Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (review)

In her introductory essay for Raising an Empire, Ondina González makes the observation that, "By examining the patterns of interactions between adults and children, historians can comprehend some of the fundamental assumptions upon which a society is built" (p. 3). The essays in this collection on childhood in the early modern Iberian world do well to document the inversion of the observation by demonstrating the integration of children into the social, political, and economic structures fundamental to the experience of Iberian empire. It remains the case that documentary traces of face-to-face interactions between adults and children are hard to come by. But, as these essays demonstrate, a keen eye and creative analysis of a variety of familiar sources can bring new texture and life to the historical experience of childhood in Iberoamerica. Indeed, the contributors interrogate a wide variety of sources: law, prescriptive literatures, synod constitutions, foundling home records, demographic and census material, labor contracts, spiritual autobiographies, cabildo records, Council and Cámara of the Indies records, civil litigation including custody suits, and more. In drawing on this wide variety of evidence, child circulation emerges as the running thread that tied together childhood experiences from Portugal to Brazil, and from Seville to Havana, northern Mexico, Lima, and Santiago, Chile. The authors find that children of all stations and ethnicities were circulated amongst both extended family and others. Reasons for circulation varied widely, including family poverty, the need for breast milk, abandonment, illegitimacy, eco-nomic opportunities and coercions, religious vocation, the vagaries slave life, and the pursuit of education.

Isabel Dos Guimarães Sá finds that Portuguese child circulation patterns were affected by predictable differentiations of social, birth, and gender status. Teresa Vergara demonstrates how indigenous migrations to Lima in the seventeenth century worked as a force for the acculturation of indigenous children. She documents the impact of social status and encomendero ties on elite and commoner indigenous children who came to or were sent to Lima as domestics, apprentices, convent novices, and enslaved exiles from frontier wars in Chile. Jorge Rojas Flores reads the vida of Chilean nun Ursula Suárez for clues to her childhood that, filtered for "confessional boilerplate," speak to the dynamics of extended family households, where parents and grandparents shared the responsibilities of childrearing. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof utilizes anthropological sources on West African cultural practices to give context and quality to the lives of Brazilian slave children, who were potentially subjected to a brutal form of circulation. Laura Shelton finds child circulation a flashpoint of potential disagreement as the practice morphed in early republican Mexico into a labor recruitment strategy. Indeed, the ubiquity of circulation belies nucleated family structures and their associated strictures of authority for the whole of the Iberoamerican world.

The best pieces in the collection—essays by Valentina Tikoff, Ondina González, and Ann Twinam—present the history of orphanages in Sevilla and Havana. Foundling homes provide a uniquely situated venue of institutional interaction with, largely, eighteenth-century childhood. The authors find that the fate of foundling homes in Seville and Havana were directly impacted by the predictable and ongoing jurisdictional conflicts between municipal government, local elites, imperial policies, and the Church. In fact, given the extraordinarily high infant mortality rates of foundlings in part due to scarce resources, the foundlings and their refuge both appear as pawns in bureaucratic and political struggles that defined the decentralized nature of Spanish imperial rule, precisely at the moment when the Bourbons sought centralization. Furthermore, access to orphanage services were wracked by the imprecision and ambivalence of Spanish identities, in which not all of the orphans really were orphaned and racial and ethnic labels rested on the whims of individual members of the bureaucratic regime.

There is one quibble with an otherwise laudatory book. The collection intentionally eschews the traditional preoccupations of the history...