U.S. Educational Public Diplomacy toward Indigenous Mexicans: Political Actors and Dual Social Constructions

Abstract

This article analyzes the political interests of institutions involved in three strategies of U.S. public diplomacy in education toward Mexican indigenous people: the itam-Stanford Summer Seminar, the University of New Mexico Indigenous Leadership Seminar, and the Strengthening Our Roots program by the U.S. Consulate General in Monterrey. The authors examined twenty-one documents and electronic materials and, to complement their data, sent questionnaires to eight respondents from the institutions involved in these programs. They applied Schneider, Ingram, and DeLeon’s framework of social construction to their analysis and concluded that the Mexican indigenous enjoyed a certain positive social construction, which meant that the institutions improved their reputation by supporting them. However, public diplomacy is more effective when the institutions involved have similar dual social constructions –that is, not only of the target population, but among each other. The results also reformulate the choice of alliances in educational public diplomacy.