By Elena Jackson Albarrán

Child and Nation in Latin America is a website featuring public scholarship created in Spring 2020. It is the product of semester-long, multi-disciplinary research projects undertaken by upper-level undergraduates enrolled in the capstone course in Latin American, Latino/a, and Caribbean Studies at Miami University of Ohio. The students spent the first half of the semester learning critical theories of childhood studies and becoming familiar with some of the narratives that define Latin American childhoods, both from within the region and externally imposed upon it. To prepare for their public-facing scholarly interventions, students conducted substantial behind-the-scenes work. They formally reviewed the literature on their chosen topics, and defined the structures (states, agencies, institutions, policies, laws, and discourses) and agents (individuals, groups, actors, or victims) that emerged in each respective study. They also collaborated to identify the critical theories—key terms and concepts borrowed from other scholars that contributed to a deep reading of the forces at play. These included childhood as (under)development, infantilization as a project of empire, semiotics and the power of propaganda, the adult/child binary, the white savior complex, the suffering stranger trope, the revolutionary redeemer trope, and the “useful” versus the “useless” child, among others. Intentionally interdisciplinary in scope, this project draws from perspectives and methods in history, medical anthropology, cultural studies, literature, journalism, visual culture, and legal studies in order to gain an appreciation of the many professional fields that are engaged with issues of child rights, protection, regulation, and exploitation. 

Issues related to children and childhood are often associated with the private realm of the family. As a collaboration on politics and representations of childhood in Latin America and the Caribbean, this project sheds new light on the ways that childhood intersects with macro forces driven by the nation-state, international organizations, and global capitalism. On a metaphorical level, historically marginal nations and peoples have been subject to infantilization as a way of minimizing their access to resources and political power. On a practical level, children themselves have often borne the brunt of structural injustices in the region. In particular, these pieces attend to the constructedness of childhood in historical and cultural context. Most modern assumptions about what a “good” childhood should look like—well-intentioned rights-based discourses—have been generated in Western circles and do not consider the realities, challenges, and preferences that prevail in countries of the Global South. The blog pieces here ask what happens when the ideal educational, labor, or recreational models for childhood are implemented in Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, or the southern border of the United States. They ask the reader to consider other childhoods, ones perhaps unfamiliar or uncomfortable, to add nuance to and expand our global definition of childhood as a universal experience. 

Here, I share a selection of student work:

Behind Bars: The Criminalization of Migrant Youth

By Jordan Proce

As of November 2018, there were over 14,000 unaccompanied minors being housed in immigration detention across the U.S, with many more being apprehended at the border each week. While many of these minors did, in fact, come to the U.S. alone, other children became unaccompanied minors in the eyes of the immigration system after being separated from their families at the border due to the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. In the media and across the U.S., images of children locked behind bars spread like wildfire. As a result of gang violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity, there are numerous children migrating to the United States each year. While these youth engage in this often-dangerous journey, they are seen as very adultlike, facing harsh realities that, to the Western world, no child should have to endure. However, once they enter U.S. immigration system, youth are criminalized similarly to adults and are denied the assurance of children’s human rights. By drawing upon public policy analysis, statistical data published by immigration enforcement and various research organizations, and the works of childhood studies scholars, this project explores the ways in which the U.S. immigration system treats unaccompanied migrant youth as criminals and how the definition of “child” is fluid as children migrating pass through many different spaces. Ultimately, the treatment of migrant youth defines how the United States, very differently from how it views its own youth, views children from the Global South under an outdated, colonial lens. ​Read Full Post.

"It'll Stunt Your Growth! Or Will It?" Child Labor vs. the Working Child on Guatemalan Coffee Farms

By Hannah Stein

In the rural communities of Guatemala, the realities of childhood are different from the ideals established in Western international rights discourse. Guatemala relies on coffee production for its economy. Children accompany their parents to work on coffee farms, starting as early as infants strapped to their mother’s back. Families get paid for the amount of ripe beans they pick, and children assist their parents at a young age to increase the household income. This piece analyzes the difference between working children and child labor in contemporary Guatemala. This research includes interviews with Guatemalan coffee farmers and delves into the national school system as means to provide evidence that, in many cases, children working on coffee farms should not be considered child labor. Rather, children working is a part of rural Guatemalan culture. A case study of Guatemala’s coffee farms suggests the need to update international and domestic laws to include diverse realities of childhood. Read Full Post.

The Evocative and the Endangered: Climate Change and Children in Mexico

By Dora Milan

Climate change awareness narratives warn that due to neoliberal development, the impacts of high carbon footprints, pollution, and environmental degradation do not stop at the borders of each nation-state. Recent data has proved that children are disproportionately affected by climate change, despite their minimal carbon footprint. Contemporary southern Mexico serves as an excellent case study of this phenomenon due to the region’s geography and exclusion from Mexico’s infrastructural systems. The communities remain politically isolated from the rest of the country and are especially susceptible to floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Children’s biological and cognitive lack of preparedness for these natural disasters make them extremely vulnerable, and in many cases, victimizes them in the face of environmental catastrophes. Mexico’s disaster prevention agency (CENAPRED), created after the earthquake of 1985, is tasked with preparing the public for these disasters and administering aid in their aftermaths. This piece investigates the rights of children in the face of unprecedented environmental challenges through climate change litigation, statistical data of climate change-related child mortality and the presence of children in disaster preparedness and relief policy. Children are often seen as a reason for action to mitigate climate change, and have become a voice for this crisis, but they have virtually no visibility in government adaptation plans for multi-national environmental and human protection policies. How can children simultaneously have a voice in important matters, keep their “childhoods,” and be protected from disaster? Read Full Post.

The Question of Educational Justice for Mapuche Youth in Chile

By Hanna Vera

This project focuses on how Chile’s indigenous students can be better served by the national public education system today. With really no other viable option than to participate in the traditional Chilean education system, Mapuche students are forced through mechanisms of assimilation that are covert at some times and more obvious at others. This form of educational hegemony forces native students to see their personal culture and language as less valid than what is normally deemed as important academic curriculum. Even more tragically, fewer and fewer Mapuche children are learning their native language, as parents encourage Spanish as form of protection from existing ethnic prejudices. This interdisciplinary piece utilizes academic sources from History, Educational Theory, and Cultural Studies. It also draws evidence from Chilean educational statistics and documents from youth activists demanding educational equity. This project aims to shine a light on the ways that Chile's official national curriculum hurts indigenous students, and makes suggestions for ways to more meaningfully integrate indigenous students into mainstream education. Recommendations include better funded culturally-conscious teacher trainings, increased Mapuche teaching incentives, and more emphasis on native culture and language in the classroom. Read Full Post.

The projects undertaken here reveal some of the larger structural inequalities that disproportionately affect Latin American childhoods, burdens that are shared by many children throughout the Global South.  The challenges can seem insurmountable, and the diversity of perspectives on each complex issue make it hard to find moral clarity, at best, or frustration at the futility of our actions.  A Meaningful Actions page of the website supplements the public scholarship project to channel readers’ concern, charity, rage, or interest into acts of engaged citizenship. Here we intend to signal some of the everyday decisions we can make to improve conditions, restore dignity, reduce precarity, and promote agency for children of the Global South.

About the author

Elena Jackson Albarrán is Associate Professor in the History Department, and the Global and Intercultural Studies Department, at Miami University.  She is author of the book Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Nebraska 2015; María Elena Martínez Book Prize 2016), and a founding member of the Red de Estudios de la Historia de las Infancias en América Latina.