Backroads Pragmatists. Ruben Flores

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      The teaching corps at Oaxtepec was one of its greatest strengths, according to Vázquez. “They are all actively involved in the school, enthusiastic, and come with good training.” They were primarily responsible for giving classes in the traditional curriculum, including arithmetic and geometry, algebra, Spanish literature and language, social science, and music and singing. But they also demonstrated specializations in other domains that had been deemed central to the integration project of the state. They were expected to study the native languages of the indigenous communities of Morelos, since, as Vázquez reported, a majority of schoolchildren still spoke only their native language rather than Spanish. He was even surprised to find that Spanish was being spoken in one location in the jurisdiction of the rural normal school. “It is important to take note of the fact that in the region of Oaxtepec there is to be found one school whose students speak Spanish,” Vázquez wrote. “That village is Tetelcingo. It is for this reason that we must endeavor to teach this language not only there, but in other communities of Morelos state, where it is more common to find the languages of the native Americans.” There were classes in psychology of education, rural sociology, Native American languages, and a broad range of manual arts that included carpentry, toolmaking, introduction to the manual trades, the domestic household, and basic drawing. Normal school students were expected to attend six forty-five-minute sessions of instruction every day from Monday through Friday every month between January and June, with added sessions dedicated to physical activity and rural economic production at night.⁹

      The state maintained its leverage through the relationship between the cultural missions and the rural normal school. Programming at the normal school was modified through the cultural missions, which functioned as the network through which instruction from Mexico City could be modified in the field. “The normal school professors put into place those programs that had been sent to the school in 1931 from the Office of the Cultural Missions [in Mexico City],” wrote Vázquez. The cultural missions continued to function as a centralizing agency whose role was to standardize pedagogy as it radiated out from Mexico City. Still, local conditions often tempered this centralizing function. “These directions from the Office of Cultural Missions are always modified by the particularities dictated by the region in question,” wrote Vázquez. “We must put them to work in the context of the cultures that our students bring to them.” Meanwhile, the normal school was open to whoever wanted to visit, including the parents of the normal school students. “Some parents of the students at the school visit Oaxtepec and even live at the school themselves,” Vázquez reported. Oaxtepec was also the subject of frequent visits by cultural missionaries from other states and dignitaries out of Mexico City. “I was also there during the visit by one of our congressmen from Mexico City and when several visitors were escorted to the school,” wrote Vázquez. Another visit was made by Alfredo Basurto. “Professor Alfredo Basurto, Chief of the Cultural Mission, also visited the school while I was there.… His visit was beneficial for both the teachers and students of the school, since Basurto was interested in the technical progress being made in the methods of instruction and spoke with them about the refinements that had to be made to their chosen methods. He finished after consulting with several of the teachers and students of the school.”¹⁰

       The House of the People

      In a photograph taken in 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 СКАЧАТЬ