Mexico's Mandarins: Crafting a Power Elite for the Twenty-First Century (review)

The University of California press tells us on the back of Roderic Camp's latest book that this study "marks the culmination of more than 20 years of research by one of this country's most prominent Mexico scholars." One of the reviewers' blurbs on the cover further informs us that, in this volume, "Camp brings together the conclusions from all his previous research in one capstone volume." Unfortunately, these characterizations of the book are misleading in the extreme: in capitalizing on Camp's earlier successes at explaining Mexican reality, the promotional campaign significantly undersells the originality of Camp's approach and findings in this important new study. In several critical respects, the book marks a major departure for both Camp and the Mexicanist field. Most importantly, Camp describes and analyzes two virtually unstudied aspects of the way Mexican politics work: elite mentoring and networking among leaders.

Camp uses a carefully selected subset of his large collection of elite cases amassed over the last 30 years to explore a set of issues that are notoriously difficult of access. He looks to a non-random sample of 100 politicians, 100 military officers, 100 capitalists, 50 intellectuals, and 48 clergy in the period from 1970 to 2000 to explain an apparent paradox in Mexican affairs: all Mexico observers know that Mexico is characterized by a "power elite" and yet, by standard definitions of a power elite (which tend to focus on interlocking elite groups active and influential in more than one realm of power), Mexico would appear to not be characterized by a power elite. Camp's most important conclusion, and one for which ample evidence exists in his sample, is that it is mentors and networks of mentors and disciples that bind rulers in Mexico across realms of power and thus explain both how Mexico's power elite is structured and how it reproduces itself. Camp shows that mentors function in three crucial capacities: they recruit new elites from promising, generally younger, generations; they plug their disciples into extensive networks that cut across realms of power; and they socialize their disciples in both traditional and new values and policy approaches. To return to my gripe that the promotional campaign for the book has apparently missed what the study is all about, let me observe that this conclusion significantly extends and modifies Camp's pioneering studies in the 1980s of the functioning of camarillas in Mexican political history.

In a particularly interesting set of chapters on the education of leaders, Camp sheds a great deal of light on the function of advanced training of elites at U.S. universities. While he wisely leaves the task of explicating the exact paths of intellectual and policy influence to scholars such as Sarah Babb, Camp carefully details how elite mentor-disciples networks are maintained and reinforced by periods of study abroad. Camp argues that mentoring networks, functioning through higher educational experiences in United States, reinforced the ability of economic policymakers in the executive branch under Presidents De la Madrid, Salinas, and Zedillo to implement macroeconomic policies studied in United States. Camp also shows that many analysts, in noting the early association in key government agencies of policymakers who later became influential, miss the fact that mentor-brokered contacts generally antedate, sometimes by many years, the later associations that attract so much comment. Camp's data lead him to propose that almost three-quarters of prominent figures establish their initial contacts with one another long before they serve together in government. After reading Camp's analysis, it comes as no surprise that the way leaders come together in government service is through the actions of mentors and interlocking mentor-disciple networks.

All longtime observers of Mexico will recognize in Camp's description of Mexican elites the...