LA CRUZADA DE LOS NIÑOS: INFANCIA Y CULTURA EN AMÉRICA LATINA (1880-1980)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the writings and thoughts of a group of canonical Latin American authors for and about children. It looks into a selection of unexplored archival materials--schoolbooks, children's literature, magazines, newspaper articles, autobiographies, short stories and poems--to reveal their participation in debates about parenthood, family life, education, children's social status and ethnicity, sexuality and psychoanalysis. The works I address retrace the child as part of a liberated imagination: an emblem of educational reform, active citizenship, political change, social and ethnic diversity, as well as of a revolution in family life, sexuality and gender roles. However, on occasions, they also consider the child a "minor", submitted to paternal authority and school discipline, subjected to a patriarchal ideal of citizenship, family life and gender roles. I argue that these texts function as artifacts that produce social meanings about childhood, at the same time as they model public and private practices of family life, methods of education and upbringing, sexuality and gender, as well as strategies of cultural consumption.

My study is divided into a general introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1 examines José Martí's reflections on the changes in family life, fatherhood, private and public education at the turn of the Century; it considers his writings for and about Latin American children as future citizens of a republican, independent and transnational Latin-Americanist utopia. Chapter 2 analyzes Horacio Quiroga's savage child--a young Robinson--in relation to his search for a self-sufficient, adventurous model of citizenship, accomplishable only through the exposure to a masculine reeducation in the jungle. Chapter 3 explores the rebirth of the avant-garde artist as a child of radical aesthetic impulses--in César Vallejo, Luis Palés Matos and Mário de Andrade--and, at the same time, it studies their social, ethnic and political preoccupations around Latin American children, in light of the new role of the welfare State. Finally, Chapter 4 considers the changes in gender roles, sexuality and family life during the 1960s and 1970s to shed light into the contradictory visions and uses of childhood in works by Silvina Ocampo and Clarice Lispector.