Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 (review)

In this beautifully written and well-crafted book, Nara B. Milanich convincingly argues that the family served as the nexus for class formation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chile. Combining poignant vignettes that bring to life the hardships faced by plebeian children with sharp analyses of civil law and elite discourse, this study makes a major contribution to the burgeoning historiography of children in Latin America. In addition, Children of Fate should become required reading for students of class and state formation beyond Latin America.

In a country where elite and popular narratives figured Chileans as uniformly mestizo, class, not race, emerged as the primary determinant of someone's place in the social hierarchy as the republican state took hold in the early nineteenth century. It was precisely at this juncture that the state came to confer rights and entitlements on practices and legal structures surrounding the family. As a consequence, the family came to establish a person's class location. Children from working, middle, and upper class families would be placed in their respective class positions based on filial ties; illegitimate children would consequently find themselves as part of a kinless underclass.

The Civil Code of 1857 figures prominently in Milanich's story. The brainchild of Andres Bello, one of Latin America's greatest intellectuals, the Code abolished colonial Spanish legal codes that had remained Chilean law throughout the first half century after independence. Chapter 1 examines how the civil code transformed family law, revolutionizing "the gender, generational, and class dynamics of filiation." (42) Most notably, the Code provided a legal structure for a liberal economy and for a patriarchal society. In the process, the code transformed the relationship between citizens and the state.

Milanich argues that the key difference between colonial and republican law focuses on the issue of paternity. While both laws disinherited illegitimate children, they acknowledged paternity differently. Colonial law granted paternity when there existed sentimental or economic ties between a man and a child or a man and the mother of the child in question. Drawing on 102 paternity suits, the author finds that women or children who took men to court over paternity claims won 53 per cent of the time. Since the Crown entrusted the colonial court with protecting the empire's children, the colonial court often settled in the plaintiff's favour, conferring on the man responsibility for his offspring.

The liberal Code proved detrimental to illegimate children and their mothers filing paternity suits, as the Code came to reinforce the patriarchal liberal order. Based on liberal precepts that emphasized individual rights over collective obligations, the Civil Code configured paternity as a free and voluntary act on the part of the man, granting fathers the right to choose whether to acknowledge extramarital offspring. Paternity investigations were prohibited, and paternity status of extramarital children would now be acknowledged through contracts, with parents appearing before courts to declare kinship ties. As a result of this new requirement for establishing filiation, countless more children were deemed illegitimate. Deprived of property and socially stigmatized, they joined the ranks of the underclass. In short, the liberalization of family law had a profound role in class formation in modern Chile. Tracing the trajectory of the impact of this change in family law provides a major contribution to the literature on Latin American state formation.

In adjudicating cases contesting kinship ties, by the 1870s the court came to interpret the Code through the prism of class. Chapter 2 demonstrates how paternal recognition came to define an offspring's class position. Drawing on over 90 paternity suits filed after the enactment of the Code, Milanich demonstrates how family law reproduced class differences in republican Chile. Paternity status came to be based on the actions that a biological father undertook regarding his offspring. "If a man," writes Milanich, "had made manifest efforts to assimilate his alleged offspring into his social status through class-appropriate education and upbringing, then it said...