Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Nationalism by Elena Jackson Albarrán (review)

In recent years, historians of Mexico have offered detailed accounts of how the country’s Ministry of Public Education (SEP) implemented an ambitious state- and nation-building program in the immediate postrevolutionary period (1920–1940). They have described an uneven process involving a great deal of negotiation; parents often resented and resisted an official curriculum that could challenge gender roles, threaten social hierarchies, and attack religious beliefs. But until now, historians have not addressed how children themselves experienced Mexico’s cultural revolution.

Elena Jackson Albarrán attempts to do just that in this ambitious and well-written book. Some of the primary documents that she uses—children’s letters and drawings, photographs, and documents generated at child-centered conferences—are uniquely rich. These sources offer a view into the minds of Mexican children who “were at the forefront of a country reinventing itself as a nation of literate, productive, modern citizens” (269).

Mexico was not the only country to take special interest in its young people at this time. Adults the world over turned to children to redeem societies that had been shattered by the Great War. In Latin America, Mexico emerged as the vanguard for its child-centered initiatives. Jackson Albarrán describes a child-centered society that “offered new opportunities for the child to serve as an active member of society in his or her own right, and not simply as a future citizen” (6). Following the 1934 reform to Article 3 of the Constitution, which introduced a brief but intense experiment in socialist education, the niño proletario—the proletarian child—took center stage as a political actor.

Perhaps the book’s most fascinating chapter looks at the children’s art magazine Pulgarcito, published from 1925 to 1932. Jackson Albarrán argues that this magazine, with its almost entirely child-produced content, promoted an aesthetic shift in the art world. Schoolchildren taught to draw using Adolfo Best Maugard’s indigenous motif-based curriculum submitted their drawings for publication. In the afternoons, the magazine’s editors also invited children to produce art in their studio, and the best child artists became celebrities. The magazine also organized trips to allow children to draw volcanoes and other iconic scenes using Best Maugard’s method. Pulgarcito contributors won international acclaim for their art. Yet the nation-building function of Pulgarcito had its limitations; the magazine’s editors and art educators distinguished between urban children, who consumed and produced the art, and rural, often indigenous children, who were not considered citizens of modern Mexico and were discouraged from submitting drawings of factories, airplanes, and other images of modernity.

SEP radio programming for children was marked by the same disjunction: modern urban children were more likely to have radios, receive the SEP’s signal, and relate to the content of the programs. The 1933 program Troka el Poderoso—The Powerful Truck—starred a man-made supermachine that seemed to embody all things mechanical and modern. The Troka character was attuned to his urban listening audience; he referred to his rural audience as his amigos invisibles. Jackson Albarrán suggests a gendered dimension to SEP radio programming—modernity was depicted as masculine, while rural, traditional lifeways were feminized.

Other chapters in this impressive book discuss children’s participation in a dizzying array of committees at SEP schools. Participation on student councils and anti-alcohol committees encouraged children to be civic actors while their parents were being channeled into the official institutions of the emerging corporatist state. The 1935 Conference of the Proletarian Child was held just months after the Mexican congress endorsed socialist education. Adults organized the conference, but children elected the delegates—boys and girls—democratically. The child delegates then gave impassioned speeches decrying social inequality. The Children’s Anti-Alcohol Assemblies in 1936 and 1940 were also remarkably democratic and child centered. The young delegates were chosen from among the...