The Future in Their Hands

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The Future in Their Hands is a deep history of the politics of foreign education in Mexico, where many influential figures have degrees from European or US institutions. Reconstructing the history of student mobility from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, Rachel Grace Newman unveils the social hierarchies, political languages, and institutional mechanisms that created Mexico’s foreign-educated elite. Study abroad began as a private phenomenon for young elites to acquire specific forms of knowledge and to preserve their status. But after the 1910 revolution, elites gradually convinced the Mexican state, under the guise of modernizing the nation, to underwrite their ambitions with merit-based scholarships. Student mobility naturalized the expectation that Mexico’s sovereignty and development required knowledge from elsewhere. For historians of Mexico and other countries with foreign-educated elites, this book reveals the subtle, insidious processes by which states reinforce privilege through education policy.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Mexican Elites, Education, and Mobility in an Unequal World, 1876–1910

2. Sovereignty, Revolutionary Nationalism, and Study Abroad, 1920–1940

3. International Scholarships, Merit, and the Right to a Favor, 1920–1940

4. Mexican and US Institutions Building Mexican Expert Cadres, 1940–1960

5. Becario Politics and the Pursuit of Middle-Class Stability, 1940–1970

6. Managing Student Mobility with Science Policy, 1970–1982

Epilogue: Toward the Unreachable Future

Appendix 1. Quantifying Mexican Student Mobility to the United States

Appendix 2. Biographical Data on Instituto Nacional de Investigación Científica Committee Members, 1970

Appendix 3. Conacyt Becarios in 1974

Notes

Bibliography

Index