Penn author Ruben Flores (Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States) has a post up on History News Network titled "Did Mexico Reshape the American Civil Rights Movement?"
We typically think of the United States as a hegemonic nation whose power shapes the nations of Latin America along a north to south trajectory. But the example of Mexico during the 1930s and 40s shows us that Mexican government policy influenced American politics as much as American power influenced the history of Mexico. Thus, while Americans tend to think of Mexico as a country of “chaos” – a word that has been perennially repeated in accounts of Mexican history from 1920 to the present day – Mexican policy change has been important to the United States in ways that Americans have not imagined. Pragmatism in Mexico helped to reshape the moral character of American nationalism and democracy, and at the level of institutional practice rather than in theory alone, during a moment of heavy social change in American history.
Read the full post here: "Did Mexico Reshape the American Civil Rights Movement?"
