The Future in Their Hands

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The Future in Their Hands is a deep history of the politics of foreign education in Mexico, where many influential figures have European or US degrees. 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, as Newman shows, after the 1910 revolution, elites gradually convinced the Mexican state, under the guise of modernising the nation, to underwrite their ambitions with merit-based scholarships.

Student mobility naturalised the expectation that Mexico's sovereignty and development required knowledge from somewhere else. 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.