The Right to a Favor: International Scholarships, Clientelism, and the Class Politics of Merit in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

Abstract

This article considers the ways that middle-class and elite citizens in post-revolutionary Mexico pursued access to exclusive favors from the state in the 1920s and 1930s and emphasizes the overlooked role of merit as political logic in this era. Examining political discourse within clientelist exchanges through the close reading of petitions, I explore ideas about class and nation as articulated by young strivers and their families who sought scholarships for foreign study. The article argues that working within clientelism, upwardly mobile Mexicans strategically wielded merit to preserve and legitimate their status amid social tectonic shifts. Petitioners’ ideas of merit encompassed individual loyalty and patriotism, unique talents, and inherited status. I identify heritable and disciplinary merit as distinct yet compatible understandings of worthiness used by privileged citizens. These citizens claimed that exceptional Mexicans trained abroad would make an outsized contribution to the national well-being and thus deserved special rewards, an argument which anticipated rationales that the Mexican state would later embrace for its modernization policy. After 1940, the state expanded international scholarship programs and invoked the same terms that citizens had used in the early post-revolutionary period to justify socially regressive benefits providing foreign education for the already fortunate.