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Rachel Grace Newman, "The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite" (U California Press, 2026)
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Rachel Grace Newman about her book published by the University of California Press in 2026 and available open access. So we will get to talk about it in this interview and anyone interested can go find out more. And of course the topic of the book today is quite intriguing. It's titled the Future in Their Making Mexico's Foreign Educated Elite Examining the deeper than one might expect history of the politics of people in Mexico going abroad for education, which honestly you don't have to look far in sort of influential political figures, for instance, to look at their CVS and see that this is a pretty common thing in a lot of senses for Mexican elites. And nothing becomes common out of nowhere, right? So a lot of what we'd like to do on the podcast is investigate how and why things happen and sort of become common or normalized within groups. And that's exactly what this book helps us do. So it definitely relates to things that are happening right now by going back into history to explain kind of how we got here. So there's a bunch of things for us to discuss obviously in this conversation and the book, as I mentioned, is available open access for people who want more details. So let's get into it. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me.
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
Miranda, I'm just thrilled to be with you. And thanks so much for the kind introduction.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, speaking of introductions, can you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? I mean, what sorts of questions were motivating you to undertake this project?
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So I came to this topic somewhat accidentally. I moved to Mexico from the United States after I graduated from college. And the part of Mexico that I moved to, the city of Guadalajara, is sort of at the heart of Mexico's historical migrant sending region. So while I hadn't really studied migration much before moving there, I came to understand that this was actually a really important part of of Mexican history. I was also interested in education and the history of education. So while I was living in Guadalajara, I did a master's thesis there that looked at a binational education program for migrant children, the children of migrant farm workers. So when I started my PhD going back to the United States, I was interested in kind of continuing to pursue these key words of education and migration. And while I was looking out for sources, I came upon these references to scholarships that were available for Mexican students to study in other countries. And I knew enough about Mexican history at that point to realize there are a lot of prominent Mexicans who have these US Or European degrees, but I hadn't really ever thought before about how it is that they got them. So I was interested in learning more about these scholarship programs. And that's sort of the rabbit hole that I've been down for the past 13 years. And I realized later that I think some of the reasons that this topic resonated with me were the ways that it intersected with my own experience as a person who moved from one country to another and ended up pursuing higher education in another country. In my case, going from the United States to make Mexico someone who was internationally mobile and lived with a lot of privilege in that particular experience, but also, you know, with my own kinds of privileged struggles. And I also think that the deeper I got into this topic, I realized that these questions about what everyday life is like with a scholarship, how do you earn merit in academic settings but also take care of the people you love? What does it mean politically to get your education in one place or another, and how is that education seen in one country or another? These are all things that resonate with my lived experience. So that was sort of how I got interested in the topic, but I realized pretty quickly that actually for other people, it might not be that obvious why the actual process of getting foreign education would be inherently interesting. And what I discovered is that when I started to say, you know, this is what I'm working on, people immediately would think about a very, very specific group of people and a very specific time period. They were thinking about foreign educated Mexicans who held very, very high positions of power. We're talking the presidency, cabinet, ministries, you know, the entire sort of ruling class has this sort of particular profile at the very end of the 20th century where they all have these foreign educated backgrounds. This is also a moment where Mexico makes some big policy shifts away from economic nationalism toward neoliberalism, for example. And so folks, journalists, scholars, ordinary Mexicans would make this connection between where these people had studied and what ideological positions they occupied and what sorts of policies they would implement when they were in power. So what I have to kind of explain in talking about my research, and I do this in the beginning of the book, is to say, actually before we can explore questions about how foreign educated Mexicans actually govern, we need to understand some other things. First, where do foreign educated Mexicans come from? And why does the Mexican state actually support, support people getting this particular educational profile through these international scholarship programs? Those are questions that people are not necessarily talking about, but they actually help us to expand this idea of who foreign educated Mexicans are beyond these particular, very famous folks who reached the apex of power to see that this is actually a pretty common experience within a certain group of Mexican society. And if we want to understand why Mexicans from this particular group, which I can talk about later, are going after this experience and why the state is supporting that ambition, we're going to need to do some deep social, cultural and political history before we can start to understand that neoliberal political moment.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very helpful introduction to a number of the things that the book tackles and as you said, really crucially raises the point of kind of who it is that we're talking about here. So can we go into more detail about what you mean by the term elite in the book?
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So when I use this term in the book, I am referring to people who have the chance of possibly studying abroad, Mexican citizens who could reasonably imagine that that's an aspiration they could achieve. So these are young people who come from Mexico's middle and upper classes. So. So when I say elite, it's kind of an umbrella term that's including people who actually do have some internal variation in terms of how prestigious their families are, maybe how much money they have at their disposal. But what I want to show in the book is that even though it isn't the same to be middle class as it is to be upper class, not now, not historically, what those two class groups do have in common is access to to education, and specifically access to the highest levels of education that are available in Mexican territory. So folks who come from this elite background have the chance to study abroad, have the chance to make an it imaginable by kind of doing one of two things. So if you're from the very wealthiest families in Mexico, then you can, with your family's finances, afford to cover all of the costs of a foreign education. If you're a more middle class person, you wouldn't be able to afford study abroad on your own. But it would be possible for you to take advantage of an international scholarship to be able to have that experience. And actually coming back to Mexico with a foreign degree could possibly set you onto a process of social mobility. But you wouldn't be starting from the very bottom. You would be starting from this sort of middle class place. Place. And to kind of expand a little more on why it feels okay to me to put middle class and upper class folks together in this category without trying to lose the fact that, yes, there are distinctions within this group is that Mexico's middle class historically was not very big. So being an average or a typical Mexican didn't mean being middle class, it meant being poor or working class. So if you're middle class, you're actually already in this sort of rarefied minority group. Within the context of Mexico's social pyramid. For young people in the lower classes, the working classes, some of them did get the chance to have access to higher education during the 20th century, and a few of those folks even did get the chance to study abroad. But studying abroad came at a place where they already were. In that upward trajectory of social mobility, study abroad is something that is not available to the vast majority of Mexicans either now nor in the present. So when I use the word elite to refer to people who get access to this opportunity, whether it's through family financing or a scholarship, we're talking about a privileged realm within Mexican society.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to situate and especially situate kind of within the Mexican context, so that we're not just assuming that the same sort of divisions amongst class that work kind of everywhere. I mean, of course, nothing like that is global. So helpful to have that Precision here in terms then of why families would consider study abroad for some of their family members. If we go back to say, like the 19th century Mexican elite, you discuss in the book that this was definitely an option that some of these elite Mexican families were considering. In fact, you talk about it as being, quote, unquote, the only reasonable option. So why was that?
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So for elites in the 19th century in Mexico, we need to situate them first sort of in their historical time and place. So Mexico has become independent in the early 19th century after three centuries of being under Spanish rule as part of the Spanish empire. So we're looking at a postcolonial nation. Well, what that means is that until very recently, the political, cultural, institutional, religious center of power is not actually in Mexico, it's somewhere else, it's in Spain. When Mexico becomes independent, of course, now they are politically sovereign. But this idea that actually the real seat of power, of prestige, of knowledge, of modernity is actually somewhere else, that remains true. And it moves from being Spain to being Northern Europe. And then kind of as we get deeper into the 19th century, the United States starts to become kind of more of an icon in that sense of where is the geopolitical center of power. So for elites in this post colonial context, part of what it means to be privileged, I would even argue most of what it means to be privileged means being very connected to these places where power, wealth, prestige are actually located. So being an elite in 19th century Mexico could mean that you had a business that depended on, you know, selling Mexican goods to folks in Europe, or it could mean importing European goods to sell them to other elites in Mexico. It also meant that if you were in any kind of political trouble, there were certainly a lot of political ups and downs, changes in ruling party in Mexico. If you found yourself on the wrong side of sort of where the political coin had landed. Going into exile meant going to places like Europe or the United States to kind of wait things out until the tide turned again. It was also the case that elite families often had folks from Europe or from the United States in their own family trees, either because they had gone to Europe and married someone there or. Or because elites from other countries who came to Mexico married into Mexico's elite as a way to establish their own social position and have a good network of contacts there. So Mexican elites in the 19th century were already definitionally cosmopolitan. So when they were thinking about the best way to ensure that their children had a good chance of maintaining or even enhancing their the status of their clan in a Society where, with political turmoil and economic ups and downs, even being privileged, was a little bit shaky. It does make sense that they would think about sending them to get education in the places where knowledge and prestige were located, I.e. europe and the United States. But to me, this sort of naturalness that it seemed obvious to them, they didn't really spend a lot of it time explaining why it is they needed to do this. What I just described to you is me kind of triangulating things by learning more about this period of Mexican history. I don't think that it really was necessarily the only reasonable option, even though elites talked about it and thought about it that way. Mexico did have its own education system. It did have opportunities for professional education on Mexican soil. And in fact, most of the most powerful politicians of the Mexican 19th century were educated in Mexico. There were only a few that had that foreign educational profile. So it wasn't really true that in order to be somebody, you had to get that foreign education. But elites did feel like it was the best way to give their children a real shot at maintaining their privilege in Mexican society. So I call this the necessity narrative. And I didn't really realize when I started this project that I was going to need to write about the 19th century. But it became clear to me the more I learned about the 20th century, that this idea that study abroad is a natural, obvious good thing must have come from somewhere. So this is sort of the way that I worked back to try to explain that naturalness to myself and, and then to see what happens to that narrative when we move into other political moments.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, because of course, if we're talking 19th century and political turmoil, I mean, we kind of have to move into the political moment of the Mexican Revolution. I mean, that's quite a lot really of political turmoil in many senses. So to what extent does that change these ideas about the necessity of studying abroad?
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So to say a few things about the Mexican Revolution, which certainly could warrant an entire podcast series all on its own. This is a civil war that replaces an authoritarian leader who's been in power in Mexico for decades, who's ousted in 1910. And it actually takes quite a few years to kind of fully see a long lived new state come out of this revolutionary turmoil. So we kind of start the more stable history of the post revolutionary state around 1920. What I want to say first is that for Mexican families, what was appealing and enticing about study abroad didn't really change with the revolution. It was a strategy of social reproduction before, during and after the revolution. And actually some of the folks who came up with the revolution and formed the new political ruling class after the sort of dust of battle was settled, even though they were espousing these revolutionary values, which I'll talk about in a moment, they actually also sent their children to study abroad because they were trying to consolidate the place of their sort of nouveau riche newly arrived families to the elite in Mexican society. So the sort of, I don't want to say grassroots exactly, but the sort of ordinary banal reasons that families would want study abroad, those actually remain pretty constant. But the revolution changes political culture in Mexico quite dramatically. And two aspects of this revolutionary culture are really important for my research, one of them is that revolutionary culture is all about Mexican sovereignty and nationalism. So after many years of a lot of either foreign investment or meddling extraction exploitation in Mexico, now Mexico is trying to keep its wealth for itself, take control of its natural resources, and limit the power of foreigners within Mexico to make Mexico more independent on a world stage. It's also about celebrating Mexican culture and celebrating what Mexico has to offer and saying what we have is just as good as, and can be just as modern as what other countries have. So not trying to imitate foreign cultures anymore. The other aspect of revolutionary political culture that's super important here is this push toward redistributing wealth, about making society more equal. So after the revolution, there's a big push to elevate the political status of two particular groups, the campesinos, or the peasants and the workers. So the sort of emphasis on the people and who the Mexican state is meant to be serving is shifted onto the popular classes. So in this moment, where we're pro sovereignty and pro social leveling, study abroad has a very awkward fit with the major discourses of this moment. Because study abroad is sending the best and brightest away from Mexico to the countries, particularly the United States, that have been these meddling, exploitative forces in Mexico for so long. Sending wealth away from Mexico too, with all those tuition payments, and saying that there's something lacking in Mexico that people need to go elsewhere to get. And to top it off, this is a very elite, exclusive phenomenon which doesn't sit well with the sort of equity driven ethos of this particular moment. So even though elite families in Mexico still want to send their children abroad, and they do do it, suddenly study abroad becomes something that isn't just a family affair. It becomes a national question. It becomes a topic of political debate, because this practice now suddenly has a political importance that it really didn't have in the 19th century. So in these debates, some people go as far as to say, Mexico shouldn't do this anymore. Parents shouldn't be sending their children to study abroad. It's bad for the nation. And this moment of kind of peak anti study abroad rhetoric happens when there's a scandal involving two Mexican students who get murdered in the United States by local law enforcement in the state of Oklahoma. So that scandal kind of throws all these questions into relief, puts this onto the very top of the national agenda. And some people really see this as a moment to say we should stop doing this at all. But really quickly, after that incident, which happened in 1931, people seem to kind of start to gravitate back towards study abroad actually being a good thing. And they're actually saying not just that it's a good thing for the people who do it, but they start to argue that it's actually good for the nation for a select few Mexicans to go abroad, get foreign knowledge, get foreign skills, bring these back to Mexico, and then put all this cutting edge capacity to the service of the nation. This shift happens pretty subtly from kind of mid level Mexican state agencies. We're certainly not seeing Mexican presidents, you know, stating opinions on the topic or anything like that. But what I argue is that this shift toward this new story about study abroad being actually pro nationalist, not anti nationalist, is not actually something that the state innovates. It's an argument that these ambitious elites develop in petitions that they write to different state officials asking for scholarships. So they're looking out for themselves, they want this state benefit, they're trying to convince the state that they should give it to them. And they use a whole bunch of different types of arguments, including basically whining, talking about how needy they are. They're not embarrassed to explain or admit that they're elites, even though this is a revolutionary political moment. We did just have a social revolution. But they're honest about who they are. But the argument they make that ends up really stuck sticking because it ends up getting adopted by the state and actually becoming state discourse is this idea that study abroad is actually something that the state needs to fund for certain individuals for the benefit of the nation writ large.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And this, as you said, argument sticks, right? Because you talk about in the book that say from the sort of 1940s onwards. So kind of the initial revolutionary fervor has calmed down a bit. This study abroad initiative is something that the Mexican government supports, right? Increases opportunities for Mexican students to go abroad. And it's also something that the US government supports, right? So kind of supplying places for the Mexican students in some senses. So from this sort of period onwards, like you've explained, kind of part of the reasons that the Mexican government is sort of convinced of these elite arguments. What are the other factors that make this something that both governments support?
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So let's talk about the Mexican government first. So after 1940, there is a general shift in terms of policy and also sort of high level state discourse in Mexico, where we're not so much on the radical redistribution, kind of a very arch sense of sovereignty, but we're moving toward more rapprochement with particularly the United States, a shift away from wealth redistribution, to actually trying to promote growth, which, with the idea that that's going to benefit everybody, which isn't what ends up happening, but that's the kind of impetus of this moment moving toward modernization. This is a very, very sort of nice dovetail with these elite arguments that say that we need specialists in different disciplines in order to be able to unleash these processes of modernization. Because if we don't have highly educated folks in different types of scientific fields, fields that can be applied, you know, whether that's in the sort of agricultural realm or maybe more industrial, or even in the social sciences, like economics is a really important discipline in that regard. There's this argument that Mexico needs to increase its highly skilled human resources capacity and in order to be able to modernize and modernization and development in Mexico, these are understood to be processes that the state needs to lead, that it needs to spearhead, that there needs to be a plan or a design. So with that logic that this is something that the state needs to sort of engineer from above, then it becomes logical to create programs in order to ensure that there are cadres of people prepared in the way that the state needs in order to develop. Now, again, the Mexican presidents of the 1940s and 50s, they're not talking about this. And the place where the Mexican state's first real scholarship program begins, it's within a particular department within Mexico's central bank. So kind of like a very technical, wonky part of the Mexican state. And the guys who are leading this program, you know, these are not super high level officials. They are just, you know, sort of functionaries in this central bank. But all of them have studied abroad, either in the United States or in Europe. So they create this program to train Mexicans up kind of in their own image. The, the central bank's program, you know, runs for a couple of decades, and very lucky for me, they kept very good records about who participated in their program, which I can talk about more about later. But what I really want to emphasize is that this Mexican scholarship program is, yes, using study abroad, which is an international phenomenon, but it's very inward looking in the sense that it's meant to promote national development and it's very practically and technically oriented. So I underscore that because at this kind of same moment, the U.S. government, through the Department of State, also begins to fund scholarships for Mexican students to study in the United States. So it's the same mechanism targeting more or less the same people. But the US Government has very, very different reasons for investing in this sort of cultural diplomacy effort, they're trying to increase US soft power in the world through different kinds of educational, artistic, cultural exchanges. This is a moment where Pan Americanism has a lot of cachet both in the US mainstream and also a lot of support within the US Federal government. And their idea basically is if we train Mexican elites in the United States, then these folks are going to become pro US spokespeople for us when they go back to Mexico. So they are trying to win over hearts and minds and, and use Mexicans as kind of these US Ambassadors to kind of help bolster the image of the United States and Mexico. Because this is a political moment where if the United States wants something in Latin America, it's for Latin Americans to like them and particularly to support any of their strategic or geopolitical endeavors, whether that's during World War II or during the Cold War. Whether these US aims really worked, I think my research suggests, is that the United States was very naive about sort of how savvy Mexican students could be, and that actually studying in the United States does not turn you into a sort of champion of all things in the United States. It may actually attune you to some of the many things that are wrong with the United States. But that soft power aim was why they were investing in this. And I want to add something too, which is that while these sort of state actors, both on the Mexican and US side, are very important here, and the Mexican state is sort of really where my focus is in the book, there are also private institutions, philanthropic, in the case that I'm going to talk about in just a moment, that are also part of this landscape of where an ambitious Mexican young person in this moment might get a scholarship. So the Rockefeller foundation, which is intended to sort of reduce human suffering on a global scale and is very active already internationally, earlier in the 20th century, it begins to really beef up its programs to train Mexicans in the United States during the mid 20th century as well. It also has a kind of technical focus that's pretty similar to the bank of Mexico in some ways. But this is a US institution which is pretty compatible with the values of the U.S. department of State. And they also have maybe the most money of any of these places that they are directing toward this scholarship initiative. So the Rockefeller Foundation's scholarships were actually the most generous. They gave the highest stipends in this particular era. So. So these three different institutions with different goals all are using the same tool, international scholarship programs, to try to achieve their different ends. They were compatible Enough that some Mexican students actually sort of piggybacked the different scholarships off of each other or held more than one of them, either in sequence or simultaneously. But I also argue that the fact that there were these US Dollars available allowed the Mexican state to advance its goal of training Mexican cadres abroad without actually having to pay for all the Mexicans who were doing that by kind of harnessing, you know, the resources that these different US Institutions were willing to spend for their own reasons.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really helpful to understand kind of the multiple things that are going on here at the various government and non government levels. There's of course, the kind of individual student aspect of this that I want to make sure we talk about too. So when we are thinking about kind of these different goals, is it therefore the case that kind of most of the students receiving scholarships in the mid 20th century are like, well, we'll give you a scholarship if you go study engineering or if you go study something helpful to the bank. What are the kinds of students who are getting these experiences and what were their experiences studying abroad like?
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Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So the three different scholarship programs that I just emphasized, and there were others, but I see these as being the most important. The ones including the most students have different requirements, have different disciplines that they prioritize, but all of them have a single base requirement. That means that this group of who's getting a scholarship is not going to be representative of Mexico's youth nationally. And that requirement is that you have to have completed your undergraduate degree in Mexico in order to qualify. So that shuts out the vast majority of working class youth, popular youth who are not getting access to higher education in Mexico, even though that's actually also an area that is expanding quite rapidly at this time, getting. And there are more Mexicans getting college degrees than ever before. But the population is also booming. So different disciplines that get prioritized by these institutions, I could say for the bank of Mexico, the ones that I already mentioned, including economics, different types of chemistry, different things relating to public health. What I would want to say about the bank of Mexico's program is that this technical emphasis does skew its group of scholarship recipients toward men because it is prioritizing funding students in these more technical areas, which are male dominated from the undergraduate level. So they don't all. They also don't have any goal toward gender parity or anything like that. But I do want to say that in addition to the kind of general class bias of scholarships really can only go to people who are already elite when the Programs prioritize disciplines that are male dominated. They end up with pools of scholarship recipients who are mostly men. So was only about maybe 9, 10% of their recipients who were actually women. And when you start to break it down by what fields of study the women were in, it's in fields where there is more of a presence of women, which include things like library science, which maybe we would expect, but also things like chemistry, which was sort of the science that women were kind of had the highest levels of participation in in that era. The U.S. department of State, its scholarship program had a little bit more of a humanistic focus. And so from the available data, which isn't that much, we do see the women had a higher level of participation. The Rockefeller foundation has the most robust archive in terms of individual files on individual students that give us a lot of information about who these people were and what their experiences were. Why do they have these very rich records? Well, because they were a very, very rich foundation. So this is really a gold mine for researchers as well. So what I was able to find by looking at these individual dossiers was to see how Mexican students, depending on their gender, but also depending on their family status, got different kinds of support or not from the Rockefeller Foundation. And what I learned was that men who were husbands or fathers got a lot of support from the Rockefeller foundation in order to be able to be breadwinners for their families while they were studying abroad. However, the foundation was much less supportive if men were trying to support parents, older relatives, siblings, other families, family members back at home who were not part of kind of their nuclear family, of like, you know, the husband, wife, and the kids. And women were really only supported insofar as they were single. The foundation was very, very skeptical about whether women who were married and worse, mothers could possibly go on to practice these disciplinary specialties that the foundation was trying to prepare them in. So there was clear examples of gender discrimination, although there was no outright prohibition or exclusion of women from participating in these programs. So in terms of the experiences these students had, it depended in some ways about how generous their scholarship was. How much they might be struggling to make ends meet would depend on not just the amount of their stipend, but also what kinds of family responsibilities they might have back in Mexico. But I guess on the sort of more positive or pleasant side, one thing that Mexican students did often experience in the United States was this really celebratory kind of ethos around Mexican students being present on US Campuses because they're treated as these cultural ambassadors who are very special who are Mexico's best and brightest. And folks in the United States are actually very eager to hear from these Mexican students, what's your country like? Teach us something about it. So there's a lot of interest, curiosity and celebration being directed toward these Mexican students. So I'll mention a story about a particular student because it's one of my favorites from the book, but also because I do want to emphasize that while this is a social phenomenon, it is also an individual lived experience. And I think that's a really important part of how we need to tell this story. So a woman I spoke to who studied in the United States in the Midwest in the 1950s, and she actually was in the sciences in a very male dominated field before she went to the United States. People in Mexico told her, you know, when you go to the United States States, you should really bring some folkloric Mexican outfits with you. This is not what she would have been wearing, you know, to the university in Mexico or anything like that. She's an elite woman, dresses in a modern fashion. However, what they were telling her was when you go to the United States, people are going to ask you to kind of represent this folkloric Mexico. They're probably going to ask you to do some regional folk dances. So you should, you know, be prepared for that. And sure enough, when she got to the Midwest on her campus, people did ask her to do just that. And so then she had to send for, you know, traditional outfits to be sent to her from Mexico up north into the United States. So she's not a dancer, she's not in the performing arts. But there is this expectation which comes with some opportunities and maybe also some stereotyping in the United States, that Mexican students are these kind of perfect representatives of the best their nation has to offer. The other side of that coin is that anti Mexican discrimination and racism was a thing in the United States at that moment, as it had been in the past. In many cases, elite Mexicans were shielded from that, but not always. So Mexican students could sometimes experience different forms of stereotyping or microaggressions. And something that I found, I mean, sad about this is that Mexican students in the United States really did not want to be confused with Mexican migrant workers in the United States. They didn't really see themselves as having any kind of a kinship with them. We don't really see evidence of any. Anything more than sympathy for working class Mexican migrants in the United States. So they were not only elites, they were also elitist. And so they were especially offended by anti Mexican discrimination because they believed that this stemmed from them being confused with working class Mexicans in the United States. And that was something that offended them.
- [41:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, race and class and nationality are all very difficult to sort of pretend, aren't related. As that example, I think very clearly shows. Thinking then about these Mexican students when they go home, when they've completed their study abroad, what sorts of challenges perhaps do they face when they come back to Mexico in this sort of period? What happens at that moment?
- [42:13]
Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So the short answer is that not all Mexicans who are returning with these foreign degrees see their very high expectations for what's going to happen to them afterward actually get met. So they experience different kinds of frustrations. And I think in order to understand where these frustrations come from, I really want to underscore how much they've been built up by this very sort of celebratory rhetoric about how important they were for the nation, both from sort of Mexican conversations, but also when they were in the United States. So believing that they were very special, broadly speaking, returning foreign educated Mexicans expected that they should receive high paying, prestigious, meaningful jobs in the fields that they had prepared in. And of course, sometimes this does happen, but there's actually kind of a lot of evidence out there that it didn't happen as easily or as automatically or as universally as students expected. So sometimes what might happen would be that students would, would come back to the United States and then maybe the employer they had before they left would put them back in the same position they had before doing their studies that wasn't what they wanted, or the jobs that were available, like university teaching or maybe a government position, they might have some kind of prestige attached. It's somewhat debatable, but what they definitely had were low salaries. And that wasn't appealing to the students, students either. And it does seem that even though foreign educated Mexicans believed that these credentials from somewhere else were going to open all these doors from them, that actually some people in Mexico were skeptical of people with foreign degrees because they questioned their loyalty to the Mexican nation or because they thought that it meant these people sort of thought they were better than everyone else and that turned them off. And a final, and I think this is the most sort of practical, real reason that Mexican students struggled when they came back is that while they were gone, their networks, their connections, their sort of activity in professional circles had withered because they were gone. So they didn't have the kind of like, you know, easy to access connections the way that someone who had never left Mexico might have in a context where knowing the right people is very important for getting a good job. So these frustrations in the 40s, the 50s, these are sort of personal problems, but there isn't really any institution paying all that much attention about, you know, what do we need to do something about them? The bank of Mexico actually does do a little study and record some of these frustrations, which is where I got the information from. And the people who did the study were foreign educated themselves, and they thought this is something that some institution should do something about. But it took some more years for that to actually happen. So what happens is a change in global conversations. And Starting in the 1960s, this idea of brain drain becomes something that people around the world are getting concerned about. The idea with brain drain is that in countries where there may not be adequate opportunities for the most highly educated citizens, those citizens may choose to leave and take their talents elsewhere, particularly to the United States, where they can get more respect, higher salaries, better working conditions, etc. So this is something that countries around the world are concerned about. And Mexicans start to get anxious about this in the 1960s as well. And in the Mexican case, this issue of brain drain is inextricable from study abroad and foreign educated Mexicans, because the only Mexicans who really have this opportunity of getting a prestigious, high paid, professional job in the United States are ones who also studied in the United States or in other European countries as well. So the concern becomes that if Mexico does not have enough high, highly educated Mexican citizens in its national territory, the country's development trajectory is going to suffer. And they trot out statistics about, you know, other countries have this many scientists per 100,000 population. Look at how low ours is in comparison. The Mexican state needs to do something about this to ensure that foreign educated Mexicans not only come back to Mexico, but after they study, but also that they stay and that they're happy, because if they're not happy, then they'll leave and everyone's development is going to suffer as a result. So what was a personal frustration in the 40s and 50s now becomes construed as a national problem that requires a policy solution. So when Mexico creates the first robust national scientific policy agency in 1970, it gets a lot of input from highly educated Mexicans in the sciences kind of writ large, including many different areas of knowledge. A lot of foreign educated Mexicans get to weigh in on what this institution should look like, and they build in this concern about brain drain to the way that this institution is going to work. So this agency is designed not only to train lots of, of Mexicans abroad, which it ends up doing, but also to make sure that they come back and to try to provide, in some sense, for their happiness. And so in this way, these concerns about brain drain get baked into this very important institution, which quickly becomes the most important place granting international scholarships. In the context of the 1970s, their methods for trying to sort of steer the careers of foreign educated Mexicans, both to keep them happy, but also to make sure that people were really doing what they wanted them to do, were not necessarily that successful. But the fact that they were trying really shows this kind of development way of approaching things where everything needs to be kind of designed and engineered from above, from the state. And by the way, the people leading this agency and running these scholarship programs, they're always foreign educated Mexicans themselves. So the way they tried to make sure that Mexicans would come back was first they implemented a program that converted scholarships from stipends into loans, and basically the loans would be forgiven at different rates depending on whether you came back to Mexico, and if you did, depending on what sector you worked in. So that was one way of kind of trying to coerce foreign educated Mexicans to do what the state wanted them to do, which was to work in the government academic research sectors. They also had some kind of smaller, more symbolic efforts to kind of match these returning Mexicans with jobs, and also repatriation programs to bring some Mexican scientists who'd already established themselves abroad back to Mexico. But these were really more symbolic than anything else. But the problems that this agency had, I think, reflect this tension that, that that is owes to the, the great role that foreign educated Mexicans have had in designing scholarship policy, which is that on the one hand, if we're going to argue that Mexico needs foreign educated Mexicans in order to develop, then we need to have some control over what they study and what they do when they come back. But on the other hand, if we want people to actually participate in these programs, we have to satisfy these very class informed needs and desires that they have, which may not be compatible with what we think is best for the nation. So by the time I kind of close out this book in the early 1980s, those two tensions are already there. And I would argue they haven't gone away.
- [50:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, how much of this is still in place in terms of these sort of competing norms, in terms of these institutions? Like how much of this is still happening?
- [50:36]
Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
To a great extent, the system that Mexico has today is this system that was created out of the 1970 founding of this particular institution. It's called Conacy. It's Mexico's national Science and Technology Agency. However, kind of, as I was really finishing this book, the agency had for the first time in a 50 year history, a name change. Briefly, the humanities were added into the acronym. And then even more recently, just last year, it was actually elevated to the level of a secretariat or a ministry in Mexico. So that being said, going for decades without either a name change or some sort of other major bureaucratic reorganization, I.e. longevity in the context of the Mexican state, state and the scholarships that have been on offer from Kona Seat and now it's sort of successor institutions have been available throughout this whole time. There have been years when they've given more, years where they've given less, but that opportunity to study abroad has remained there the entire time. And Mexico has undergone some pretty tremendous political transformations between 1970 and the present. Away from economic nationalism, toward neoliberalism, as I said before, and then also a move away into this sort of some aspects of neoliberalism we're moving back against, but there's also a lot of nationalism. It's very, very difficult for the Mexican state to take away these international scholarship opportunities now that they're there. And it's remarkable how this same mechanism can get kind of re justified depending on changes in the political context. So there's a lot of continuity, and I would actually argue that this continuity stretches deeper, much deeper than the 1970 founding of Conacyt. To say that this idea that as a nation, Mexico needs study abroad in order for that better future goes back to this 19th century necessity narrative, the narrative that elite families have about what's best for their own families. So the process that I'm looking at over this very long time span covered in this book is how a sort of chestnut, an article of faith that's deeply held in elite families informs national policy to become this article of faith that the Mexican nation now needs foreign educated Mexicans in order to have the future it deserves. So having talked about continuities, there is a very, very important change that I need to flag, which is that after 1970 through the end of the 20th century, up to today, Mexico's educational landscape has changed dramatically to have many, many more graduate programs available in Mexico. So there are all kinds of master's and doctoral programs in Mexico that didn't exist in the early part of the 20th century. So while some may have argued in the past I mean, to get the highest training in my discipline, I have to leave. We don't have it here. That's actually not true for very many disciplines anymore. And Conacyt and its successor institutions, most of the scholarships they give now, and this has been true for decades, most of the scholarships they give are actually for Mexicans to study at Mexican institutions. However, in this context of kind of increasing investment in Mexico's own educational ecosystem, they've never taken away that opportunity for a few people to get an even more prestigious and more expensive education somewhere else. So that in this change there's actually also still kind of a kernel of continuity, which is this opportunity for the most special people to get that chance to study abroad. That's something that's still there.
- [54:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting indeed. And I think probably a good place to come to a close on our discussion about the book, given that we've tied together the past with the present. But was there anything that really surprised you in kind of figuring all of this out and piecing it together?
- [54:52]
Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
So I would say that the elitism that I described on the part of Mexican students did surprise me a little bit. I guess maybe I'm just very optimistic, but I thought that perhaps sort of a sense of national solidarity might be something that I would find in the course of my research. And I think that was the product too of coming from a background as sort of a migration studies scholar. I also noticed that there were some sort of experiences in common between more typical Mexican migrants from the popular classes and these Mexican students from the elite. One thing that I discovered from these Rockefeller files that were so detailed was that some of these students who were getting the most generous scholarships available to Mexican students in that era, were actually saving part of their stipends in order to send money back home to their families in Mexico. And that surprised me not because I was unfamiliar with migrant remittances. They're unavoidable if you're reading anything about migration. But I didn't think that that was something that elite families would necessarily practice. And what I learned as I sort of tried to kind of unpack, my surprise was that even for a middle class family, which is a pretty privileged position to have in, in Mexican society, even part of a stipend in dollars in the United States could represent a quite large proportion of a typical middle class income. So it made sense that because these young people did have sort of income generating responsibilities to their families, to their parents, to other kin, that they would reserve, maybe even scrimp, go without a little bit in the United States in order to be able to send money back home. So this sort of how much elite migrants are like or unlike working class migrants, I think the sort of surprises that I've had around that have kind of gone in both directions, maybe less, less commonalities in some places that I expected, but then other commonalities that I didn't expect.
- [57:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
No. That's very interesting. Thank you for sharing that sort of behind the scenes aspect, I suppose, with us. And in fact, on that theme of behind the scenes, I have my final question, which is this book is obviously out in the world. As I mentioned at the beginning, it's available open access. What, however, is not yet available? What is on your desk that you're working on? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [57:34]
Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
I'd be delighted. So I mentioned just a moment ago being surprised about this remitting practice of, of these Mexican students in the United States. And pretty quickly that snowballed into me being very curious about remittances in general and transnational family economies and how it is that Mexican migrants whose loved ones are, you know, thousands of miles away across the border, how do they exchange resources during the time when they're in the United States, whether that's money or other sorts of goods that people might exchange. I'm very interested in these sort of material and everyday aspects. And I think there's some of that in the book that, you know, that's now finished. But this long history of migrant remittances and transnational family economies is the thing I'm researching right now. And I'm having a really, it's been very fascinating and also very sobering considering some recent political developments trying to tax remittances, put tariffs on things being sent. So definitely keeping me engaged at the moment.
- [58:45]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it definitely sounds like it. And of course, while you're pursuing that project, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Future in Their Making Mexico's Foreign Educated Elite, published by the University of California Press in 2026 and available open access. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [59:04]
Dr. Rachel Grace Newman
An absolute pleasure. Thank you, Miranda. Sam.