Each One Teach One: Education and Literacy in Mexico during World War II

In 1942, Mexico formally joined the Allied cause in the Second World War. At the same time, the administration of President Manuel Avila Camacho created a wartime agency charged with developing a propaganda campaign to encourage Mexicans to support the war. By late 1943, the propaganda office appears to have closed and instead the SEP (Secretaría de Educación Pública) had taken over the role of winning popular support for the war. At the same time, a parallel U.S.-sponsored literacy campaign was underway orchestrated by the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs—the wartime propaganda office headed by Nelson Rockefeller. My paper will examine literacy and education as a vehicle for wartime propaganda. I consider the role of the SEP as part of the national wartime information program and I compare its efforts to those of the U.S. propaganda agency. By examining themes such as agrarian production and industrial output, it is clear that the Mexican school system actively promoted the government's overall domestic platform. It is also clear that U.S. and Mexican government leaders saw education and literacy as important tools in winning support during World War II. But the two governments experienced mixed results as education and literacy became icons of nationalism and patriotic expression during the war. I hope that by examining the educational and literacy programs of the 1940s I can draw some conclusions about the decade as a transition to new educational paradigms in the last half of the twentieth century.