Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America

Abstract

Youth is coming of age in Latin American history, or so it seems with recent studies on children and childhood. González and Premo’s edited volume contributes to the field by studying children as an extension of empire in the early modern Iberian world. The editors set out to present various alternatives for the study of childhood in the Iberian world. The first alternative is to unhitch the history of childhood from the history of modernity, a connection proposed by Philippe Ariès in his pioneering work on European childhood. Rather than assuming children to be hidden and silent, researchers can find them in often-used sources such as criminal, notary, and institutional records and court cases. By reading such sources for children, they emerge not only as objects of historical research but as “key colonial subjects” (p. 243).Two chapters, by Isabel dos Guimãres Sá and Valentina Tikoff, look at children in the Iberian Peninsula. While Sá’s chapter is largely an overview of children in Portugal, in particular children in the royal court, Tikoff examines elite and common children placed in Seville’s various institutions for children and the strategic use of institutions, even orphanages, by parents as a means to educate and feed children. A flexible interpretation of the category of “orphan” made it possible for parents to secure social mobility through state beneficence and discipline.The theme of strategies for survival is raised again in the chapter on indigenous migration to Lima in the early colonial period. Using principally the 1613 census of Lima, Teresa Vergara asks us to assume that indigenous parents migrated to the city for a better life for their children, and that they subsequently placed their children in the homes of other people whom they “trusted would treat [their children] well.” While this might have been “a strategy that allowed them [indigenous families] to cope with the colonial system,” this explanation might risk downplaying the very coercive actions of the colonial state for labor extraction that pushed some families to take such extreme measures.The argument that the labor needs of adults determined the lives of some children is made by Laura Shelton, who describes the “adoption” of children to fill the labor shortages suffered by Sonoran ranchers and agriculturalists. This ad hoc labor scheme took advantage of an informal social practice of passing along children to family members and non-kin. According to Shelton, when it came down to who held the rights of patria potestad in custody battles, the colonial courts tended to side in favor of patron-guardians. Yet, the fact that parents who could afford to repay childcare expenses could thus recover their children suggests another possible interpretation, that parents maintained their rights (if they had the money).The connection between the maintenance of empire and the fate of children comes to the foreground in the chapters by Ondina González and Ann Twinam. González studies the establishment of a foundling home in Havana, the apparent need for such an institution, and its doomed fate as a consequence of lack of financial support from the local elite. Twinam’s chapter moves to the late eighteenth century and gives a nuanced study of the racial and gender considerations of abandoned babes (expósitos) and Bourbon legislation that wished to erase the stain of illegitimacy suffered by those of unknown parentage. The potential collapse of racial hierarchy due to such blanket legislation led to an ultimately successful battle by local elites to protect “white” privilege.The fragility and insecurity of children’s lives is most heart-wrenchingly described in Elizabeth Kuznesof’s thoughtful chapter on slave children in Brazil. This chapter successfully combines a historiographical overview with new readings of established research into children. While the fortune of poor Brazilian children was bleak in general, children born into slavery were “vulnerable to being separated from family members at any point” (p. 189).It is perhaps in terms of the editors’ goal of hearing children’s voices (or at least their “echoes”) that this collection of essays falls short. In the chapter “Ursula: The Life and Times of an Aristocratic Girl in Santiago, Chile (1666 – 1678),” Jorge Rojas Flores comes the closest to directly citing a child, though not in a child’s voice but that of an adult woman reflecting on her childhood for the purposes of a religious autobiography. For the most part, children remain on the margins of adults’ lives as contested property (in custody battles over child servants), as normalized citizens formed in institutions, or as the subjects of legal and religious prescriptions. However, as this volume shows, we can learn much about social practices, normative views of childhood, labor systems, and indeed the building and maintaining of empire through the study of the smallest of subjects, a colonial child.