Mexico City, May 23 – This Saturday, May 23, Mexico City will be the venue for the National Centennial Scout Parade, a mobilization that will bring together contingents from across the country to commemorate 100 years of scouting in Mexico. The parade will take place on Paseo de la Reforma, starting at 07:00 AM from the Angel of Independence.
A Century of Scouting in Mexico
The event, organized by the Association of Scouts of Mexico, A.C. (ASMAC), will see the participation of scout children, adolescents, youth, and leaders. They will march towards the Historic Center in a commemorative day that includes activities of encounter, coexistence, and celebration of the movement at a national level.
Although the parade’s organization falls to ASMAC, the commemoration is intended as a recognition of scouting in Mexico, an educational movement that has experienced different stages of organization, expansion, and consolidation over more than a century.
In an interview with Aristegui Noticias, the national scout chief of ASMAC, Pedro Díaz Maya, stated that the National Centennial Scout Parade represents “100 years of many adventures, much social work, especially many messages of peace and many community projects by children, adolescents, and youth.”
He highlighted that the activity will gather participants aged 6 to 22 and will be one of the commemorative actions of the movement in its centenary. “Tomorrow we will shout that Mexico needs more scouts, it needs empowered young people, it needs young leaders, because the future is youth,” Díaz Maya emphasized.
The leader stressed that scouting in Mexico celebrates 100 years of promoting the formation of children and young people “to be good, constructive, and empowered individuals,” and underlined that the movement has evolved without losing its formative principles.
Youth Formation and Sustainability in the Scout Program
Regarding the current context, Díaz Maya explained that scouting works on building integral values from the family and as a companion to formal education, through activities aimed at personal development through contact with nature and community work.
Díaz Maya noted that the movement faces the challenge of adapting to the new realities experienced by children and young people, in a context marked by changes in their forms of coexistence, development, and social interaction, in addition to the digital environment.
He added that another challenge is to expand the presence of scouting in the country and give greater visibility to its educational proposal in the face of the diversity of activities available for young people. “We wouldn’t say that other activities are bad, all are very good; the difference is the great diversity of potential that we work on,” he said.
He stressed that the movement seeks to respond to these conditions without losing its formative essence, by incorporating current tools into its educational model.
He explained that the educational program has evolved towards more flexible schemes, where the daily activities of children and young people can be integrated into their progressions, understood as acquired knowledge and recognitions within the movement, which allows connecting their daily lives with their formation within scouting.
“In the new program oriented towards sustainability 3.0, everything that the child from 6 to 22 years old does in their school or social environment can be part of their progressions,” he indicated. Finally, he maintained that the objective of the movement is to continue forming young people with tools for their personal and social development, and reiterated the call for more families to learn about scouting as an educational alternative based on coexistence, service, and community work.
A Hundred Years of Scouting History in Mexico
Scouting in the country has its origins in 1912 in Mérida, Yucatán, where initial associations emerged with local support. However, these early attempts had a limited duration after the political changes resulting from the triumph of the Constitutionalist Army, which led to their temporary disappearance.
Subsequently, during the government of Venustiano Carranza, between 1917 and 1918, a new attempt at organization was promoted with governmental support, in which the movement acquired more structured characteristics, under the coordination of Federico Clark.
From that stage emerged the so-called Mexican Explorer Tribes (Tequihuas), led by Professor José U. Escobar with the support of the Ministry of Public Education.
In August 1926, Mexican scouting was recognized at the IV International Scout Conference in Kandersteg, Switzerland, and was registered as “National Explorers of the Mexican Republic,” marking its formal integration into the international scout movement.
Following this recognition, the movement evolved until May 9, 1932, when it adopted the name Scouts de México, which allowed it to strengthen its identity and organizational structure.
In 1943, the movement formally constituted itself as a civil association under the name Asociación de Scouts de México, A.C., consolidating its institutional structure.
The history of scouting in the country also includes the creation of the Meztitla school camp in Morelos in 1956, the participation of scouts as volunteers in the 1968 Olympic Games, the opening to female participation in 1981, and their role in civil support during the 1985 earthquake in the capital.
In Mexico, scouting has not been limited to a single organizational structure, and although the Asociación de Scouts de México, A.C. is currently the group with the largest institutional presence, the movement has had various expressions and associations throughout its history, including local experiences, previous associations, and educational projects that contributed to its development from different regions of the country.
Over time, some of these initiatives disappeared, others integrated or evolved, and others managed to consolidate as national structures. Together, these experiences have shaped Mexican scouting as a collective construction, sustained by different generations and organizations that share common principles of formation, service, and community work.
In this context, the Centennial Scout Parade seeks to bring together this historical and current diversity of the movement, as a form of recognition of the legacy of scouting in Mexico and its continuity in the social and educational life of the country.
Source: https://aristeguinoticias.com/2205/mexico/scouts-de-mexico-celebran-100-anos-con-desfile-nacional-en-cdmx/
