Recent literature on interactions arising between capital forces and local communities has tended to equate “the global” with economic globalization and “the local” as a more or less reactive formation. Less attention is paid to the fact that processes very particular to a locale are crucial mediators between global and local scales. Perhaps the most salient of these is the production of national ideology. This paper examines Mexico in the 1990s and explores the way leaders wove articulations of modernity through reproductions of nationalism to exclude those—poor, largely rural and indigenous—who didn't fit the picture of progress, then looks at how several indigenous communities contested these elite notions, demanding equal access as citizens of Mexico, and radically altered the public view of elite notions of progress.

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