In Backroads Pragmatists, Ruben Flores offers a stunning intellectual and social history of the influence that John Dewey's pragmatism and Mexico's postrevolutionary efforts to integrate the country's diverse society had on educators in the US South and Southwest. Ultimately, Flores argues, the experiences of US educators in Mexico shaped their arguments for integrating US schools, their establishment of rural schools to educate some of the most marginalized in the United States, and their work during the Civil Rights era to desegregate schools. Backroads Pragmatists seamlessly brings together several fields of history that are not often in conversation with one another, including intellectual history, borderlands history, US and Mexican histories of education, and the history of American race relations. Without a doubt, scholars in each of these fields will read it with great enthusiasm.

Flores begins by mapping out the similar challenges that educators in Mexico and the United States faced in the early twentieth century, as they conceived of strategies for bringing together diverse populations under the umbrella of national progress and belonging. Mexico's famous postrevolutionary intellectuals, José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, through writings such as La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race) and Forjando patria (Forging a Nation), formulated ideologies of mestizaje and indigenismo to promote the virtues of Mexico's mixed-race society and incorporate the country's indigenous communities as citizens. The thinking of these Mexican intellectuals, Flores demonstrates, was influenced by their encounters with professors at Columbia University, particularly the anthropologist Franz Boas and the philosopher John Dewey. Both scholars—Boas through his theory of cultural relativism, and Dewey through pragmatism, which stressed the importance of experience and experimentalism over abstraction—rejected nineteenth-century ideas about biologically determined racial hierarchies and, as Flores puts it, “faith in the revealed word of God and the sophistries of philosophers whose truth models could not be validated empirically” (p. 284).

Thus did New York academics influence Mexico's postrevolutionary intellectual elite, who in turn inspired US educators to study how Mexico integrated the residents of poor rural communities. The northerners then translated the lessons they had learned in Mexico back to the United States. Borrowing from the lessons of Mexico's cultural missions and rural schools, they set up schools in rural African-American, Native American, and Mexican-American communities in the South and Southwest that, by educating some of the nation's most disadvantaged and segregated communities, played an important role in debates about America's melting pot and liberal pluralism, and integration and segregation. Flores tells this story by mapping the social networks of pragmatists who spent their lives moving back and forth between Mexico and the United States, describing the institutions they established on both sides of the border, thoroughly analyzing the ideologies behind their actions, and convincingly demonstrating their impact on desegregation cases in the Southwest that preceded the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Three accomplishments make Backroads Pragmatists truly impressive: it pieces together for the first time a cast of actors who constituted what we might consider a transnational pragmatist movement; it makes the important argument that we should understand mestizaje as an institutional practice instead of as an ideology; and it challenges commonly-held beliefs about the directional flow of influence between Mexico and the United States. We know a great deal about intellectuals such as Dewey, Gamio, and Vasconcelos, but Flores shows us the influence of their thinking on one another, and how their ideas traveled on the ground through the works of a wide range of thinkers and teachers, among them Rosario Castellanos, Rafael Ramírez, and Moisés Saenz in Mexico, and Ralph Beals, Montana Hastings, George I. Sánchez, and Loyd Tireman in the United States. Also, seeing mestizaje as a practice rather than an ideology serves two illuminating purposes: it parallels pragmatism's emphasis on experience over abstraction, and it helps us understand the connections among distinct institutions such as Mexico's Secretaría de Educación Pública (Public Education Secretariat), the Progressive Education Association, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and primary schools throughout North America.

Finally, many in the United States prefer to imagine that our influence emanates outward to the rest of the world, but Flores demonstrates that Mexico and the United States mutually influenced each other. In doing so, he joins a cohort of scholars who show how the nations of the world have influenced the United States, and how Mexico, a neighbor that many in the United States ignore except to malign the country for sending us illegal aliens and drugs, has also benefited us in ways that have gone unrecognized, including providing inspiration and legal precedents to opponents of segregation in the Southwest through the important Mendez v. Westminster (California, 1947), Delgado v. Bastrop (Texas, 1948), and Gonzales v. Sheely (Arizona, 1951) court cases.

However great, Backroads Pragmatists is not perfect. While Flores acknowledges the darker side of his story—especially in a section about the writer Ralph Beals, who worked with Sonora's Yaqui Indians and developed more critical views of Mexico's postrevolutionary rhetoric of inclusion—he focuses on the positive aspects and influence of pragmatism. But how do other facts on the ground between the 1920s and 1950s, such as the widespread displacement of indigenous communities and Mexico's anti-Chinese campaigns, fit into his narrative? Moreover, between World War I and the end of World War II, when the ideas of pragmatists on both sides of the border had greatest currency, many in the United States also debated how and whether to include Southern and Eastern Europeans as American citizens. It is unclear how relevant the example of Mexico would have been to debates centered in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Upper Midwest. Did participants in debates about European inclusion also look to Mexico, or did the educators that Flores focuses on apply the lessons of Mexico to regions outside of the South and Southwest? These questions take nothing away from the overall strengths of this exceptional book, which should be read and praised widely.