The Mexican Melting Pot:

Race and Migration in 1920s Mexico

 

by

 

Leonora Acheson Dodge

 

Biographical Statement Leonora Dodge is a Ph. D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.  Raised in Montreal but moved to the US for college.  In 1995 she completed her B. A. in Latin American Studies at Williams College, in Massachusetts.  She went to Puebla, Mexico, on a Fulbright IIE fellowship from 1995-1996, and then enrolled in the UT-Austin History Department.  She completed her MA on Mexico's post-Revolutionary immigration policies under the guidance of Dr. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo and Dr. Gunther Peck in 1998.  She now lives in El Paso, Texas, with her husband, William Dodge, where she is studying the dynamics of 1920s migration in the Ciudad Juárez region.  She can be contacted at leonora26@hotmail.com.   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS   For their wonderful insight and valuable critiques on this article and related work, I would like to thank Drs. Mauricio Tenorio, Gunther Peck, Richard Graham, my peers in the Atlantic Worlds Seminar, my friends and colleagues Patrick Timmons and Víctor M. Macías-González (with whom I have discussed and shared research on 1920s Mexico), mi mamá, y el amor de mi vida, Will.

 

 

            Modern Mexico has never been considered an immigrant country, especially when compared to the United States or to Latin American nations such as Argentina.[1]  Nevertheless, ever since independence from Spain, Mexican leaders have engaged in heated debate over the advantages and disadvantages of foreign immigration.  From the 1820s to the 1860s, Liberals and Conservatives argued over how Protestant immigrants, for instance, would impact the relations between Church and State, as well as Mexico's sovereignty.[2]  From the 1870s to the 1900s, Porfirio Díaz and his officials generally believed that, along with railroads and the privatization of property, foreign settlers and labor would fuel the nation's growing economy.[3]  In the 1920s, when the United States closed its doors to the world's "tired masses," sixty-thousand Asians, Middle Easterners, Eastern Europeans, and Southern Europeans found their way to Mexico.[4]  Nevertheless, "Mexican immigration history" still connotes the story of Mexicans in the United States, rather than foreigners in Mexico.  In this article, I argue that immigration impacted Mexican history, because foreigners in fact arrived from all over the globe and added to the country's already rich cultural tapestry.  More importantly, government officials and ordinary citizens employed the immigration policy debate to craft a national identity and to negotiate state power.  In the 1920s, while the country was recuperating from a bloody civil war, the immigration debates provided a forum for determining how the bellicose years of the Mexican Revolution would give way to stable political institutions and a relative social peace.

Moreover, the aim of this exploration into Mexico's immigration policy is to question the orthodox model that came out of post-Revolutionary historiography, especially regarding the nature of Mexican nationalism.  To summarize most historical accounts: the Porfirian intelligentsia devalued all things Indian and erected slavish monuments to European culture, whereas the Revolutionary intellectuals claimed Mexico’s superiority based on its Indian heritage.[5]  Indeed, any standard survey of Mexico in the 1920s will mention Minister of Education José Vasconcelos, and his attempts at integrating the country’s Indian element into Mexico’s national model by sending teachers out into the countryside, and his role in extending state sponsorship to muralists such as Diego Rivera, who covered public façades with scenes of pre-Columbian utopias.[6]  To many historians, then, the legacy of the Mexican Revolution is most visible when contrasting the cultural attitudes of the Porfiriato with those of the post-Revolutionary regime.

However, while it is true that 1920s leaders attempted to forge ideological legitimacy and national unity by distancing themselves from the Porfiriato, it is important to recognize the continuities between the two regimes.  Since the 1960s, historians have revisited Porfirian nationalism, especially by questioning the myth created and enforced by the Revolutionaries that Porfirian leaders were “malinchistas,” that is, "sell-outs" to the United States and Europe.  In the area of economic history, recent studies show that Díaz and his officials strategically manipulated foreign powers to develop the Mexican economy.[7]  Similarly, some historians have found Porfirian precursors to Indigenismo in figures such as Justo Sierra and in Porfirian officials’ use of pre-Hispanic elements to exhibit Mexico at world fairs.[8]  Just as we can find forerunners to cultural Indigenismo in the Porfiriato, it is important to highlight the intellectual voices that retained echoes of Porfirian Liberalism and diverged from what has come to be popularly accepted as Revolutionary ideology. 

In particular, the immigration polemic shows that both the ancien régime and the Revolutionary leaders considered Mexico's rural and primarily indigenous population as the single greatest obstacle to Mexico’s social and economic progress.  And like the Porfirian intelligentsia before them, many Revolutionary thinkers and politicians proposed various solutions to the "Indian problem."  Some leaders advocated land redistribution and literacy campaigns to "modernize" the nation's rural population. Most often, Indigenistas, as these thinkers came to be called, infantilized the very groups whom they claimed to be serving, and they framed their policies in terms of a transformation of native groups from supposedly docile and lazy social parasites into productive citizens.[9]  In his Indigenista manifesto, Forjando Patria, Manuel Gamio lamented paternalistically: "Poor suffering race!  You will not awaken spontaneously.  You require friendly hearts to labor for your redemption."[10]  Other policymakers considered much more drastic measures for solving the "Indian problem," notably, substituting the rural population with individuals who were already from the "modern" world.

Indigenista educational and agricultural projects of the 1920s competed with--or were at least complemented by--efforts at colonizing the countryside with European immigrants.  Indeed, the call for attracting European farmers was a recurring theme throughout the 1920s.[11]  While the governments of Alvaro Obregón (1920-1924) and Plutarco Elías Calles (president from 1924-1928, but his control lasted behind the scenes until 1934), supported officials such as Vasconcelos and Gamio in their efforts at encouraging rural education, Indian popular arts, and archaeological projects, these presidents also diligently sought status reports on immigration and even sponsored studies on how to effectively increase the flow of Europeans to Mexico.  Both Obregón in 1921, and later his opponent Arnulfo Gómez in 1927, included favoring foreign immigration in their platforms as presidential candidates.[12]  In fact, the many projects to establish rural colonies of Mennonites, Germans, and others during this period closely mirrored efforts under the Porfirian regime.[13]  Even  Gamio reluctantly favored immigration as a means of building a “homogeneous race” sharing a “modern culture.”[14]  Certain Revolutionary intellectuals decried the “painful tendency to Europeanize or Yankee-ize everything” and called for “nationalism” to counter the xenophilia of past “dictatorships.”[15]  It is clear, however, that this "painful tendency" survived the Revolution.

The most ardent proponents of attracting foreign settlers, “Immigrationists,” as I will call them, diverged significantly from the Indigenistas on a basic premise: the Indigenistas mainly recognized cultural differences when analyzing the population (hence Gamio's stress on "modern culture"), whereas the Immigrationists maintained to varying degrees that racial distinctions carried very real  and measurable biological implications.  Historians have argued that Latin American intellectuals such as Gamio in Mexico, and Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, discarded Herbert Spencer’s racial model based on biological hierarchy for two reasons: first, the Spencerian racial hierarchy doomed Latin American countries to a failure they could not accept; and second, they had studied under Franz Boas, who discredited biological race as a scientific concept.  Instead, these thinkers believed in uplifting Indians (in the case of Mexico) and Blacks (in the case of Brazil) through rural and urban development, education, and integration into a national economy as producers and consumers.[16]  According to this perspective, the Revolutionary thinkers dismissed the physical implications of racial difference which had so preoccupied the nineteenth-century.[17]  Presumably, then, Revolutionary ideologues would have rejected the Immigrationists as regressives or even as counter-revolutionary enemies.  This was not the case.  In fact, Immigrationists were not outcasts in the political or intellectual sphere; rather, they formed part of the new regime that had toppled the old Porfirian order, and they were moved by many of the same ideals as their fellow Revolutionaries.  Writing with as much conviction and nationalist fervor as the Indigenistas, Immigrationists such as José Dávila, Luis Híjar y Haro, and Gustavo Durón González, argued that the only way for Mexico to fulfill its destiny as a great nation was to replace the supposedly inferior Indian population with white immigrants who, by their very nature and physique, would improve Mexican society.  The other side of the coin was that non-whites must not settle, lest they add to the racial confusion.  This position has largely escaped the historical lens, even though these three authors alone each produced government reports varying in length from forty to over one-hundred-and-fifty pages.[18] 

Moreover, the views they espoused in their reports reflected the attitudes of their contemporaries.  The capital’s newspapers featured editorials hailing the coming of European colonists, while investigative reporters decried the decadent nature of non-European immigrant communities.  The racist premise against Asian immigration was especially strong in northern Mexico, where local politicians and merchant associations mounted vicious anti-Chinese attacks.[19]  As Nancy Stepan argues, the legacy of the Revolution opened the way for materialist, secularist, and populist ideologies, which led in turn to eugenicist projects aiming to control Mexican society through the physical and social sciences.  In 1932, the Mexican Society of Eugenics was formed through “good contacts with the federal and state health authorities and cannot be considered to have been completely out of sympathy with the goals of the national state.”[20]  In terms of immigration policy, the eugenicists believed that Mexico’s racial makeup could be more easily improved by controlling immigration rather than reproductive behavior.  In 1933, Adrián Correa called for a genetic study of Mexico’s racial makeup, and to use those findings to determine which potential immigrants possessed the genes that would allegedly whiten and therefore improve the nation's racial mix.  Given this wider context, it is clear that Dávila, Híjar y Haro, and Durón González were not alone in their quest to transform Mexico racially and not merely culturally.

            The language of the immigration advocates in their government-sponsored texts is unmistakably tied to blood, reproduction, and physical inheritance.  José Dávila dealt most overtly with biological distinctions and spoke of race openly in his booklet.  In one passage, he advised that the Mexican government should select superior immigrant groups like the horse breeder who does not dare mix his Arab mare with common horses only to obtain mules. He qualified French immigrants as being such "common horses" because, he claimed, they did not contribute “a good seed” to “physical amelioration.”  Dávila favored Germans and Mennonites, on the other hand, but he recommended against admitting their wives, for this impeded “the fusion that we seek.”  If all or most immigration were male, Mexicans would “soon see the desirable Mexican mestizo arise from foreign colonies.”[21]  Dávila argued that although human equality is a wonderful ideal, Mexico should not “sacrifice itself before the altar of equality.  If the fatherland needs to improve its race, why mix it with orangutans and erect-pithecanthropus in the name of an impossible equality, since there is a way of regenerating it with Hercules and Apollos?”[22]  Durón González claimed that he was not advocating that Mexico import Europeans to mix with the Indians like cattle, as Dávila himself had put it.  Nevertheless, he stressed that Brazil had solved its “black problem” through racial mixture, producing mulattos.  He stated that “The mulatto has acquired habits of cleanliness and thrift and has evolved in such a way that he is now seen with affection in the country.”[23]  In addition, he expressed he criticized a black colony in San Luis Potosí on pseudo-scientific grounds: “[Mexicans] not having the problem of the Black, it is foolish to create it artificially.  His mix with our Indian, moreover, is a totally inferior product.”[24]  He concluded that Mexico needed to encourage immigrants that would best counteract Mexico’s “black or mongolic imprint.”[25]  Híjar y Haro, like Durón González, stressed the “racial” medium through which foreign colonists could elevate the Indians, and he argued that Argentina and Chile had managed to improve their population’s “physical and moral condition” thanks to the European “infusion” of northern Spaniards and Englishmen.[26]

            The government erected or demolished immigration barriers depending on whether officials viewed a foreigner as likely to improve or degrade Mexico’s supposedly inferior rural population.  These laws generally favored white agricultural colonists and discouraged or even prohibited immigration by non-Whites. In its 1927 annual publication, the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores reported that it had designed new immigration laws to avoid the “mixing of races which have been scientifically proven to produce degenerate descendants.”[27]  For instance, they succeeded in limiting entry by people "of the black race," and stated that this policy was necessary to keep out this "little desired element," and also to avoid "the mixing that generally provokes the degeneration of the race."[28]  When it came to anti-Black immigration policies, the Mexican government was caught between racist ideology on the one hand, and the development of good relations with the United States on the other.  Prohibition in the United States sent many Americans, including African Americans, across the border for entertainment purposes and to work in this growing industry of cantinas, casinos, and cabarets.  In 1924, the federal government sent out a notice to all their migration and customs officials along the Mexico-United States border, telling them how to deal with Blacks who wanted to enter Mexico temporarily. They could not turn away African-Americans outright, for fear that Americans might retaliate against Mexicans living along the border; however, Mexican migration officials should only allow entry once they were absolutely certain that the African-Americans were going to return.[29]  The government treated Western European immigrants very differently.  Thousands of Mennonites, Italians, and Germans, among other groups, enjoyed special treatment at the hands of immigration officials, subsidized transportation, and agricultural loans.  For instance, for some Italian colonies, Calles waived a law that barred foreigners from acquiring land along the coasts or near the national borders.[30]  In addition, Mennonite colonists received tax and customs exemptions, as they had during the Porfiriato, to import household effects and tools.[31]  The government even organized personal escorts into Mexico for promising colonist groups.  When Mennonites from Saskatchewan went to settle in Mexico, the government sent a representative to the border in order to facilitate their entry.[32]  Rural Mexicans protested--at times violently--against policies that favored foreign colonization.  Obregón had to send troops to defend Mennonite settlers from attacks, for instance.[33]   The prevalence of racial justifications behind immigration policies affected immigrants and Mexicans alike, particularly the rural population who lost valuable land and credit to government-sponsored immigrants. 

Jews (mostly from Eastern Europe) and Arabs (an ethnic term referring mainly to Lebanese and Syrians, among other Levantine nationalities) challenged the model of racially defined modernization through white immigration, for although they qualified technically as Caucasian, they were not exactly European in culture.  Moreover, they did not tend to settle as farmers, and therefore, they did not "whiten" the countryside, as the policymakers desired.  Indeed, although many Middle Easterners who emigrated to Mexico declared themselves to be peasants, they tended to work as merchants in the major cities and smaller towns throughout the country.[34]  Although the government was rarely willing to close doors to European farmers, anti-Semitic urban popular groups successfully pushed policymakers to forego any notions of racial improvement through Jewish or Arab immigration.  In 1927, the government barred legal entry to all Arab groups, claiming that they competed with Mexican entrepreneurs.[35]  Mexican officials such as President Obregón himself had favored Jewish immigrants early in the 1920s, welcoming them as productive immigrants "of the white race" who would colonize the countryside.[36]  Durón González also favored Jewish immigrants as colonists, particularly Sephardic Jews.  Again, the racial undertones came through in his writings, when he praised Jews for having "a great ability to adapt biologically and socially."[37]  Despite the wishes of these policymakers, however, popular forces swelled into anti-Semitic campaigns similar to the anti-Chinese movements.[38] 

The early signs of the global economic downturn began appearing in Mexico by 1927.  The government could no longer afford the rather high price of diverting its finances and its nationalist legitimacy toward attracting and maintaining foreign immigrants, however few of them were actually present.  Any privileges extended to foreigners seemed especially ludicrous in view of the minimal successes arising from colonization projects.  For instance, many Italian colonists left Mexico entirely, and Italian officials began a campaign to keep their citizens from going to Mexico.[39]  Meanwhile, many colonists who remained in Mexico, such as the Mennonites, isolated themselves from the Mexicans whom they had been meant to transform.  In addition, the Immigrationist stance flew in the face of the waves of repatriated Mexicans crossing the border.[40]   Indeed, the failing economy and rising nativism in the United States meant that the Revolutionary government could no longer rely on American labor markets as a safety valve for national economic and social problems.

The intellectual debates over racial or cultural divisions raged throughout the 1920s.  Moreover, the tensions between Mexicans and foreigners continued, and xenophobic discrimination at the popular level strengthened.  The 1930s saw a rise in anti-Semitic activities in Mexico City, led by fascist-inspired groups such as the Camisas Doradas and the Liga Nacionalista committees, which mounted boycotts and anti-Jewish propaganda machines throughout the country.[41]  The racist underpinnings of immigration policy also persisted into the 1930s, although the language of cultural assimilation replaced biological race as justification for discrimination.    Indeed, the switch from strictly biological racial ideology to ethnic categorization led to an even broader net of discrimination, for now the Jews and Arabs who had previously qualified as desirable Whites were now clearly victims of xenophobic immigration policies.  In 1934 the government again stated that Poles, Syrians, and Lebanese immigrants were undesirable due to their commercial activities.[42]

Indeed, the shift toward cultural or what some called “socioeconomic” difference did not translate into an egalitarian view of Mexico’s marginalized population.  Demographers such as Gilberto Loyo continued writing about Mexico’s population problems (the 1940s population boom), and recommending selective immigration as the 1920s policymakers had done.  In contrast to the Immigrationists of the 1920s, he recommended attracting skilled workers for the growing industrial sector.  However, just as Híjar y Haro, Durón González, and Dávila, pointed to the rural population’s supposed passivity and inferiority as justification for bringing European farmers, Loyo recommended attracting foreign labor to “act as social ferments” who could energize “passive and conformist societies like ours.”[43]  Mexican thinkers thus transferred their underestimation of Mexico’s underclass from the rural population to the urban working class.  Mexican leaders continued to blame Mexico’s social problems on its diverse socio-cultural makeup.

 

 

 

 

 

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