Programs for Democratic Citizenship in Mexico’s Ministry of Education: Local Appropriations of Global Cultural Flows

In this paper, I sharply focus my analysis on recent efforts to create and implement programs for democratic citizenship education at the secondary level in Mexico. Drawing on numerous interviews with key Mexican education policymakers and bureaucrats, as well as extensive document analysis and observational field notes, I tell the story of how an ambitious national program for democratic civic education took shape within the Mexican National Ministry of Education over the course of the 1990s.

By examining how programs and policy formation for democratic civic education have unfolded in Mexico over the last ten years, I hope to illustrate the unique and unexpected ways that one instance of the state—the Ministry of Education—goes about attempting to educate democratic citizens. I attempt to theorize important continuities and disjunctures across these different approaches to democratic civic education, and to thereby situate the local appropriation of global flows of ideas about democracy and citizenship. A key question for this paper is how democracy becomes “glocalized” in in and through particular educational programs for democratic citizenship.