Boy Scouts under the Aztec Sun: Mexican Youth and the Transnational Construction of Identity, 1917–40

Abstract

Within a year from 1927 to 1928, a minor flurry of press coverage documented two occasions in which three Mexican Boy Scouts walked from Mexico City to New York City. This isolated and seemingly incidental set of events illuminated the complex intersections of Mexican cultural nationalism and modern transnational youth identity. The phenomenon illustrates the disjuncture between how young people growing up in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s envisioned themselves, how they translated and exported that vision abroad, and how other countries like the United States continued to view them. The overlapping national, global, and youth identities expressed by the Boy Scout protagonists of this history perfectly capture the imperfect — indeed, often confusing — relationships between local, national, and transnational identities that concern historians.