“As Fair and as Objective as Possible”: Choosing Mexican Candidates for US Scholarships in the 1970s–80s

This paper examines the political tensions in the process of choosing Mexican scholarship recipients for study in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. It focuses on the work of the Latin American Scholarship Program of American Universities (LASPAU), a cooperative organization with both public and private funding founded in 1965, and its efforts to find suitable candidates in Mexico. There, LASPAU sought to develop faculty for regional universities by sending students and recent graduates to complete Master’s degrees in the United States. Based on archival sources from LASPAU’s records and oral history interviews with scholarship recipients and program officers, the paper examines LASPAU’s commitment to making the choice of candidates “as fair and as objective as possible” and the selection mechanisms they developed in pursuit of this goal. As an international program advancing U.S. interests in a national Mexican context, the project undermined Mexican control over its outward flow of students and upheld U.S. notions of merit that had the potential to unsettle Mexican power structures. Still, these politics of selection also represented an opportunity for some students who happened to fit the program’s profile for the supposedly objectively meritorious candidate. In other words, the pursuit of unbiased selection was in fact a highly politicized project.