Professor of History at Colgate University. At Colgate, she teaches on these themes and other topics in modern Latin American, global history, and historical methods.
Newman applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Future in Their Hands: Making Mexico's Foreign-Educated Elite, with the following results:
What’s on page 99 of The Future in Their Hands:Visit Rachel Grace Newman's website.
This falls in the book’s fifth chapter, set in the mid-twentieth century. That chapter explores the political agenda of Mexican students studying abroad, mostly in the United States. This agenda, I argue, was not explicitly ideological and perhaps seems even apolitical: young, middle-class Mexicans sought to protect and uplift their social status by securing generous scholarships to support themselves and their families, expecting that their foreign degrees would ultimately shore up their future careers with prestige and good salaries.
On page 99, we find several stories relating to Mexican students’ family commitments both during and after their studies abroad. First, we encounter the end of the story of Concepción Reza Inclán, who studied economics at UCLA in 1952-1953. She sat for several interviews with a researcher during her time in Los Angeles, and she told the interviewer that she aspired to be both a professional economist and a wife, which the interviewer found hard to believe possible. On page 99, we learn that in 1959, several years after returning from UCLA, she was working as an economist for Nestlé México. I explain that we don’t know whether she also had formed her own family by that point. It is the case, though, that some US-educated Mexican women I interviewed ended up being very successful researchers and mothers, too.
In the mid-twentieth century, scholarship program officers (such as those working for the Rockefeller Foundation) saw women’s family commitments as impediments to their professional careers, and so they were generally unsupportive of women who married or worse, had children. However, as I explain on this page, the Rockefeller was also unsupportive of men who provided for family members other than their wives or children. Subscribing to a vision of a breadwinner for the nuclear family that presumed that young professional men did not need to take care of their own parents, siblings, or other relatives, Rockefeller officers were surprised to find that the Mexican students they invest in with scholarships had just these kinds of “other dependents.” As I explain on page 99, these commitments were common, but usually scholarship recipients were not given extra support from the Rockefeller to provide for these relatives. An exception was one young playwright, considered to be very promising, Jorge Ibargüengoitia—who did actually become famous several years later. Because he negotiated for it, he garnered an extra stipend of $80 monthly so that he could continue to support his widowed mother and his aunt back in Mexico while he was studying theater in the United States.
Does the Page 99 Test work for this book?
The sources I used to write page 99 are some of my favorites, so the test pinpointed a place where my personal scholarly predilections really come through. Indeed, this test works fairly well for my book, although the contents of page 99 might come as a surprise to the browser who opened up to this page after seeing the book cover. Invoking “foreign-educated Mexicans” (as in the book title) usually brings a very specific image to mind: US-trained technocrats who ushered Mexico into neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. But I’m interested in how Mexicans pursued foreign education, what scholarship programs aimed to do and how they worked, and how upwardly mobile youth’s ambitions and experiences abroad related to their social origins. That will be an unexpected turn for many readers, and page 99 indicates just how deep we venture into the social history of Mexico’s ordinary elite. In the book, I argue that social imperatives were just as important as intellectual (or political) motives for studying abroad because a foreign education both signified and enhanced Mexican social privilege. That privilege was conditioned by family responsibilities and gender norms, both points which come across on page 99.
Elsewhere in the book, we learn about the political history of their relationship with state institutions. The book’s main argument is that the Mexican state created cohorts of foreign-educated Mexicans through scholarship programs at the behest of ambitious elites themselves. The idea is that scholarship programs, whether yoked to discourses of nationalism, modernization, or development, have always obeyed a hidden agenda: opportunities for elites to shore up their own status with support from the state in the form of merit-based, selective benefits. The Mexican state is mostly absent on this page (though its first systematic scholarship program, run by the Banco de México, does get a mention, and it is featured elsewhere in the book). But page 99 is not quite misleading because my book is not only about the Mexican state, but about the forces outside of it in Mexican society and even beyond Mexico that shaped its policy. The Mexican state was never been the only source for funds to study abroad. Besides family-financed study, Mexican students have also had access to scholarships from foreign and international organizations, like the Rockefeller.
--Marshal Zeringue
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