Part of Mexico's hesitance comes from bad past experiences.
US anthropologist Oscar Lewis didn't mean to offend anyone when he came to Mexico to interview a poor, problem-plagued Mexican family for his 1961 book The Children of Sanchez. The book became a social science landmark, defining what came to be known as "the anthropology of poverty."
But it angered some Mexicans so much that the country's Society for Geography and Statistics filed a criminal complaint against Sanchez in 1965 for sedition, violating public morality and defaming Mexico.
Prosecutors decided not to bring the case to trial, despite the society's complaint that Lewis had "dragged the name of Mexico through the dirt." But the feeling of insult didn't fade, and in 1966 private publishers in Mexico put out a biting book about social problems in US ghettos entitled Stories for Oscar Lewis.
Perhaps the most troubled US project was the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group of researchers who were invited in the 1930s to work on improving literacy rates in Mexican Indian villages.
The linguists studied dozens of Indian languages and translated the Bible into those tongues. They set up medical services and agricultural training programs.
By the 1980s, the linguists -- affiliated with a Protestant Bible-translation society -- were being accused of being everything from missionaries to CIA agents. The Mexican government withdrew permission for the project, and most volunteers had been asked to leave the country by 1990.
"Our people are not preachers ... they are linguists whose work has been recognized and valued in academic circles," Summer Institute spokeswoman Rebeca Rivas de Lopez said.
No matter how the Americans saw their work, it did help lay the basis for some of Mexico's most stubborn, bloody religious conflicts. In San Juan Chamula, dozens of people have been killed in clashes between Catholics and Indians who converted to Protestant faiths following the linguists' stay.
Still, officials haven't ruled out the possibility that Mexico could accept more Peace Corps volunteers, or other aid.
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