PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico — A few years after retiring to this Pacific resort city, David Bender was bored with golf. His new hobby, the American decided, would be tackling Mexico’s income inequality. He would do it by teaching English to Mexican children.

Never mind that Mexico didn’t ask for his help. Or that the former advertising executive knew nothing about running a school. Bender saw working families hungry for affordable English-language instruction and a shot at upward mobility for their kids.

Credit a seasoned adman for knowing his market.

Fewer than five years since its founding, Colegio Mexico-Americano has become the largest school in Puerto Vallarta. The nonprofit’s tuition is 70 percent cheaper than that of the city’s priciest bilingual academy. Enrollment has grown to 1,135 students, with dozens on the waiting list.

Not bad for a project that began in August 2002 with a few preschoolers learning their ABCs. It is vindication for Bender, a preacher’s son who never lost faith when the current campus was a weed-choked vacant lot with no funding and plenty of doubters.

“We saw a tremendous need,” said Bender, 71, a former Chicagoan. “We are trying to build a middle class in Mexico.” 

But while Hispanic nations such as Costa Rica and Chile have seized on English fluency as a key to global competitiveness, Mexico has done little to prepare its youngsters. The state requires just three hours a week of English instruction for three years during Mexico’s equivalent of junior high school, often by teachers who don’t speak the language well.

“Pencil. Window. Door. It was useless,” said Jose de Jesus Alcantar Delgado, a Puerto Vallarta workman recalling his rudimentary lessons. Lack of fluency has kept him from higher-paying employment in the city’s air-conditioned resorts.

Experts blame scarce resources, an inflexible teachers union and widespread resentment of U.S. hegemony. But Puerto Vallarta mother Kenia Salazar Torres isn’t buying it. English is standard in elite academies where the children of Mexico’s wealthy matriculate. Salazar wants the same chance for her three boys.

Her oldest son, Jose Rodolfo, 9, has a partial scholarship to Colegio Mexico-Americano. Salazar earns the rest by rising before dawn to prepare refried beans for local markets. Her husband, Arturo, is a ticket seller at the bus station. He’s trying to land a better job to earn tuition money for their twin 5-year-old sons.

Jose helps out by collecting cans to earn recycling money. On a recent afternoon, he was too shy to practice his English. But the serious, handsome child knows what’s at stake.

“That’s how you get a good job,” he said softly in Spanish.

Such stories keep the balding, bespectacled Bender focused on his all-consuming second career.

He helped raise scholarships to keep low-income children in class with money for uniforms, supplies and other extras not covered by the government. Then he got a good look at the public schools. He saw teeming classrooms, crumbling facilities, poorly trained teachers and pitifully low expectations for students.

Conversations with the mostly Mexican congregation of his local church, the New Dawn Christian Center, led to the idea of launching a secular, nonprofit, bilingual school that working-class families could afford.

Bender spearheaded a fundraising effort, hitting up friends in the U.S. for money to clear a junkyard and build three classrooms on rented land. Colegio Mexico-Americano opened its doors with 35 preschoolers and the goal of adding a grade every year through high school.

But as the school expanded, Bender spotted a trend that disturbed him. Slots were being taken by the children of well-heeled parents who knew a bargain when they saw one.

Bender said he and school administrators dismissed reviewing a family’s financial standing for admission criterion as unworkable. The solution, they agreed, was a bigger campus to take all comers.

But no bank in either Mexico or the United States would lend the pipsqueak nonprofit a peso, much less the millions needed for land acquisition and construction. With deadlines looming, teachers bailing and gossip swirling that Colegio Mexico-Americano’s grand ambitions were doomed, the school appealed to those with the most at stake: parents.

Some risked everything they had.

Maria Elena Covarrubias Ibarra was among those to pledge their homes as security to a landowner who agreed to sell the school 5 1/2 acres on installment.

Others raided their savings accounts and mattresses, extending unsecured loans on little more than a handshake. Tradespeople swapped building materials to get their children a seat in class.

Laborers such as Alcantar proved crucial. Spurred by the promise of full-time maintenance jobs at Colegio Mexico-Americano and discounted tuition for their kids, he and other members of the construction crew toiled 18-hour days and slept on the job site for weeks to deliver the new school on time for the August 2005 opening.

“It was worth it,” said Alcantar, who has two daughters enrolled. “I hear my girls speaking (English) and I feel so proud.”