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

In the early days of the history of childhood the debate mostly hinged on whether childhood existed in a recognizable form before a given time and whether parents loved their issue or grieved when they died. Children themselves were not the marrow, and their lives came to us filtered through the sentiments, beliefs, and acts of adults. We know remarkably little about how children in Latin America lived and prematurely died; only recently have historians made them an explicit focus of their research. Raising an Empire enriches our understanding of children's lives in Latin America considerably.

The volume opens with a chapter by Isabel dos Guimarães Sá on children in Portugal between 1500 and 1800. The scope of this essay (work, play, education, religion, abandonment, and beyond) is more than a little ambitious. Yet the piece works well in this book, framing many of the topics treated in the chapters that follow and touching on the types of sources available to historians of childhood.

Fully three chapters concern orphans. Valentina Tikoff explores the orphanages of Seville between 1681 and 1831. Rather than offering a history of the institutions, she seeks to "rethink the identities of the children who resided in them and how they came to be there" (43). This insightful piece ultimately invites us to look both inward at these heterogeneous institutions where the children lived, learned, labored, and languished, and outward at society.

The other two chapters are about foundlings in Havana. Despite some overlap, the essays by Ondina González and Ann Twinam mostly reveal different things. González traces the development of the Casa Joseph foundling home, inaugurated in 1711, arguing that church-state struggles over the upkeep of the house "mirrored societal attitudes toward children" (138) As church, state, and local elite eschewed responsibility for the home its charges fared dismally, few surviving infancy.

Twinam offers a broader look at expósitos, or foundlings, revealing the conflict between a 1794 decree by Charles IV and local laws and mores. The royal edict was meant to erase discrimination against expósitos and was applied to the entire empire; whereas peninsulars had little to lose with the presumption that babies born in Seville or Burgos were white and the progeny of legitimate union, the scenario was different in the new world where pardos and mulatos were hardly welcomed into the upper echelons of society. Local law and practice chipped away at the order, with racial and other prejudices prevailing even over the royal decree.

A chapter on Indian children in Lima between 1570 and 1640 and another on the life of an aristocratic girl born in Santiago, Chile, in 1666 are at opposite methodological extremes. The first offers a glimpse at a broad cross-section of Indian children in Lima whereas the other is tightly circumscribed, not unlike the subject's own monastic life. But as Jorge Rojas Flores intimates in his essay on the child in Santiago, the close study of the individual can tell us important things about society. The essay by Teresa Vergara, in contrast, suggests that impersonal social data can reveal much about individuals. Vergara's chapter on Lima relies on a 1613 census of indigenous people in the city, labor contracts, and wills, while the Santiago chapter draws primarily on the subject's spiritual autobiography, or vida.

Indian parents in Lima would place their children in the households of Spaniards so they would learn practical and cultural skills, according to Vergara. She notes that Indian children only began to work officially and to be paid a salary at the age of nine or ten, though they often arrived at a much younger age. It would be difficult to believe that the seven and eight year olds were not working, effectively in a regime of slavery. From there to suggest that these children "became members of their masters...