Book Reviews Ruben Flores. Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 360 pp. Cloth $45.00. The concept of the nation is highly influential in shaping the scope of historical studies and the questions they ask, often in unseen and uncritical ways. Ruben Flores’s Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico’s Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States upends self-limiting nationalistic perspectives to uncover the hidden connections of people and ideas in major social movements in the United States and in Mexico between 1920 and 1950. More specifically, Backroads Pragmatists is an original and transgressive book that analyzes how “Mexico’s postrevolutionary melting pot shaped the American civil rights movement” (p. 12). Flores’s lengthy study is the first book-length exploration of this hidden universe of intriguing connections and how they profoundly shaped what are commonly held as unconnected topics in separate historiographies. The author interrogates the intellectual contributions and policy impact of several key thinkers who were in constant contact and dialogue with one another across physical and cultural borders. Flores, an Associate Professor of American Studies at the Uni- versity of Kansas, begins with a compelling analysis of Mexico’s rural school system and teacher-training institutions and how they reflected the nation’s revolutionary ethos. He then shifts to scholars in the United States whose domestic research and activism on civil rights for African Americans and Mexican Americans was intimately connected to their work on education and ideas of acculturation from Mexico. Backroads Pragmatists is a stimulating intellectual history filled with examinations of Mexican intellectuals such as Jos ´ e Vasconcelos, Mois ´ es S´ aenz Garza, Manuel Gamio, and Rafael Ramirez, as well as American scholars such as Lloyd Tireman, George I. S´ anchez, Marie Hughes, Montana Hast- ings, and Ralph Beals. All these figures, as Flores documents, were connected to the philosophical tenets of pragmatism and John Dewey’s crucial role in it. The author smartly discusses how Mexican thinkers had engaged Deweyan philosophy more seriously and with more policy impact than U.S. scholars. This book is patient and highly attentive to language. A close reading of Mexican sources, for example, captures the intriguing metaphorical distinctions in discussions of Mexican na- tional identity and culture. The author takes U.S. scholars to task for focusing on biology to explain the term mestizaje (racial mixing) while ignoring its wider cultural meaning as it emanated from the Mexi- can Revolution. Flores also corrects U.S. scholars who have rushed to History of Education Quarterly Vol. 56 No. 3 August 2016 Copyright C  2016 History of Education Society