From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista, Mexico, 1924-1935

From Many, One examines the Calles government’s attempts to centralize control over education in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands region and to transform its rural and indigenous inhabitants into more “mainstream” Mexicans. Calles’ nation-building programs met with varying degrees of success. Not surprisingly, his new educational policies sparked a good deal of backlash among those affected. Andrae Marak’s analysis focuses on three main incidents which caused the most contention: the establishment of frontier schools along the border in order to promote nationalism and protect against the onslaught of U.S. cultural and economic imperialism; the takeover of state primary schools by government inspectors in Chihuahua; and the government’s indigenous assimilation program, which aimed to integrate numerous culturally distinct groups into a monocultural Mexican nation.