Good Neighbor Empires by Albarrán, Elena Jackson;

Short description:

Children, and ideas about what it meant to be childlike, informed policy and perception of Latin America during the Good Neighbor era. Children contributed as artists, refugees, and diplomats to evolving transnational discourses about Latin American (under)development.

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Long description:

A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Americas" on the continent. In other cases, children's interventions in the cultural politics, economic projects, and diplomatic endeavors of the interwar period revealed that Latin American children saw themselves as modern, professional, participants in forging inter-American relationships.



Listen to the interview with author Elena Jackson Albarrán about her book on New Books Network!



This book has received an Honorable Mention from the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) for the 2025 Grace Abbott Prize.



"Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how children’s experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture."
- Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023).



"Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century."
- Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte



"Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of children’s agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century."
- Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)

Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how children’s experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture.
- Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023).



Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century.
- Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte



Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of children’s agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century.
- Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexico’s Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)

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Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments


List of Tables and Figures





Introduction: Children, Empire, and Development in the Americas


 1 Children and Youth Mobilized


 2 Infantilized Subjects and Governability


 3 Children as Subjects, Objects, and Agents


 4 Chapter Organization

Part 1: Artists

Introduction to Part 1





1 Los tres grandes y unos chiquitos: Primitivism and Childhood in the Mexican Art Renaissance


 1 The Infantilization of Latin America/ns


 2 Childhood as a Metaphor for Development


 3 Primitivism, Folklore, and the Indian in Modern Art


 4 Institutionalizing Hemispheric Aesthetics


 5 Conclusion





2 Primitive Geniuses: the Transnational Circulation of Children’s Art from Taxco


 1 Guerrero and Vermont


 2 A Word about Rescuing Children’s History from the Archive


 3 Elsa Rogo and the Transnationality of the Open-Air Art School in Taxco


 4 Taxco 1931: Primitive Paradise or Cosmopolitan Hub?


 5 Techniques in the Taxco School


 6 3,000 Miles from Mexico


 7 Little Empresarios


 8 Conclusion

Part 2: Exiles

Introduction to Part 2





3 Spanish Cubs of the Aztec Eagle: the Niños Españoles and Parenting as Statecraft


 1 Manufacturing Public Opinion: the Spanish Civil War Comes to Mexico


 2 From Mother Spain to Dependent of the Mexican State, 1519–1937


 3 The Orphan Myth and Cardenista Family Metaphors


 4 The Living Parents of Orphans


 5 Conclusions





4 Tata Cárdenas and the Escuela España-México


 1 The Escuela España-México


 2 Tata Cárdenas: the Revolutionary Father Figure


 3 Battle for Hearts and Minds: Communists and Catholics at the Escuela España-México


 4 The Fate of the Niños de Morelia


 5 Conclusions

Part 3: Diplomats

Introduction to Part 3





5 A Hemispheric Family Affair: Washington and the Other Americas


 1 Pan-Americanism and the Two Americas


 2 The Other Americas Talk Back


 3 The PAU’s Division of Intellectual Cooperation


 4 Children’s Exchanges as Official Pan-Americanism


 5 Pan American Day


 6 “We Make Sombreros!” Racial and Ethnic Representations of Latin America


 7 “Once a Pan Am-er, Always a Pan Am-er”: Pan Americanism in the US Classroom


 8 Conclusion





6 Diplomats of Development: Children’s Exchanges in a Wartime Economy


 1 “Acercamiento Espiritual”: Vertical and Horizontal Ties


 2 A Tale of Two Roberts: the “Short-Pants Ambassadors” of Wartime Brotherhood


 3 Promoting Resource Knowledge about the Other Americas


 4 Conclusion





Epilogue





Conclusions: Two Americas, Other Americas, Nuestra América


Archives


Bibliography


Index

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