Ruben Flores
Clements Center Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America

The Republic of Mexicois a highly diverse society comprised of 50 ethnic groups whose relationship to one another became one of the fundamental questions of 20th-century Mexican history in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Clements fellow Ruben Flores will examine the efforts of the Mexican state to create a unified nation through the mechanism of the public schools in the years between 1920 and 1950, when Mexico struggled to rebuild itself amid the growing power of the United States to its north. Flores will pay special attention to muralist art, the archives of the Secretariat of Public Education, and some of the classical installments in 20thcentury Mexican literature to illuminate the process of national integration that one Mexican intellectual called “forjando patria,” or “forging the fatherland.” Flores will also trace the careers of several important American social scientists who traveled to Mexico to study its nation-building efforts as a model for integration and civil rights work in the 1940s and 1950s American West.

Professor Flores received his PhD in history at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006 and is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas.  He is spending the fall semester at the Clements Center completing his manuscript The Beloved Communities: Mexico's Melting Pot and the Making of American Civil Rights for publication (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press).

Image: "La maestra rural (The Rural School-teacher)" by Diego Rivera, 1923. Secretariat of Public Education headquarters, Mexico City, Mexico.