Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City by Eileen Ford (review)

A mother comes upon her baby being attacked by a rat. This image—one that makes our hair stand on end—opens the conclusions of Eileen Ford’s book. She could not have chosen a better one. It is an image that touches our sensitivity toward childhood and it contains the central idea that runs through the book: modernization had its limits, its negative, harmful effects, and that realization gains particular import with respect to childhood.

However, this undoubtedly valuable idea works more as a premise than a conclusion, considering the vast body of Latin American scholarship that has read the changes brought on by modernization through that lens, and the fact that, at the international level, recent historiography on childhood has taught us that modernization put childhood on a pedestal while at the same time, paradoxically, producing new forms of violence against children. With that premise, the book explores a host of problems—the new social inequalities, cultural strategies in the Cold War, the political nature of everyday life, the significance of mass culture in shaping childhood—and therein lies the richness of the author’s contributions. Through them, Ford delves into the history of Mexico from the 1940s to the early 1960s, an emerging field in the country’s historiography, and also advances the study of the history of childhood in Latin America.

Ford has a fine writing style. Her book is very well organized into five chapters. The first intelligently begins by reconstructing the mobility of children and child labor against a backdrop of demographic and urban growth, thus providing a valuable perspective for the issues addressed. The second examines state policies. Focusing on the expansion of kindergartens, it discusses the battles prompted by this development and the exclusions it entailed. The third chapter looks at children as media objects and subjects, with a double focus: the study of a beloved children’s entertainment production in Mexico (Cri Cri) and the arrival of Walt Disney and other US productions, through which Ford shows their undeniable connection with Cold War dynamics and US strategies. The fourth chapter maps the efforts of the Catholic Church, viewed as a key transnational agent in the battle against communism, to claim its authority over the education and everyday life of children, a claim that drew it into confrontation not only with the state, but also with US customs. In the final chapter, Ford considers childhood images in the media, which, she argues, show the social inequality portrayed through the sensitivity of Mexican photographers and controversially analyzed by Oscar Lewis.

In each chapter, Ford addresses specific phenomena, deftly inserting them into a broader context and larger research issues, in dialogue with Mexican historiography (produced, incidentally, both in Mexico and abroad). The history of childhood thus serves as a way into a novel discussion of such issues, but the book is foremost a contribution to the vibrant field of the history of childhood in Latin America. Here, perhaps greater attention to that scholarship would have further strengthened Ford’s arguments on issues that have long been studied for Brazil or Argentina, such as care policies for small children. This would have allowed her to underscore the singularity of the Mexican state, or the mass media and children.

Ford’s research reveals an intelligent and valuable historian, capable of combining different registers and working with multiple sources, incorporating her interpretations in a way that weaves them together without interrupting the narrative flow. She takes into account class and gender differences, and she achieves a rich counterpoint between policies “from above” and the reality of boys and girls. The result is thought-provoking. It raises new questions about, for example, the differences between age groups, the significance of childhood in the production of social hierarchies, and the relationship between modernization and political processes (in this case, the Tlatelolco student massacre). It also highlights the methodological challenges of the history of childhood and of a transnational history that incorporates the...