Censuras y Literatura Infantil y Juvenil en el siglo XX ed. by Pedro C. Cerrillo, María Victoria Sotomayor (review)

Censorship is a well-studied topic, but is usually neglected inliterature for children and young adults. All the more welcome is a research project conducted by five Spanish and four Latin American universities from 2014 to 2016, which analyses by the example of authoritarian regimes in Spain and Latin America in the 20^th century how censorship works in children’s literature. The results of this project are now made available in this volume, edited by Pedro C. Cerrillo and María Victoria Sotomayor.

The first section, taking up more than half, studies the Franco regime in Spain (1939–1976). The archival material is rich and easily accessible, allowing for a good understanding of the structures, methods, and results of a state-controlled, institutionalized censorship. The authors list the existing laws and regulations and the criteria that the censors or their assistant “readers” (“lectores”) used. Even though it is impossible to reconstruct everything in detail, the meticulous scholarship also succeeded in compiling an annotated list of censored titles.

The censorship justifications testify to a remarkable arbitrariness and lack of literary knowledge on the part of the authorities. It is striking that many (international) children’s book classics were censored; young adult literature was targeted much more than books for younger readers, and generally censorship struck because of moral or religious concerns, rather than for political or ideological reasons. This could be due to the close alliance between the authoritarian national-conservative regime and the Roman-Catholic church of Spain, which also served to secure the respective spheres of power and influence.

Further chapters on Spain focus on specific aspects, such as the banning of the works written by authors living in exile or the children’s books written in Catalan, Basque or Galician, whose public use was prohibited under Franco.

The second part features chapters on Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, and Venezuela. They can be read independently and are much shorter than the Spanish ones, offering less detail. This could be due to the fact that censorship of literature for children and young adults is much less documented in these countries. The chapters are nevertheless illuminating because they illustrate the variety of censorship attempts and measures as well as the motifs and strategies specific to each country and its censorship agents. They range from state-controlled censorship (as in Spain – in the forms of pre-censorship and retroactive censorship) to more subtle forms (“censura soterrada”), such as compulsory reading lists for schools or lists of recommended reading, which churches, parents’ associations, or other social lobby groups used to exert influence – all the way to “voluntary” self-censorship for financial reasons by authors and publishers.

Censorship in Argentina during the military dictatorship (1976–1983) gets more detailed coverage because of solid sources. Following the coup, strict state-censorship was put into place, and enforced by the Ministry of Education, the security services, and customs. Contrary to Spain, Argentinian state-censorship concentrated on children’s literature. The regime, waging the ideological battle against communism (and everything it considered to fit that bill) tried to have the Ministry of Education endorse their doctrine and to raise a generation of submissive and conformist subjects.

In Latin-American countries without official state-censorship, more indirect forms of suppression can be discerned. The chapter of Mexico explores the mechanisms of this kind of “censura soterrada”. It worked because only government-supported books were accepted into the state-sponsored programs while other titles were simply ignored, either because of their content or because they were written in an indigenous...