Community Development Journal Advance Access published online on August 31, 2007
Community Development Journal, doi:10.1093/cdj/bsm038
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Campaign for education in democratic citizenship, Guadalajara, Mexico
Address for correspondence: email: luisfer{at}imdec.net
Since the time of the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 (views on when it finished vary between 1917 and 1940) Mexico had been ruled by the same, single political party, the PRI (the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, meaning the ‘Institutional Revolutionary Party’), until it finally lost a presidential election in 2000 to the right-wing Party of National Action, after seventy-one years in power. The PRI had stayed in power through a mixture of ‘clientelism’, ‘populism’, ‘corruption’ and the rigging of elections and held a tight control on the whole of Mexican society. In its efforts to bring about social change, from the 1990s onwards Mexican society began to concentrate its efforts on challenging the dominance held by the PRI at the national, federal level. A debate on the ‘transition to democracy’ took off in both academic circles and social and civil organizations looking for ways to create a new and different kind of relationship between government and society. It was in that context that, as with many other civil organizations in Mexico, we in IMDEC1 considered how we might best open up more spaces for the culture and practice of democracy and motivate citizens to actively campaign on those issues impacting on their daily lives. The issue, however, was how to engage this participation differently, in a more festive atmosphere, breaking with formal traditions, in such a way that people would feel better motivated to become involved in actively addressing the problems that surrounded them. In this article, I want to share an experience, which took place between April and August 1994, before the local elections of that year, based on a Campaign for Education in Democratic Citizenship.