Minor Omissions

Children in Latin American History and Society

Tobias Hecht

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780299180348, 9780299180300
• eBook ISBN: 9780299180331
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Latin American history—the stuff of wars, elections, conquests, inventions, colonization, and all those other events and processes attributed to adults—has also been lived and partially forged by children. Taking a fresh look at Latin American and Caribbean society over the course of more than half a millennium, this book explores how the omission of children from the region's historiography may in fact be no small matter.
    Children currently make up one-third of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean, and over the centuries they have worked, played, worshipped, committed crimes, and fought and suffered in wars. Regarded as more promising converts to the Christian faith than adults, children were vital in European efforts to invent loyal subjects during the colonial era. In the contemporary economies of Latin America and the Caribbean—where 23 percent of people live on a dollar per day or less—the labor of children may spell the difference between survival and starvation for millions of households.
    Minor Omissions brings together scholars of history, anthropology, religion, and art history as well as a talented young author who has lived in the streets of a Brazilian city since the age of nine. The book closes with the prophetic dystopian tale "The Children's Rebellion" by the noted Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Sketches of Childhood: Children in Colonial Andean Art and Society
• 2. Model Children and Models for Children in Early Mexico
• 3. Historical Perspectives on Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in Latin America
• 4. Down and Out in Havana: Foundlings in Eighteenth-Century Cuba
• 5. Minor Offenses: Youth, Crime, and Law in Eighteenth-Century Lima
• 6. The State, the Family, and Marginal Children in Latin America
• 7. The Child-Saving Movement in Brazil: Ideology in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
• 8. How Haitian Artists Disclose Childhood of All Ages
• 9. Victims, Heroes, Enemies: Children in Central American Wars
• 10. August
• 11. Children and Contemporary Latin America
• The Children's Rebellion
• Glossary
• Contributors