Many academics have received publicly funded scholarships, like those addressed in Rachel Grace Newman’s monograph, which have enabled us to study abroad or conduct overseas research. While the story seems familiar, there is much to be learned from her intriguing study of the making of Mexico’s US-educated elite from the 1880s to the early 1980s. Newman’s book deftly integrates Mexico’s political, economic, social, cultural, and international history, and it is based on her work in twenty different archives located in a half dozen US and Mexican states.

According to the author, Porfirio Díaz’s government funded only 124 students and professionals to study and train in Europe and the United States between 1876 and 1911, averaging just 3.5 students annually. Consequently, the hundreds of Mexicans who pursued overseas education without the state’s backing during the Porfiriato were financially supported by their families. This limited the endeavor to upper class Mexicans who could afford it. The Porfirian rationale in favor of foreign study was maintained by their postrevolutionary successors. As Newman ably demonstrates, federal officials promoted overseas education in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was the most cost-effective way for Mexico to obtain domestic engineers, agronomists, economists, and educators (among other white-collar professionals) who could improve the nation’s schools, enhance its government, and expand its economy. In other words, supporting higher education abroad was the cheapest and fastest way for the Mexican state to obtain local experts who could modernize the country. Likewise, the goals of most Mexican students who went abroad were similar during both the Porfiriato and postrevolutionary eras. Most saw it as a strategy to expand their employment opportunities, protect their lineages’ future, and serve the nation. For the applicants and the state officials who selected scholarship recipients, self-preservation and self-justification intersected with clientelism, meritocracy, status, sovereignty, and nationalism. For the United States, allowing the best and brightest, or the most well-connected, Mexicans to study at US universities was a form of cultural diplomacy that enhanced the “prestige” of its leading centers of knowledge. It also was a way for Washington to help Mexico become more prosperous and bring it more fully into the US economic and political orbit, which would in turn temper Mexico City’s revolutionary radicalism.

Although important precedents for state support of foreign education were set during the late 1800s, noteworthy changes occurred after the Mexican Revolution. For instance, higher percentages of middle-class students and women studied and trained overseas after 1920 in comparison to the Porfiriato. Additionally, some Mexican nationalists worried that the program threatened the nation’s sovereignty and enabled a brain drain whenever becarios (scholarship recipients) remained in the United States after completing their studies. To impel them to return home and direct where they sought work, Luís Echeverría’s administration changed the scholarship program into a tiered loan program in the early 1970s. A becario’s entire loan would be forgiven if the recipient worked for an equal number of years in a Mexican academic or research institution. Fifty percent of the debt would be forgiven if they worked in the public sector, and 30 percent if they worked for a private Mexican company. There would be no loan forgiveness, however, if a recipient worked for a foreign-owned corporation or outside the country. According to Newman, this policy change continued until the end of the twentieth century and “was quite a significant departure from the economy of favor” (124). Such strong-arming had only limited success, since good jobs were hard to find in Mexico and higher salaries in foreign-owned companies or in the United States easily offset loan repayment.

Newman’s book broadens our understanding of the important roles played by several Mexican institutions that participated in the scholarship programs, namely the Banco de México, the Instituto Norteamericano-Mexicano de Relaciones Culturales, and the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. Rather than get bogged down with writing a staid institutional history, the author thankfully devotes significant attention to the becarios’ experiences on US college campuses. Not surprisingly they encountered racism, stereotyping, verbal abuse, and violence—most notably in 1931, when two sheriff’s deputies in Oklahoma killed two Mexican students who were driving through the state. Although Newman uses contemporary student surveys, yearbooks, campus newspapers, and the records of Latino organizations on a few university campuses to elucidate the becarios’ academic and professional goals and experiences, we would have gained a more nuanced understanding of said issues had she conducted interviews with Mexican scholarship recipients or their children. Self-censorship or editorial oversight likely watered down what was put in print. This criticism aside, anyone interested in Mexican education policy, postrevolutionary state building, and the social components of US–Mexican relations should read this book.