In the United States and Mexico, public schooling, as a government institution, has attempted to reinforce cultural and national values explicitly through civics lessons and implicitly through attitudes and classroom management. This study shows how schools on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border attempt to teach distinct national and cultural norms. Based on fieldwork in Ciudad Juarez and El Paso schools, our research illustrates the blending and separation of cultural values in a large metropolitan border area. It looks at overt civic rituals in schools, such as the flag salute, and at more tacit normative training associated with classroom organization and management strategies. We link teaching practices to cultural concepts of time, personal interaction, and nationality. The development of themes regarding human relationships and time, sociability and individualism, and nationalism and hegemony opens up some commonly held assumptions of U.S. and Mexican cultures for a more critical view. (Contains 5 figures and 22 notes.)