Description
From Many, One looks at the educational policies and practices of the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles in post-revolutionary Mexico. Andrae Marak examines attempts of the Calles government to centralize control over education in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands region and to transform its rural and indigenous inhabitants into more "mainstream" Mexicans.
During his presidency and the period known as the Maximato, Plutarco Elías Calles put in place a series of national educational policies with the goal of constructing an economically prosperous and culturally unified Mexico. Marak's analysis of the federal government's attempt to promote nationalism highlights the ways in which the federal government sought to incorporate and unify Mexico through centralization and assimilation as well as the ways in which it tried to define itself in relation to what was not Mexican, an especially prominent issue along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Calles' new educational policies sparked a good deal of backlash among those affected. Marak's study focuses on three main incidents which caused the most contention: the establishment of frontier schools along the border in order to promote nationalism and protect against the onslaught of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism; the takeover of state primary schools by government inspectors in Chihuahua; and the government's indigenous assimilation program, which aimed to integrate numerous culturally distinct groups into a monocultural Mexican nation.
Reviews
The American Historical Review, Vol 115: 4, October 2010
Reviews of Books: Caribbean and Latin America
Andrae M. Marak. From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924-1935. (Latin American and Caribbean Series, number 7.) Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press. 2009. Pp. xxviii, 226. $34.95.By Monica A. Rankin
University of Texas at DallasWith an abacus and a chalkboard, the right leader can build a nation. This was the theory employed by many of Mexico's early revolutionary leaders in the 1920s and 1930s. In this book Andrae M. Marak examines educational policies during the presidency of Plutarco Elías Calles and the subsequent years of his domination of Mexican national politics known as the Maximato. The work considers Callista educational programs as part of a larger nation-building project and ultimately as the foundation for future efforts, particularly under President Lázaro Cárdenas, to use education as a tool to consolidate support for the revolution. Marak focuses his study on the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, and other areas along the northern border. In doing so he is able to tie the local cultural experiences of revolutionary leaders from those regions to their approaches to educational policy as a tool for "civilizing" the indigenous populations of those states and promoting revolutionary unity. Those regions also faced increasing influences from U.S. culture and educational theories. Furthermore, examining the northern states as case studies allows Marak to consider the ongoing debate over the merits of federal versus local control of education. Overall, he finds that various degrees of resistance and demonstrations of local autonomy in the border region prevented the Calles administration from achieving most of its immediate objectives. Nevertheless, the Callista educational experiment put in place numerous layers of local power brokers that later became instrumental in establishing and reinforcing the corporatist nature of the postrevolutionary Mexican state.
Marak begins his study with a helpful overview of Mexican educational history prior to the 1920s, demonstrating that the earliest attitudes of revolutionary leaders toward education privileged a liberal system controlled at the local level. That changed during the presidencies of Alvaro Obregón and Calles as the two Sonoran politicians sought to centralize control of education under the auspices of the federal government as a way to "civilize" rural indigenous people, create productive and patriotic revolutionary citizens, and modernize the country. Calles, in particular, viewed local and religious loyalties as an obstacle to nation-building. He envisioned federal educational programs as a way to rein in local opposition to his administration and to replace the "backward" influence of the Catholic Church with his modern vision of national unity.
Marak explores these strategies first by chronicling the Calles administration's efforts to federalize the educational system in Chihuahua. As the first state to come under federal educational control, Chihuahua offers a rich backdrop to the rest of the study. Marak demonstrates that the Education Ministry initially attempted to work with state governments to establish federal subsidies for local schools, but over time this strategy gave way to the creation of a parallel school system administered exclusively by the federal government. By the early 1930s state budget problems compelled the Chihuahua governor to negotiate even greater federal government control over primary schools. While future governors would attempt to reverse this move, a federal presence in local schooling had been secured by the end of the Maximato. Marak's examination of Chihuahua also reveals constant tension between the federal government and the Catholic Church over local control of education and curriculum. He rounds out his study by considering the local case studies of the Tarahumara in Chihuahua, the Seri along coastal Sonora, and the Tohono O'odham along the Sonora-Arizona border.
This book began as Marak's dissertation, and the interdisciplinary nature of its author's training is evident. But while Marak's book is generally well written, it suffers from some structural weaknesses that compromise its readability. Remnants of its origins are often present in passages containing information that would be better suited for footnotes. Additionally, the index is a scant five pages and lacks many terms that would facilitate a quick search of the book for readers who will surely wish to consult his case studies and background material as reference for future research.
Despite some minor problems, Marak's arguments are solid and his work fills an important void in the scholarship of the revolutionary policies of the Calles administration in general and of the evolution of Mexico's modern educational system in particular. Marak provides a historiographical bridge between the seminal years of the Obregón administration and the years of "socialist education" under Cárdenas, demonstrating that many of Calles's policies helped to build the corporatist governmental structure that matured in the last half of the 1930s. Taken together with the works of Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen Lewis, Marak's work will become part a larger body of scholarship on revolutionary educational programs.
- Monica Rankin, University of Texas at Dallas
Canadian Historical Review, September 2010, pp302-305
From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924-1935. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. 2009. Pp. xxviii, 226. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $44.95 [sic] paper.
Schools and state formation are familiar topics, but this interesting volume still breaks new ground by exploring revolutionary cultural politics in peripheral settings. It examines the centralizing project of President Plutarco Elias Calles (1924-1934) first in Chihuahua, as the outermost expression of the jefe maximo's program; then in the Tarahumara, Seri, and Tohono O'odham homelands; and finally, among migrant communities on the U.S. border. Even with such recalibrations, Marak must tread carefully around existing studies of northern revolutionary habitats, perforce omitting key topics: Yaqui and Mayo indigenes, or Sonoran Callismo, respectively studied by Mary Kay Vaughan (1997) and Adrian Bantjes (1998). Hence the book at times has a feel of niche-like intertextuality. Structurally, too, there are echoes of Vaughan's Cultural Politics of Revolution, whose basic architecture Marak redeploys: as in Vaughan, an introductory survey precedes a portrait of educational bureaucracy and four studies of differential peasant engagements with the Secretaria de Educacion Publica (SEP). Marak also dialogues (generally supportively, not always persuasively) with Vaughan's thesis that SEP's state-building role was less to diffuse a patriotic monoculture than to create hegemonic discourses joining rules and ruled (p. 79). There are, nonetheless, fresh insights, and a wealth of new research in national, state, and US archives, making this a useful study.
The book begins with an informative survey of Callismo. Chapter 2 is more original, if (to my mind) contrary to the negotiation thesis. Marak convincingly interprets the federalization of Chihuahuan schools in 1933 as the product of bureaucratic imposition, ideological complicity, and economic cooptation. SEP largesse won maestros' support, while Callista governors' anticlericalism drove them to support the beachhead of Socialist Education. Chapter 3 details SEP's failure to wean Chihuahua's Tarahumara off tesguinadas (corn-beer bacchanals) and resettle them in centered villages with boarding schools. Mutual incomprehension prevailed as SEP misconstrued a dispersed society of canyon-floor herders as savages, failed to see that beer-drinking was the basis of ritual and kinship reciprocity, and proved unable to protect Tarahumaras from exploitative mestizos. Grilles on school windows to keep children in told the dismal story.
Chapter 4 relocates to Sonora and shows how the Seri-coastal fishermen living tensely alongside ranchers-collaborated with SEP following the mediations of Arizona rancher Robert Thompson. The Seri promised to attend school, fish efficiently, and desist from rustling. In return, SEP adopted a reservation-style, non-integrationist policy. Recognition of Seri otherness climaxed with a scheme to send a "Wild West Show" to Hollywood, featuring Seri wearing pelican skins. In the end, failure was symbolized by the sinking of the Seri's motorized fishing boat and the expulsion of the interloping Thompson. Chapter 5 examines the significant tradeoffs experienced by the Tohono O'odham, desert Indians who played on SEP's insecurities vis a vis U.S. cultural imperialism and their "Two Village" transnational status. Again, Marak shows, tribal brokers were pivotal in framing Indian demands for bilingual schools equipped to U.S. specifications and tolerance of saintly cults. In the end, SEP would not meet these demands and Tohono O'odham children attended U.S. schools. SEP found limited success at Piedras Negras (Chapter 6), where the nationalistic curriculum was sweetened with mixed-sex choirs and technical training, which addressed migrant's romantic and economic aspirations. Even so, the northward drift to displace Catholic or English-language schools was too strong. In sum, SEP's repeated stabs at negotiating regional hegemony failed.
The book works best as an anthropological history offering fascinating, beautifully researched indigenista microhistories. It also provides surprising insights into the melange of Callista educational politics at precisely the point where "nation" meant most to the regime and least to would-be citizens. Perhaps because of its right specificity, however, the book works less well as a model of postrevolutionary state formation. The negotiated hegemony paradigm that works for altiplano villages seems less apposite for tribal enclaves that fleetingly sought SEP endorsement of their folkways and turned away when this was not forthcoming or proved counterproductive.
Reviewed by Matthew Butler, University of Texas, Austin
- Matthew Butler, University of Texas at Austin