The First Generation of North Americans Born in Mexico? American Schooling and the Postwar Formation of a Transnational Elite

This paper focuses on the rise of a transnational Mexican elite during the post-war period of economic expansion known as the "Mexican Miracle." By examining the community that formed around the American School Foundation, the oldest secular "American-sponsored" school abroad, it traces the shift in elite attitudes of secondary and preparatory education vis-a-vis Mexico's ascendant role in Western Hemisphere and global economy. More than a reconstruction of the powerful pre-revolutionary American "colony," the school's microcosm also reflected and magnified the mid-century political, social, and economic anxieties of a burgeoning managerial elite class in Mexico. School administrators had to negotiate contradictory political philosophies that governened the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education, the agency that regulated both public and private educational institutions, while complying with the foreign policy directives disseminated by the U.S. Departments of State and Education, among others. These mixed directives had a critical impact on the school's community, as tensions between the Mexican middle classes and the Mexican state over educational opportunities, particularly a new understanding of education as a consumer good, and political repression increased. Within the school, children from families employed by the embassy, multinational corporations, and the Mexican government negotiated their parents' politics as the school body absorbed the children of U.S. "political exiles" seeking relief from the concurrent Red Scare. Drawing on traditional archival sources, as well as oral histories and works of literature, this paper argues the late 1950s and early 1960s represents a critical moment to understand the cultural politics undergirding the boom in private schools with international and bilingual curricula that has nearly monopolized elite education in Mexico in the post-war era.