
Like Bourne and Kallen, Gamio had situated his essay in the context of the attempt by Germany and England to destroy each other in World War I. In “Trans-National America,” Bourne had called the United States a “star” wandering between two European antagonists that were trying to blast each other to bits in the Great War. As Bourne put it, America was “a wandering star in a sky dominated by two colossal constellations of states.” America would work out her cosmopolitan ethic, “some position of her own.… A trans-nationality of all the nations, it is spiritually impossible for her to pass into the orbit of any one,” in this colossal tragedy. Gamio, too, believed that World War I was a turning point in history, and like Bourne, believed that the fragments into which Europe was collapsing provided the ideal political moment for the rise of the melting pot in the Western Hemisphere—in Mexico rather than the United States. In Forjando patria, Gamio used the example of World War I to chide the presumed superiority that Europeans had historically assumed over Mexico’s indigenous cultures, begging the great foreign powers to leave Mexico alone in anticipation of Mexico’s postrevolutionary rise to prominence. “Have your last words in Europe,” he wrote, “on the occasion of the great battle whose only defense seems to be the will to vanquish the other.”22
Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’s vision of the Latin American melting pot arguably became the most enduring image of cultural fusion in twentieth-century Mexican history and the one that has become most prominent in American scholarship.23 One year before Robert Park added the assimilationist melting pot of the “race relations cycle” to the canonical images of American diversity,24 Vasconcelos became synonymous with the postrevolutionary melting pot project, an ideal that he captured in a short 1925 essay called La raza cósmica.25 La raza cósmica was an aesthetic prophecy of the eventual triumph in the Western Hemisphere of one melting pot