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  • Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America
  • Karen Racine
Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. 270 pp. $24.95.

In this collection of seven articles, the editors and their contributors explore ways in which Spanish and Portuguese conquistador-settlers sought to recreate their European practices in a New World environment and how both indigenous and African-descended children navigated the requirements of a colonial order. Taken together, the articles argue, not surprisingly, that the meaning of childhood and practices of child-rearing underwent significant changes in an American context. The editors posit a variety of reasons for these cultural shifts: (1) that the child-rearing practices of origin were not monolithic and thus made hybridization a common phenomenon, (2) that the American reality was so inherently different from Europe that all aspects of Ibero-Americans' lives experienced transformation and that naturally child-rearing strategies were not excepted, and finally (3) that the mere act of colonization altered and politicized patterns of behavior in the New World. In this context, they note that the issue of race was much more significant in Brazil and Spanish America than it had been in Portugal or Spain. Ultimately, as Ondina González wrote in her introduction to the volume, "the act of growing up or raising children in colonial Latin America involved confronting the politics of colonialism" (p. 2) because "nothing would be exactly the same as it was in the metropolises" (p. 3). Although the editors' general assertions are logical and somewhat obvious, the broader scholarship on colonial Latin America is enhanced by this collection of essays because there is so little research on children and childhood that is available to students and the general scholarly audience. The articles are written by eminent historians, an independent scholar, and an advanced graduate student. They are diverse in their methodologies but uniformly interesting and easy to read.

In his essay "Ursula: The Life and Times of an Aristocratic Girl in Santiago, Chile, 1666–1678," Chilean historian Jorge Rojas Flores examines the religious [End Page 294] autobiography of an upper-class girl whose confessor commissioned her spiritual life story to be written down as a way of ensuring her piety and doctrinal purity. Of course, the genre itself raises complicated questions about the material authenticity of the account, having been written in a prescribed form for a male, adult, religious audience. Rojas set himself the task of cutting through the rhetoric and doctrine to ferret out details about the young girl's lived experience. His article raises some intriguing questions about the putative link between modernity and evolving notions of childhood raised in the classical models of scholars like Philippe Ariès.

In her article "Growing Up Indian: Migration, Labour and Life in Lima, 1570–1640," Peruvian historian Teresa C. Vergara was able to use the tools of social history, in her case sifting through countless records of work apprenticeships, to gain insight into the process by which indigenous parents in an early colonial context already comprehended the rules of the new order and internalized an imposed power structure while actively maximizing its benefit to themselves. The tales she encounters indicate a world that was not only filled with the pain of family separation and loss, but that also clearly reveal that rural peasants were keen to place their children in urban work-study environments that might position them for a better lot in life—access to education, a higher-paying job, a more favorable marriage. In a racially charged colonial context, these indigenous parents attempted to blend their familiar ayllu (clan)- based strategies of child-rearing with a more formalized Spanish pattern of patronage and access to education and employment.

Both Ann Twinam and Ondina González contributed essays that deal with colonial Cuba, a particularly fraught place because of its slave-based economy, its highly-stratified racial composition, and Havana's significance as a major port in official transatlantic trade. In "The Church, the State, and the Abandoned: Expósitos in Late 18th Century...

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