OVERVIEW
Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof
COLONIALISM
Nara Milanich
WARS IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Anna L. Peterson
Publications on the history of childhood in Latin America only date since the 1980s. In fact, most pertinent sources are about something else: the development of institutions such as education or social welfare, or the history of women. Ironically, this neglect of childhood as a historical subject exists while scholarly focus on the historical role of the family as a political, economic, and social force continues to be strong, especially for Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Chile.
Since the colonial period (1492 to approximately 1826), children have constituted a large proportion of the population of Latin America, and continue to be vital to the work force. One possible explanation for this scholarly neglect is that colonial Spanish and Portuguese law codes determined that the care and nurturing of children were private functions, and fell into the corporate sphere of the family. As a result, children who appear in historical documents were seldom members of "legitimate" families; most often they were children of the popular classes. Thus scholars have normally discussed abandoned and orphaned children, children enlisted in military service, children thrust into institutionalized workshops as "apprentices," or caught up in the criminal justice system. Other topics include prescriptive ideas about children's upbringing, and discussions of laws relating to children. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars, legislators, and politicians were also preoccupied by the levels of infant and child mortality, child labor, juvenile DELINQUENCY, and issues related to public education.
From a historical and legal perspective, the family in Latin America is represented consistently as the fundamental unit of society, and as a nuclear unit that is essentially patriarchal, based on a system of monogamous marriage, and focused on reproduction. This vision is retained from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in spite of the remarkable diversity in family and household forms that existed and exist in Latin America. The family as constructed through law can be seen as the codification of an elite world vision, concerned with the legality of family ties, the legal definition of marital and paternal power, the legitimacy of offspring, and the regulation of family wealth. The remarkable fact is that the majority of children born in Latin America since 1492 were not born in such families. Thus most children have been defined as in some sense marginal, and in need of social control by some institution.
In a rare edited volume focused on childhood in Latin America since the colonial period, Tobias Hecht argues that the lives and histories of children must be studied for an understanding of society at large. He observes that familiar aspects of Latin American history can be seen in a new light through an examination of the experiences of children and notions about childhood. For example, he suggests that boys aged eight through seventeen, including forty percent or more of transatlantic crews, had an important role in the Conquest. In addition, Europeans commonly viewed the condition of Indians as similar to that of children, who were "only potentially, but not actually, rational beings" (Hecht, p. 10). Thus Europeans argued that Indians were better off under the tutelage of Spain. Their "childishness" provided a rationale for the Conquest. Similarly, in the early twentieth century, intellectuals blamed poor parents for the "moral abandonment" of their children and for being "childish" or unworthy parents, a verdict sometimes leading to loss of custody.
The very definition of childhood in Latin America evolved over time through a continuous dialogue concerning the duties and responsibilities of parents and children toward each other, and the responsibilities of the state toward children. In the colonial period the parent-child relationship was seen as an aspect of the corporate family, embedded in the patriarchal property rights of legally constituted families. At that time, focus was on the parental obligations from early childhood up to age seven, which was considered the age of reason. The first period, from birth to age three, was designated infancy and distinguished by the child being sustained by human milk, either from the mother or a wet nurse. Children were generally left with their mothers during infancy if their fathers died, because of the need for mother's milk. In the second phase, from ages four to seven, the child remained with the parent, with little being expected of her or him. Education in the sense of learning obedience, manners, and prayers was emphasized. From age four the child was taken to mass.
In this second period the father was responsible for providing sustenance, whether the child was of legitimate or illegitimate birth. He had the legal right of patria potestad, which included the obligations to feed, clothe, discipline, educate, select occupations, and sanction the marital plans of children. In return, children were to obey parents and work without wages. In order to have a legal heir, fathers had to acknowledge paternity; otherwise the single mother had to support her children alone, though mothers were denied the legal rights of patria potestad.
Fathers who felt little obligation to children existed at all levels. During the colonial period orphaned children were usually the responsibility of grandparents or their parents' siblings. Abandoned children, estimated at between 10 and 25 percent of births, were also cared for by families.
From age seven the child was seen as having reason and as morally responsible for his or her acts. The child was required to study, work, confess, and follow the rituals of CATHOLICISM. Girls were expected to be modest. At age seven the little boy could go to primary school or work for a salary in somebody's house while he learned a skill or profession. The little girl at that age could begin to help with domestic tasks, learn to sew and do embroidery, and very rarely might be taught to read and write by a cleric or teacher. Until age ten, children could not be legally punished for crimes. Families assumed any penalties for crime. After age ten girls and boys had to sleep separately. According to colonial law, girls could be married at twelve and boys at fourteen.
After age seven a child's labor was believed to have value and judges emphasized the rights of an orphaned child from age seven to receive a salary and not to be exploited for free labor. However, there was no real discussion about what kind of work was appropriate for that age, or how many hours the child should work. In the eighteenth century the state began to exert influence as levels of child ABANDONMENT grew. In the nineteenth century mothers began to argue for child custody and patria potestad, usually with littlesuccess.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries we see the emergence of an ethic of protection of children, including adolescents, with an emphasis on their fragility and assumed innocence, as well as on the importance of education. Early nineteenth-century governments began to assist abandoned children through ORPHANAGES and poor houses, though many beneficent societies were associated with the Catholic Church or lay brotherhoods. In Mexico, families in hard times would sometimes "abandon" a child for some weeks or months at an orphanage, and then reclaim the child when the family had more resources. For older children, orphanages often functioned as workhouses where the children remained until they were sent out for foster care, often as servants.
The concept of ADOLESCENCE and a specific notion of how children ages twelve through nineteen should be treated were linked to the dramatic economic and social developments in late-nineteenth-century Latin America. This development extended life expectancy and created expanded employment opportunities dependent on longer schooling. For example, the substantial sector of service occupations that developed in increasingly urbanized communities were an important source of new employment, particularly for children and women.
By the late nineteenth century, discourse based on ENLIGHTENMENT views of education as a means to foster civic responsibility were displaced by a growing penal consciousness, intent on the prevention and punishment of crime. An ideology focused on children's protection was transformed into a preoccupation with order and social control. Nineteenth-century legislation very often targeted the social control of abandoned or orphaned children, since unruly vagrant youths were seen as potentially dangerous to society. In Brazil, the child began to be referred to as a minor, with the term carrying an implication of danger and a tendency toward crime. The Brazilian Criminal Code of 1830 determined that a child between seven and fourteen could be sent to jail if the judge determined that the child understood his or her crime. Otherwise the child was sent to a juvenile correction house to age seventeen. Similarly, the Criminal Code of 1890 emphasized responsibility as related to a consciousness of duty, right and wrong, and the ability to appreciate the consequences of acts. This kind of emphasis implicitly argued that schooling rather than age determined the level of a child's responsibility.
Until the first decades of the twentieth century, the definition of education was essentially identical with that of work. Much "education" took the form of APPRENTICESHIP or some kind of specific job. For adolescents in the lower classes this "education" was often provided through a kind of child-circulation, in which young people from poorer families were sent to serve in the homes or businesses of more elite families. By the early twentieth century, efforts were made to limit the types and hours of labor for children under fourteen, and to specifically reinforce formal education for children. The 1890 code in Brazil specified that children under nine years of age were mentally incapable of criminal behavior; those between nine and fourteen could be jailed if they understood their crime.
High child mortality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to return the discussion somewhat to questions of child protection, though the criminal potential of unruly children continued to preoccupy jurists. Legislators refocused on childhood as the key to the future. Intellectuals spoke of investing in children, and argued that society was protected through the protection of children.
Nevertheless, in Brazil and Chile, special JUVENILE JUSTICE systems were created in the 1920s to deal with "minors." Although legislators wished to rehabilitate delinquent children, they did not make education a priority because they saw education as a "dangerous weapon" (Hecht, p. 176). It was recognized that education was an antidote for criminality; a minimal education was desirable to make "minors" into useful workers. Legislators debated the challenge of how to create an educated population that would also be docile and hardworking. Because the laws focused on marginal children, legislators did not consider developing a national policy of quality education accessible to all. Children continued at the margins in terms of social policy, still seen as a threat to law and order.
Mandatory schooling for children ages seven to fourteen was instituted in most of Latin America in the first decades of the twentieth century, though once again the felt need for social control of an otherwise disruptive population was a major incentive. In addition, many lower-class families were unconvinced that education would improve the lives or economic choices of their children. While school attendance and LITERACY have improved in most countries, child labor continues to compete actively with schooling in the minds of many families and children. Families with minimal incomes often view the salaries of children as vital to family survival strategies. Observers in several Latin American countries argue that childhood as a stage of life is denied to a large proportion of their children; however, it might be more accurate to say that the childhood experienced by poor children is distinct from that of the elite.
Blum, Ann. 1998. "Public Welfare and Child Circulation, Mexico City, 1877 to 1925." Journal of Family History 23, no. 3: 240–271.
Hawes, Joseph M., and N. Ray Hiner, eds. 1991. Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide. New York: Greenwood Press.
Hecht, Tobias, ed. 2002. Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Kuznesof, Elizabeth. 1991. "Sexual Politics, Race, and Bastard-Bearing in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: A Question of Culture or Power." Journal of Family History 16, no. 3: 241–260.
Kuznesof, Elizabeth. 1997. "Who Were the Families of 'Natural' Children in 19th Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: A Comparison of Baptismal and Census Records." The History of the Family: An International Quarterly. 2, no. 2: 171–182.
Kuznesof, Elizabeth. 1998. "The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment, and Education in Brazil." Journal of Family History 23, no. 3: 225–239.
Mezner, Joan. 1994. "Orphans and the Transition to Free Labor in Northeast Brazil: The Case of Campina Grande, 1850–1888." Journal of Social History 27, no. 3: 499–515.
Salinas Meza, Rene. 1991. "Orphans and Family Disintegration in Chile: The Mortality of Abandoned Children, 1750–1930." Journal of Family History 16, no. 3: 315–329.
ELIZABETH ANNE KUZNESOF
In his classic 1946 study The Masters and the Slaves, Gilberto Freyre traced the formation of the Brazilian social order through what he called a "domestic history" of the patriarchal plantation household he saw as the center of colonial society. For Freyre, children and childhood were central to this domestic history and, by extension, to the formation of Brazilian civilization and psyche. Consequently, he devoted considerable attention to such issues as child-rearing practices and coming-of-age rites, education, SEXUALITY, and socialization.
Freyre's work became part of the Brazilian canon, but it did not set the agenda for future historical work. It was not till the late 1990s that historians took the first tentative steps toward addressing the history of childhood in Latin America, and most focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The dearth of research on children and childhood in colonial America makes any attempt at a comprehensive overview of the topic a difficult, even hazardous, endeavor. Consequently, this entry will highlight several emerging themes in the historiography rather than provide an all-inclusive survey of the topic.
Given that children and childhood are themselves culturally and historically bound constructs, we might begin by asking who was a child in colonial Latin America and how was childhood defined and demarcated? In a society stratified by sex, class, and color, the answers to such questions depended fundamentally on a young person's gender, social position, race, and legal status as free or enslaved. For example, girls were deemed to reach physical and social maturity faster than boys and for a number of purposes were granted legal majority earlier; on the other hand, because they were regarded as inherently vulnerable to corruption, charitable assistance for girls was more widely available and frequently more extensive than for boys. Meanwhile, definitions and experiences of childhood were necessarily contingent on caste. A case in point is the expansive definition of legal minority that governed INHERITANCE law and the exercise of parental authority. According to Spanish law codes, the age of majority was twenty-five–and for certain legal purposes, unmarried children were beholden to paternal authority as long as their fathers were alive. Similarly, the late eighteenth-century Royal Pragmatic on marriage held that prospective brides and grooms identified as white or Spanish had to obtain paternal permission to marry until they turned twenty-five.
This protracted legal minority had relevance only among limited segments of colonial society: those from propertied families or those identified as Spanish. Very different life chronologies applied to the poor, the non-white, and the enslaved. Chantal Cramaussel's research on late-seventeenth-century baptismal registries from northern New Spain, for example, shows that captive Indian children over age ten were classified as adults. Renato Venâncio, in turn, has noted that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazilian censuses recorded slave children over age three along with their occupations. It is difficult to say how such administrative designations translated into practice. What is clear is that perhaps the most widely observed milestone in the everyday lives of free colonial plebeians came at age six or seven. It was at this age that youngsters were deemed capable of performing useful labor and were often put to work.
This is not to say, however, that plebeians and slaves did not have a childhood. As in many societies historically, in colonial Latin America, childhood and labor were not defined as mutually exclusive. In fact, in some Amerindian cultures, the former was actually defined in terms of the latter: the Incas and peoples of central Mexico not only viewed children as productive members of family, community, and state but actually classified people into age groups according to the work they were capable of performing. Childhood for the poor and nonwhite was simply less clearly differentiated from adulthood in terms of the expectations and activities associated with it. This suggests that in colonial Iberoamerica, there were "childhoods" that varied across social groups rather than a single, universal childhood experience.
The characteristics of these different childhoods have only just begun to be explored, but a few observations are possible. The first, of course, is that labor was central to the experience of most children, the exception being the sons and daughters of a privileged minority. Long before the presence of young people in factories captured the attention of social critics in early-twentieth-century Mexico City or Buenos Aires, children in colonial Latin America performed valuable domestic, artisanal, and agricultural labors. The brief glimpses of their everyday lives afforded by sources like judicial and census records often find them busy herding animals, spinning, performing agricultural tasks, or laboring in the infamous bakeries of colonial cities. Insofar as minors were expected to contribute to the household economy from an early age, the colonial period provides antecedents for the experiences of children and the meanings of childhood among low-income sectors in Latin America today.
Another significant aspect of childhood is the fact that many minors were reared outside of their natal households. The widespread ABANDONMENT of children to FOUNDLING homes is merely the most visible facet of this phenomenon. Many poor children resided as agregados (attached people) oras criados or conchabos (servants) in the homes of unrelated caretakers. Their presence was characterized by a broad constellation of arrangements, from informal fostering and ADOPTION to APPRENTICESHIPS and domestic service. The experiences of these minors contrast with those of elite children, who lived within a restricted private sphere of immediate kin. Living and laboring under the tutelage of unrelated caretakers also served as the sole means of education for many minors.
In some instances, parents voluntarily gave up children they could not or would not care for. Circulation reflects the burden that child rearing could entail for the impoverished majority of colonial society. It also reflects the stigma attached in some social groups to out-of-wedlock birth, even as illegitimacy was endemic across colonial society. In other instances, coercion was at work. In frontier societies such as southern Chile and northern New Spain, intractable wars with native peoples fueled a lively traffic in indigenous children. In southern Chile, and probably elsewhere, the sale of children as war booty eventually gave way to the routine abduction by local authorities of poor youngsters whose parents were deemed morally, ethnically, or economically unfit.
These myriad forms of child circulation reflect the value of minors as laborers in peasant economies, artisanal trades, and urban households. The economic role of child criados seems to have been particularly important in areas where slaves were either scarce or too expensive for modest households. But the presence of minors in non-natal households had significance beyond the value of their labor. Sometimes children became the heirs of their caretakers, suggesting the importance of these practices to the construction of kin relations. Children were also a form of currency within the patronage networks on which colonial society was based. María Mannarelli has shown how the circulation of abandoned children among households in seventeenth-century Lima bound individuals of all social levels and ethnic and racial groups. Moreover, the rearing of young criados may have acquired particular significance in societies in which many individuals served as the clients, dependents, and servants of others. What better way to guarantee the lifelong loyalty of a subordinate than to rear him or her from "tender youth"? This is precisely what households of all social ranks sought to do, grooming parentless, abandoned, orphaned, poor, and illegitimate youngsters as dependents, with an eye not only to their present labor but also to the prospect of long-term dependence.
Particularly in the first centuries of the empire, the Iberian states' interest in their minor subjects was limited. Civil law was concerned with the rights of the young in their role as inheritors, but such issues obviously had little relevance to the lives of the majority of young people. Broader and potentially more interventionist preoccupations with children's health and labor, child-rearing practices and education, and the development of correctional institutions and protective legislation would come into full flower only in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does appear, however, that Portuguese authorities were more activist both in their oversight of child welfare and in their use of children for certain state purposes than were the Spanish. For example, in Portugal and Brazil one crucial role of the probate judge, the juiz de órfãos, was, as the name suggests, to oversee the welfare of the community's ORPHANS. No such official existed in Spain or Spanish America. The Portuguese crown also put into practice a system in which orphans were used to colonize its far-flung empire. Future research is necessary to confirm the impression of contrasting Spanish and Portuguese postures towards children, as well as to explain it.
Both crowns began to assume greater interest in child welfare in the late eighteenth century. Their newfound concern coincided with beliefs about the significance of population increase to the wealth of nations; an ENLIGHTENMENT preoccupation with charity and education; and an identification of children and their welfare with modernity. A series of imperial dispositions improved the legal and social condition of orphaned and abandoned children, and that quintessential institution of Enlightenment modernization, the foundling home, spread throughout the region. While ORPHANAGES had been founded sporadically since at least the early seventeenth century, they multiplied rapidly in eighteenth-century colonial urban centers, becoming the most visible public initiatives directed at children in colonial and republican Latin America. They also enjoyed a striking endurance: many functioned into the twentieth century, and the one in Santiago, Chile, continues to operate at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Because of the documentation they generated, foundling homes and their wards are the single best-studied aspect of Latin American childhood.
Childhood had an important symbolic function in colonial society. Cultural encounter, domination, and amalgamation, as well as political authority, were expressed and understood through the lens of childhood. For example, European interpretations of native peoples were refracted through early modern notions of children and childhood. Both critics and defenders of Amerindians portrayed them as childlike and childish. Whether willful and irrational, as critics charged, or unsullied in their innocence, as defenders countered, native peoples required the guidance and protection of paternal overlords. Meanwhile, indigenous children became the objects par excellence of missionaries' efforts to Christianize and acculturate native peoples. While Amerindian adults were often dismissed as intransigent in their barbarism, their children were seen as pliant and receptive to the faith.
Children also became symbolically associated with processes of mestizaje, or racial mixture. The eighteenth-century pinturas de castas, pictorial representations of mestizaje, produced primarily in New Spain, portray two parents of different racial or ethnic identities together with the product of their union, the mixed-race (casta) youngster. In such representations, children became the concrete embodiments of racial and cultural miscegenation. The association is evident in public discourses beyond the canvas as well. As Bianca Premo has pointed out, Bourbon commentators associated disorder and danger, DELINQUENCY and crime not just with the urban castas but with mixed-race youths specifically. But if the progeny of mixed unions personified danger, in other contexts they embodied the potential to consolidate the socio-racial order. Kathryn Burns documents how the founding fathers of sixteenth-century Spanish Cuzco paid particular attention to the acculturation of their mestiza (mixed Spanish and Indian) daughters. The rearing of young mestizas as Hispanicized wives, mothers, servants, and nuns was regarded as crucial to the reproduction of Spanish pedigrees and hegemony in the city. The experience of Cuzco's mestizas also reveals how the social roles and symbolic significance of mixed-race young people–indeed, how childhood as social construction and social experience in general–were deeply gendered.
Finally, political authority itself in Iberoamerica was understood through discursive analogies based on family relations. The king was a father who guided his subject-children, and patria potestad, the principle of paternal authority that was a hallmark of civil law, was an organizing principle of political order. Little wonder, then, that early-nineteenth-century independence struggles were expressed in parallel metaphors as a process of coming of age, in which the colonies reached maturity and sought to emancipate themselves from an outgrown political minority.
See also: Brazil.
Burns, Kathryn. 1999. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cramaussel, Chantal. 1995. "Ilegítimos y abandonados en la frontera norte de la Nueva España: Parral y San Bartolomé en el siglo XVII." Colonial Latin American History Review 4: 405–438.
Dean, Carolyn. 2002. "Sketches of Childhood: Children in Colonial Andean Art and Society." In Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Del Priore, Mary. 1999. História das crianças no Brasil. São Paulo: Editora Contexto.
Freyre, Gilberto. 1956. The Mansions and the Shanties: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. New York: Knopf.
Hecht, Tobias, ed. 2002. Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Kuznesof, Elizabeth Anne. 1998. "The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment, and Education in Brazil." Journalof Family History 23: 225–239.
Lavrin, Asunción. 1994. "La niñez en México e Hispanoamérica: Rutas de exploración." In La familia en el mundo iberoamericano, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Cecilia Rabell. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México.
Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya, ed. 1998. Special Issue on Children in the History of Latin America. Journal of Family History 23, no. 3.
Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya. 2002. "Model Children and Models for Children in Early Mexico." In Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Mannarelli, María. 1993. Pecados públicos. La ilegitimidad en Lima, siglo XVII. Lima: Ediciones Flora Tristán.
Marcílio, Maria Luiza. 1998. História social da criança abandonada. Saƒo Paulo: Editora Hucitec.
Meznar, Joan. 1994. "Orphans and the Transition to Free Labor in Northeast Brazil: The Case of Campinas Grande, 1850–1888." Journal of Social History 27: 499–515.
Milanich, Nara. 2002. "Historical Perspectives on Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in Latin America." In Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Premo, Bianca. 2002. "Minor Offenses: Youth, Crime, and Law in Eighteenth-Century Lima." In Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Twinam, Ann. 1999. Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Venâncio Pinto, Renato. 1999. Famílias abandonadas. São Paulo: Papirus Editora.
NARA MILANICH
Poverty, land hunger, and political repression have long characterized much of Central America. These social ills disproportionately affect the region's children, many of whom suffer from hunger, illiteracy, infectious disease, and inadequacies in housing, formal education, and health care. Children often work from an early age in order to supplement family incomes. Especially in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, poverty, social inequalities, and a closed political process have generated opposition movements and, in response, repression by government and economic elites. During the 1970s and 1980s, these conflicts erupted into full-scale civil war. Guerrilla armies and militant popular movements directly challenged authoritarian governments, and in post-1979 Nicaragua counterrevolutionaries tried to oust the Sandinista government.
Children suffer as disproportionately from political violence as they do from poverty. In 1995 the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that more civilian children than soldiers are killed in contemporary wars and that half of all refugees in the world are children. This holds true for Central America, where millions of civilians were displaced from their homes during the 1980s, including 30 percent of El Salvador's population. In addition to death and displacement, the Central American Human Rights Commission (CODEHUCA) reports that war's direct effects on children include permanent injury, loss of parents and other relatives, destruction of home and land, and loss of family income. War also damages many children psychologically. Researchers have noted, for example, the prominent place of soldiers, airplanes, and corpses in the drawings of refugee children. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the psychological, economic, and cultural damage created by the political violence of the 1970s and 1980s continued even after the wars officially ended. Some researchers attribute the growth of juvenile violence and gangs in many parts of Central America in the 1990s to the social dislocation, economic hardship, and desensitization to violence resulting from the civil wars.
Children's victimization is not without political significance. Different parties in Central America have utilized images of suffering children to channel indignation toward the enemy that has hurt them. However, children are not only passive victims of political violence. In this region, as in other parts of the world, children as young as seven or eight have participated in both government and opposition armies. Despite governments denials, international observers repeatedly confirmed that boys under fifteen, often forcibly recruited, were serving in the Salvadoran and Guatemalan government armies.
Many boys and girls also participated in guerrilla movements as combatants and also, for younger children, as couriers or lookouts. However, most of these joined voluntarily. Especially in conflicted rural areas, joining the opposition often seemed preferable to the risks of civilian life. Guerrilla participation carried benefits, including not only protection and food but also social support structures, education, and respect. Further, many young people felt strong commitments to the political opposition, based on family, ethnic, or regional loyalties, ideological and religious beliefs, or personal experiences of violence.
While young guerrillas often received respect and affection from others in their movement, authoritarian governments usually called them delinquents, arbitrary opponents of law and order. The association of youth and political opposition created a climate, especially in Nicaragua and El Salvador, in which any youth was seen as potentially subversive and thus a legitimate target of government reprisal. Nicaraguans recalling the repressive period prior to President Anastasio Somoza's defeat in 1979, for example, often assert that "It was a crime to be young."
In sum, popular perceptions in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s understood children as primarily victims of the civil wars but also as active agents, either heroic combatants or dangerous subversives. This agency was rarely affirmed by humanitarian organizations or scholars, who generally condemn all political participation by children. Their critiques rest on an assumption that children can only be victims, never victimizers; only acted upon, never actors. While these assumptions undergird vital efforts to protect children, they also reinforce a culturally and historically limited vision of children's needs, interests, and capacities, even of the nature of childhood itself. Images and experiences of Central American children, in other words, challenge the mainstream Western view of childhood as a time of innocence, ignorance, and isolation from the moral and political conflicts of the adult world.
CODEHUCA. n.d. Los niños de la década perdida: Investigación y análisis de violaciones de los derechos humanos de la niñez centroamericana (1980–92) (The children of the lost decade: Investigation and analysis of violations of human rights of Central American children [1980–92]). San José, Costa Rica: CODEHUCA.
Marín, Patricia. 1988. Infancia y guerra en El Salvador (Childhood and war in El Salvador). Guatemala City: UNICEF.
Peterson, Anna L., and Kay Almere Read. 2002. "Victims, Heroes, Enemies: Children in Central American Wars." In Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 215–231.
UNICEF. 1995. Annual Report. Paris: United Nations Children's Fund.
ANNA L. PETERSON