Bridge of the World

The social and political background of most of the Porfirian intellectuals might lead one to expect that they also agreed on the political precepts implicit in social Darwinist thought. Affiliated with the group known as the Cientificos, the four aforementioned individuals all came from prosperous families and played key roles in the Porfirian regime: Gamboa as minister to Guatemala, Limantour as secretary of finance, Bulnes as congressional representative, and Sierra as secretary of education. Indeed, Limantour and Bulnes proposed social Darwinist solutions to Mexican underdevelopment. The most powerful of the Cientfficos, Limantour advocated the rule of “natural elites,” specialists in public administration like himself. Bulnes favored European immigration to “whiten” the Mexican genetic stock, an idea that had emerged as a wholesale failure by the end of the nineteenth century. Both Limantour and Bulnes denigrated Mexico’s native population. An “orthodox” social Darwinist, Bulnes in particular portrayed the “Indians” as biologically inferior owing to their consumption of corn rather than wheat, the staple of choice of the inhabitants of the United States and Europe. Although Limantour’s technocratic impulse allowed greater hope for Mexico than Bulnes’s racial determinism, both solutions contained social Darwinist ideas.

Sierra’s ideas, however, demonstrate the diversity of Mexican social Darwinist thought. According to Sierra, the poverty and illiteracy of the Indian population lay at the root of his country’s social and political problems; education, he thought, could remedy both problems. Sierra severely criticized Bulnes for his racial determinism, and he even praised Indians and mestizos as the quintessential Mexican. In his insistence that all Indians needed to learn Spanish and the white man’s ways to be successful, however, he was certainly no less paternalistic than Limantour and Bulnes. Moreover, Sierra, like other Mexican intellectuals of the time, reviled Africans and their descendants. Nevertheless, Sierra’s belief in the Indians’ educability contradicts the widespread notion that the Porfirians used social Darwinism to justify their social and economic policies that aggravated the manifold sufferings of the indigenous population.

Indeed, the fact that Justo Sierra, as secretary of education, never pursued the rural education program that would have put his ideas into practice makes an important point about Mexican social thought. While Díaz and his retainers might have desired to justify their racist and elitist policies with social Darwinist attitudes, Porfirians like Sierra undermined these attitudes. Sierra did propose to build a great number of rural schools, but he never could overcome the resistance of Limantour and Díaz. Thus, Sierra the politician continued to serve a regime that kept Mexico’s rural population in poverty and illiteracy, while Sierra the historian and philosopher desired to uplift them. This contradiction in many ways resembles the indigenista charade of today’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional ( PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party), a party that has co-opted its share of socially conscious intellectuals only to render them ineffectual.