Mapping discourses of digital technologies: the Mexican secondary TVET system in relation to Chile and Ecuador

The integration of digital technologies and the development of digital abilities within Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) are frequently presented as indispensable and inevitable. Yet the rationalities and logics underpinning such framings remain underexplored. This article examines three normative documents governing Mexico’s TVET system and places them within a broader map of rationalities and logics that includes Chile and Ecuador. Guided by post-foundational discourse analysis, the study identifies myths, particularly that of a new society underpinned by digital technologies and that of a troubled past. While these myths recur across contexts, their articulation is contingent upon distinct political conjunctures. In the Chilean case, neoliberal reforms are implicitly criticised yet paradoxically reproduced; the Ecuadorian corpus foregrounds education as a right while retaining instrumentalization of abilities; and the Mexican corpus explicitly names neoliberalism as a troubled past while articulating a horizon of transformation. Simultaneously, the Mexican documents reproduce imaginaries of the fourth industrial revolution, presenting AI-driven futures as inevitable and thereby foreclosing scrutiny of alternative trajectories. This study adds pieces to a broader map of how digital abilities are discursively constructed within TVET systems and how such myths stabilise meaning while simultaneously revealing the persistence and rearticulation of underlying logics.