Children

Children in Latin America have been deeply influenced by the impact of race, economic and social status, and a shift in ideas regarding the roles of family and government in the education and socialization of children. From the time of the Conquest, families, especially fathers, were invested with extensive powers over and responsibilities for their children. Gradually governmental authorities, as well as mothers, began to share the responsibility. Severe economic, political, and racial differences, however, have resulted in the inability or unwillingness to care for children. The result has been periodic surges in the numbers of abandoned or homeless children.

The basic unit of Latin American society is the legally and religiously sanctioned biological family. The offspring of these unions historically have transmitted familial economic, social, political, and religious status. During the colonial era, legitimate children perpetuated the patriarchal name as well as the material fortunes of both parents. In the case of upper-class families, this meant that the child inherited their social status, and efforts were made to prepare that child to perpetuate or enhance the family's reputation. Often selected children were promised to the Catholic Church as an indication of family piety. If the child were female, upon marriage she would assume the status of her husband's family.

Most Latin American children, however, were born to poor families who rarely were sanctioned by either the state or the Catholic Church. Furthermore, racial miscegenation (mestizaje) and poverty usually prevented offspring from improving family status by marriage or by service to the church. Instead of property and social status, children born to African or Afro-Latin American slave women inherited the stigma of slavery, regardless of the status of the father.

Indian mothers faced other realities. If the father was Indian, the children inherited the burdens of the family's tribute payments in the form of labor, produce, or money. The children, particularly the young women who learned how to weave and embroider, also helped celebrate indigenous identity through custom and clothing. If the father was not Indian, the mestizo offspring of Indian women lost both their Indian identity and their obligation to pay tribute.

From the Independence era onward, Latin American governments began to revise the significance of both children's legal birthrights and (thus) their political, social, and economic value. From the nineteenth century on, governments began to insist on greater involvement in education, public health, and the development of the economy. Consequently, many patriarchal privileges, such as the right to select an occupation and provide an education for offspring, were limited. There was also a weakening of economic responsibility for children through the decline of the dowry for young brides, and child abandonment. The inability of an unmarried mother to force the father to recognize his paternity, along with development of religious and secular institutions designed to care for unwanted children, exacerbated these conditions. By the twentieth century a father's patriarchal privileges over his children (patria potestad) were further restricted by laws regarding parents accused of abandonment, maltreatment, or moral turpitude. In practice, however, governments rarely enforce the laws and have been unwilling to pay the financial costs of rearing most of the children involved.

Thus, from the Conquest to the present, the social and emotional value that society has placed on children has been highly contradictory. At the same time that childbirth was often a welcome event, illegal abortions were common, and high infant mortality and popular Catholicism led to the belief that the death of young, baptized children transformed them into angels. There are patterns of ritualized celebration of infant death through portraiture and, by the nineteenth century, of photographs of the child. Examples of the angelito (anjinho in Portuguese) phenomenon are still common in Mexico and Brazil. The children, regardless of economic status, are adorned with a crown of flowers and often dressed in white.

During the same time periods, parents who could not afford the social stigma or the economic burden of illegitimate children gave them to better-off families or abandoned them on a turno (roda in Portuguese; foundling wheel), usually at a convent, or left them at the doorsteps of churches or town council halls, or in the doorways of families they believed would take pity on the child. These traditions dated from European medieval times and allowed children to be taken into new homes without the stigma of their birth. Despite this Catholic tradition, the strength of blood ties was so strong that fostered children could never share equal inheritance with legitimate offspring unless their identities were falsified. The practice of legal adoption reached many Latin American countries only in the twentieth century. Reforms of the Civil Codes authorizing adoption occurred in Brazil in 1917; Peru in 1936; Chile in 1934; Uruguay in 1868, 1934, and 1945; and Argentina in 1948. The enactment of these laws took place in the midst of debates regarding the right of parents to have legal heirs as well as the right of orphaned or abandoned children to have parents. Adoption laws have been reexamined after military antiterrorist campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s in Central and South America left significant numbers of orphans who were illegally adopted after their parents were executed.

The formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a cadre of physicians specializing in public health took up the challenge of infant mortality by providing new technologies of childbirth, inoculations against childhood diseases, and improved water and sewage services, and by advocating programs for infant nutrition. Initially breast-feeding was the recommended strategy to save children of poor mothers, and campaigns against the sale of breast milk by wet nurses were launched. Until 1888 and the end of slavery, Brazilian doctors diverged from their counterparts elsewhere due to their belief in the superior qualities of black women's breast milk. By the early twentieth century, the availability of reliable sources of pasteurized milk in urban areas, along with the development of powdered milk and prepared baby formulas, created new opportunities for physicians to teach mothers how to feed their children. Some of these campaigns were influenced by principles of eugenics.

Elite women also had a significant role to play in the campaign against infant mortality. The Sociedad de Beneficiencia, for example, in 1823 was authorized by the Argentine government to care for sick women and children. By the 1880s it fed and provided shelter for hundreds of orphaned or abandoned children in Buenos Aires. Eventually, through government subsidies and private donations, it built children's homes throughout the province of Buenos Aires. Similar organizations were founded in Chile, Uruguay (1857), Costa Rica (1887), Cuba, and Mexico. Feminist women, often of upper- and middle-class origins, as well as socialist women in many Latin American countries encouraged puericultura (the scientific study of child rearing) and persuaded their male counterparts to enact legislation to help both women and their children. In addition to these organizations, municipal Defensores de Menores and the Patronato de la Infancia in Argentina (1892), the Mexican Asociación Nacional de Protección a la Infancia (1925), Gotas de Leche (Chile, Cuba, Argentina), the Asociación Uruguaya de Protección a la Infancia (1925), the Comisión Nacional de Protección de la Maternidad e Infancia (Cuba), and the Patronato de la Infancia (Costa Rica, 1930) worked to aid orphans or abused and neglected children.

Latin American child specialists began to meet in scientific and politically sponsored congresses. The Pan-American Union, predecessor of the Organization of American States, sponsored children's congresses from 1916 to 1984. In addition, Argentina hosted one in 1913, as well as a congress on abandoned and delinquent children in 1933. Mexico held one in 1923 and then another in 1925. Costa Rica's congress took place in 1931, and Venezuela held its first Congreso Nacional del Niño in 1936. Among the topics discussed were the need for special legislation to establish appropriate forms of re-education for delinquent children and juvenile courts, and ways to enable government authorities to intervene in what had previously been considered family matters.

These meetings resulted in the enactment of significant legislation in several Latin American nations. In 1919 Argentine legislators enacted the Ley Agote. For the first time judges had clear guidelines as to when the courts could remove the right of patria potestad from parents who were considered immoral or irresponsible, or who had abandoned their children. It identified the degree of responsibility for a child's crime by age and authorized expansion of reform schools for delinquent children so that they would not have to be jailed with adult prisoners, but provided no funds to accomplish this. (A newer, more comprehensive, version of this legislation, called Códigos del Niño, was promulgated in Uruguay in 1933.) It also created juvenile courts. Colombia already had the beginning of a juvenile court system in 1946, when the Estatuto Orgánico del Niño was promulgated. In 1934 Venezuela established its Código del Niño, which was superseded by the Estatuto de Menores in 1950.

Despite the early efforts to promote a scientific yet caring governmental policy dealing with children, recent economic and political events have made it difficult for Latin American nations to live up to both the spirit and the letter of the law. Extreme poverty, militarism, and the burdens of governmental debt have led to the abandonment of strong state intervention in the needs and care of children, and have relegated much of the social assistance to children to nongovernmental organizations. Impoverished children in the twenty-first century face the challenge of survival on the streets, often because of the actions of government elements. For example, in Brazil, in recent years, death squads of the military police have been murdering meninos da rua (street children).

See alsoEducation: Overview; Family.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Memorias del VII Congreso panamericano del niño reunido en la Ciudad de México del 12 al 19 de octubre de 1935, 2 vols. (1937); Actos y trabajos del Primer Congreso nacional de puericultura, 7-11 de octubre de 1940, 2 vols. (1941), for Argentina.

Carlos Bueno-Guzman, "The Child in the Civil Law of the Latin American States," in The Child and the Law (1975).

Silvia M. Arrom, "Changes in Mexican Family Law in the Nineteenth Century: The Civil Codes of 1870 and 1884," in Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985): 305-317.

Donna J. Guy, "Lower-Class Families, Women and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Argentina," in Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985): 318-331.

Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (1988).

John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (1990).

Emilio García Méndez, and Elías Carranza, eds., Infancia, adolescencia y control social en América Latina: Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Venezuela (1990).

Mary Del Priore, ed., Historia da criança no Brasil (1991).

Joseph M. Hawes, and N. Ray Hiner, eds., Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide (1991).

Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "Sexual Politics, Race, and Bastard-Bearing in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: A Question of Culture or Power?" in Journal of Family History 16, no. 3 (1991): 241-260.

Nancy Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (1991).

Additional Bibliography

Alcubierre, Beatriz, and Tania Carreño King. Los niños villistas: Una mirada a la historia de la infancia en México, 1900–1920. México: Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1996.

Ardren, Traci, and Scott Hutson. The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006.

Bolin, Inge. Growing up in a Culture of Respect: Child Rearing in Highland Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

Ciafardo, Eduardo O. Los niños en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (1890–1910). Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992.

González Uribe, Guillermo. Los niños de la guerra. Bogotá: Planeta, 2002.

Hecht, Tobias. Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

Klich, Kent, and Elena Poniatowska. El Niño: Niños de la calle, Ciudad de México. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Kramer, Karen. Maya Children: Helpers at the Farm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Marten, James Alan. Children in Colonial America. New York: New York University Press, 2007.

Mickelson, Roslyn Arlin. Children on the Streets of the Americas: Homelessness, Education, and Globalization in the United States, Brazil and Cuba. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Post, David. Children's Work, Schooling, and Welfare in Latin America. Boulder: Westview Press, 2002.

Potthast-Jutkeit, Barbara, and Sandra Carreras. Entre la familia, la sociedad y el Estado: Niños y jóvenes en América Latina (siglos XIX-XX). Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005.

Premo, Bianca. Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, & Legal Minority in Colonial Peru. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Reimers, Fernando. Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances: The Challenges to Equal Opportunity in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies: Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2000.

                                          Donna J. Guy