KU News Release

LAWRENCE — Robust central governments helped drive social and economic changes during both the Mexican Revolution and U.S. civil rights movement, according to research by Ruben Flores, assistant professor of American studies at the University of Kansas.

In the case of Mexico, the presidency was the driving force, while in the U.S. it was the federal courts.

“The civil rights movement and the movement for assimilation in Mexico took place in the context of a strong federal government,” Flores said. “One of the big lessons is that there is a role for government as a mediator of social conflict in American society. We have to disagree about what that role is, and there have to be very vibrant conversations about that. But I think that’s a conversation that has to be had, rather than saying that the government has no role.”

Like the United States, Mexico has been beset by challenges of race and culture. But in the early 20th century, the bloody Mexican Revolution triggered the government’s movement to integrate the country and unite people from more than 50 distinct cultures into a cohesive nation.

The power of those social changes in Mexico had a deep impact on the civil rights movement in the United States, according to Flores.

“Both countries have many different cultures, and both countries have struggled with this notion of how we create a single unity out of so many diverse peoples,” he said.

The KU researcher points to the role of a strong central state in Mexico, which throughout the 20th century was associated with the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI party. That state emerged from the 1910-20 Mexican Revolution and spearheaded the process of integration for Mexico’s varied population.

A number of puzzling questions arose from the Mexican Revolution.

“In the case of Mexico the question was, ‘to what extent should we allow the vital elements of Native American cultures to become a part of the institutional state?’ ” said Flores. “Are you going to have political practices among the Maya or the Yaqui Indians of Sonora that become a part of the PRI party, for example? Another big question is the form of the economy.”

Mexico’s muscular post-revolutionary government pushed reforms such as the creation of 15,000 public schools by its Ministry of Public Education between 1920 and 1940, which forcibly integrated schools and taught Spanish to Native American groups that historically had spoken their own languages exclusively.

Such reforms influenced a generation of U.S. social scientists who traveled to post-revolutionary Mexico to study societal change there — and who later shaped civil rights policy back in the U.S.

Flores has studied the original writings and correspondence of these social scientists. For instance, he’s tracked the work of George I. Sanchez, a University of Texas scholar who attempted to transform the state government of New Mexico after being exposed to reforms in Mexico.

Flores also has researched the work of Ralph L. Beals, a prominent anthropologist at the University of California-Los Angeles. Beals’ examination of post-revolutionary Mexican anthropology guided his attempts to change segregation policy in Southern California in U.S. federal courts.

“They continued to study Mexico in the 1930s and ’40s as the American civil rights movement was ratcheting up,” said Flores. “Mexico became a model for these individuals of how government might use its institutional power to help unite people into a single political unit.”

At the same time, immigrants from Mexico to the American Southwest brought the influence of these social reforms northward as they took up residence in the U.S.

“They brought a history of educational reform with them, and they became the targets of social scientists who wanted them to become a part of the great American melting pot,” Flores said. “Immigrants from Mexico provided much of the organic part of the equation.”

Flores now is working on a book about the Mexican Revolution’s impact on U.S. political history, entitled “Forging an American Pluralism: The Mexican Revolution and American Civil Rights,” which he expects to publish later this year.

His research is funded by a grant from the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation. His writing also has been supported by a 2008-09 postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas-Austin’s Institute for Historical Studies.