This paper will discuss, from a historical perspective, how John Dewey's ideas on democracy and education circulated in Latin America from the beginning of the twentieth century through the "long 1960s" (1958-1974) amid dynamic interplay between the local, the regional, and the supranational. These interplays generated social and political configurations containing shared spaces, whose examination could help clarify why various groups of religious leaders, intellectuals, politicians, union leaders, and educators found in eclectic readings of Dewey's educational theory, often, as Gonzalo Jover describes it, "depragmatized" ways to organize their thinking and actions in their encounters with modernity. 1 The long 1960s 2 signaled a shift to new conceptions of education and social transformation, and challenging ways of thinking about democratic pedagogies, emerging from lived experiences and revolutionary discourses and practices in Latin