Rachel Grace Newman, "The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite" (U California Press, 2026)
About this episode
Dr. Rachel Grace Newman discusses her book on the history of foreign-educated elites in Mexico and the politics of student mobility.
The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite (U California Press, 2026), by Dr. Rachel Grace Newman 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, Dr. 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 open-access book reveals the subtle, insidious processes by which states reinforce privilege through education policy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose…
People in this episode
Host: Miranda Melcher
Guest: Rachel Grace Newman
Topics covered
- foreign education
- Mexican elite
- student mobility
- education policy
- social hierarchies
- political languages
Keywords
- foreign-educated elite
- Mexico
- education history
- student mobility
- scholarships
- social hierarchies
- politics of education
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: U California Press
Places: Mexico
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