The Harvard Gazette

Global Harvard: Mexico

Harvard is increasingly entwined with Mexico, a nation of 122 million with more University graduates than any other Latin American nation except Brazil. In Mexico City, faculty and students study commuter traffic, low-income housing, air quality, and access to health care. Elsewhere in the country, Harvard projects relate to other subjects, including public art, rural medical care, Mayan ruins, freshwater contaminants, nutrition, and cross-border frictions.

With Harvard experts helping, clever and dynamic Mexico City is dealing with global megacity challenges like traffic.

World

The makeover of Mexico City

Aided by Harvard experts, officials are tackling housing, pollution, and traffic problems — and solving them

The main entrance to the National Institute of Cancer of Mexico is at No. 22 Avenue San Fernando in Mexico City. Its new wing illustrates the enhanced access to treatment provided by Seguro Popular.

World

Escalating the fight against breast cancer

With Harvard’s help, Mexico makes inroads among the most vulnerable

On the road in Chiapas in 1957 is Frank C. Miller, Ph.D. ’60, the first graduate student to join the Harvard Chiapas Project. (photo 1). Evon Z. Vogt (photo 2), dressed for fieldwork in Zinacantan in 1965, with his wife and collaborator Nan Vogt to his right and to her right future anthropologist Victoria Reifler Bricker, Ph.D. ’68. Summer 1960: The first undergraduates to join the Harvard Chiapas Project (photo 3). Seated in front, left and right, are future anthropologists (and spouses) Jane Fishburne Collier ’62 and George A. Collier ’63, Ph.D. ’68. Evon Vogt is second from left in the back row.

World

First model for Harvard in Mexico

Chiapas Project, led by charismatic Evon Vogt, studied Maya lifestyle, trained generations of anthropologists

The courtyard at the Palacio Nacional. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus

From Mexico to Texas to Cambridge

On recent trips, President Faust promoted the continued value of higher education

Air quality in Mexico City is influenced by the bowl-like valley it sits within, surrounded by pollution-trapping mountains like those in this 47-story view (photo 1). Heavy traffic accounts for most of the air pollution in this megacity of 22 million residents (photo 2). Yet it also has the largest bike-sharing program (photo 3) in Latin America — one of many attempts to improve the city’s environment and quality of life.

World

Coming up for air

Mexico City, Harvard alliance to study health changes after two decades of major environmental upgrades

“The research interests that spark connections between Harvard and Mexico are extraordinarily varied — from archaeology to the arts, from education to public health, to economics, politics, [and] public policy,” said Harvard President Drew Faust (photo 1), who later answered questions at the Your Harvard event in Mexico City's Colegio de San Ildefonso. Jorge Dominguez (from left, photo 2) led a panel discussion with Mary Schneider Enriquez, Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, Laura Alfaro, and Julio Frenk before a packed audience (photo 3) also during Tuesday's event.

World

Harvard in Mexico City

Faust, officials, and alumni gather to celebrate longstanding ties

Maria Dolores León Torres (left), at home with her family in the La Vista neighborhood of Chapala, Mexico. She and her son Juan de Dios, age 4 (center), were part of a Harvard study investigating suspected contamination in fish from Lake Chapala. “We haven’t ever gotten ill,” she said. Photos by Ned Brown/Harvard Staff

World

The mystery of the lake

Harvard researchers probed whether fish in Mexican area were contaminated — and were harming mothers, children

World

Journey to Mexico

Vignettes showcase visit to that nation by Harvard President Drew Faust, others

Paulina Campos, M.P.P. '07, in a rooftop garden at Infonavit, the federal institute for worker housing in Mexico. She is CEO of Fundación Hogares, a nonprofit created by Infonavit to establish community-building programs in affordable housing developments.

World

From Mexico to Harvard, and back

Graduates return home to help a complex nation solve its problems, improve its people’s lives

Within a Mexican landscape of mind-broadening horizons, Julia Cohn '15 sits at ease high among the ancient Mesoamerican pyramids of Teotihuacan, 30 miles northeast of Mexico City.

World

Summering (with work) in Mexico

Between semesters, Harvard students conduct complex research, embrace an enthralling country

Mexico City architect Jose Castillo, M.Arch. ’95, D.Des. ’00, on the rooftop of an affordable housing complex that his firm designed. Building in a megacity of 21 million, he said, is always “a struggle towards equity.”

World

Harvard’s Mexican connections

Intertwined programs, involved people make distance drop away