Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism

Abstract

Increasing interest in US immigration policies — particularly as they affect undocumented youth and Generation 1.5 students — has drawn parallel interest in questions of national identity. Who, for instance, counts as American today, and whom are we responsible for educating? These questions drive research projects and policy debates from disciplines as wide reaching as education, international studies, anthropology, and applied linguistics. However, despite this interest, relatively little attention has yet been given to the experiences of Mexican youth in Mexico — or their particular role in the development of a national identity within their home country.Elena Jackson Albarrán's new book, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism, addresses this gap by exploring the surprisingly strong role that children played in the development of a Mexican national identity during the decades immediately following the revolution. Far from being inconsequential bystanders, Albarrán argues, children played a key role in the institutionalization of a cultural consciousness that would prove to be crucial to the ongoing coherence and stability of the Mexican state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In fact, the 1930s and 1940s signify a period of major transition in the social space that children inhabited. Rather than remaining bound to individual family units, children after the revolution became more visibly aligned with schools, community, and the nation. That is, they became civic beings rather than junior family members.This transition, Albarrán explains through a variety of fascinating examples, was not accidental. Rather, the developing state itself set out rather intentionally to develop a number of programs that would directly involve children in the solidification and circulation of ideas related to the newly forming civic and cultural identity of the newly independent Mexican state. Treated deeply and thoroughly chapter by chapter, projects from radio programming and arts curricula to puppet theater and peer literacy initiatives demonstrate both grassroots and top-down interests in involving children in civic roles in the arts and education. These programs, Albarrán emphasizes, constitute the foundations of an effort to build a national identity following the revolution and signify a shift in the identity and social role of children themselves.By highlighting both the historical experiences of Mexican children from two generations ago and the specific nature of the way that a national identity was developed in Mexico during the early part of the twentieth century, Albarrán's book makes significant contributions to historical analyses of the formation of the Mexican state as well as to more contemporary considerations of the experiences of young Mexican nationals in both Mexico and the United States. While the latter application of ideas may move beyond her original historical research purpose, I do believe that her arguments about the new role that Mexican children have played during the mid- and late twentieth century have important implications for how researchers and education policymakers may consider the experiences of Mexican students in US schools, for instance. Within the bounds of her own discipline, Albarrán is clear and focused in her goal to identify and illustrate the foundational contributions that children made to the development of the Mexican nation as we know it today.The book's research itself is impressively thorough. Albarrán treats a wide array of archival sources, the vast majority of them located in Mexico — particularly in Mexico City — as well as published sources in and beyond the field of history. While of high quality as a historical study, this extremely clear and well-written book remains accessible and significant for scholars and students in a wide array of academic disciplines. Albarrán's topic is timely — even more so that she chooses to identify this timeliness in the book itself — and the information that she presents is engaging and redefining. I highly suspect that this excellent book will inform many future studies related to Mexican history and identity, education, immigration, and international relations.