“We went abroad not to learn the secret of others, but to learn the secret of ourselves.” Jose Carlos Mariategui
Loyola University is ready to show you Mexico. Mexico's incomparable year-round climate and affordable prices make this year a great time to visit and study in the land of beauty and legend.
Loyola offers a program of courses in Mexico City at the Jesuit Universidad Iberoamericana, the flagship Jesuit university in Latin America. The program aims to give students a mastery of conversational and written Spanish as well as a global perspective on Latin America's civilization and culture with a special emphasis on Mexico. In addition, we tailor our program to the special academic abilities of individual students and can put them in contact with and under the direction of some of Mexico's leading academicians.
Mexico City with over 20 million inhabitants is the world's largest city and perhaps the most important in the Iberian world. It is itself a unique resource, offering visitors a majestic legacy of ancient temples and buildings of the pre-Columbian and Spanish past as well as an almost endless array of other attractions proper to a great cosmopolitan center. It is the cultural, political, economic, and social heart of Mexico and Mesoamerica. Classroom instruction is enriched with a series of field trips to museums, cultural events, political gatherings, social happenings, and economic activities tied to the content of the individual courses taken.
Mexico with 108 million people is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world and is now seemingly irreversibly tied to the United States and Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico is the test case for the rest of Latin America and is the window from which to learn and watch what will take place in much of the rest of Latin America. These are exciting times to be in Mexico. The historic elections of July 2, 2000, in which PRI, the ruling party since 1929, lost the presidency for the first time brought dramatic changes to Mexico. The transition to power of the opposition under president Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and the very close election results of the 2006 presidential election in which the new president Felipe Caleron won by a mere 0.55% of the vote underscore Mexico's political maturity.
Maurice P. Brungardt, Professor of Latin American History, is the Director of the Mexico Program. Other Faculty participants are Larry Lorenz, Communications; Edward McCaughan, Sociology; Rev. Jesus Rodriguez, S.J.,; Blanca Anderson and Josefa Salmon, Spanish; Guillermo Tonsmann, Computer Science; Kurt Birdwhistell and Andy Knight, Chemistry; and Conrad Raabe, Political Science. They in conjunction with the staff and professors of the other U.S. universities associated with Loyola's Mexico Program and the Universidad Iberoamericana orchestrate a study abroad experience unmatched in the Iberian world. The summer program is six weeks in duration and the semester program twenty.
