Mexico

Arrive in Mexico City and settle in. Begin with a program orientation and street-level introduction to the city’s pace, scale, and everyday systems.

Explore the Historic Center, beginning at the Templo Mayor to examine how an Indigenous capital became the foundation for a colonial city and modern megacity.

Continue with mural-focused learning at the Palacio Nacional, using public art to explore labor, power, and national identity. End the day in the Zócalo, observing how public space functions as a site of civic life and expression.
That evening, head to a local football match or lucha libre, using sport and spectacle as a lens into popular culture, performance, and collective identity in Mexico City.

Spend the day in a local school community, engaging with students through shared activities, conversation, and collaborative games. Practice Spanish in real contexts while learning about daily student life in Mexico City. Reflection connects education to broader questions of opportunity, access, and how schools shape civic identity.

Later, join a hands-on cooking class, preparing traditional dishes and exploring how food reflects geography, history, and social connection. End the day sampling authentic tacos made with freshly pressed tortillas, grounding learning in sensory experience and local practice.

Travel to Teotihuacán to explore city design, belief systems, and the engineering of ancient urban life. Engage with the site as more than monumental pyramids, considering what it reveals about governance, labor, and infrastructure at scale.

Dip into a large cave on the outskirts of the site for lunch in a restaurant below the ground, using place and atmosphere to reflect on ritual, history, and continuity.

Return to the city for guided learning at the National Museum of Anthropology, connecting material culture to the diversity of Mexico’s Indigenous nations and the ongoing presence of Indigenous identity today.

Explore Coyoacán as a neighborhood shaped by creative life and political history. Engage with Frida Kahlo’s world, then move into a hands-on artisan experience creating your own alebrijes in a workshop that connects tradition, imagination, and contemporary craft economies.

Time in local markets emphasizes observation, interaction, and the everyday economics of a cultural district.

Engage with a local social enterprise focused on water access, working in communities without reliable sanitation or potable water. Learn how rainwater harvesting systems are designed, installed, and maintained as a response to water scarcity and infrastructure gaps. 

Later, travel to Xochimilco, where the city’s historic relationship with water is still visible. Navigate the canals by trajinera before stepping onto a working chinampa to explore floating-garden agriculture as a centuries-old solution to food production and water management.

Participate in hands-on agroecology, including harvesting, composting, and soil-building, followed by a shared meal prepared with ingredients grown on-site. Use Xochimilco as a living comparison between ancestral knowledge and modern urban innovation—two responses to the same challenge of water in a megacity.

Close with a final debrief connecting history, exchange, art, and sustainability. Depart for home carrying forward insights about cities, systems, and the people who shape them.