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Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the new books network. I'm one of your hosts, Stocker and Mademelchur and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Elena Jackson Alberan about her book titled Good Neighbour Empires, Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas, published by Braille in 2024.
This book takes us into hemispheric politics and sort of good neighbour era where we're looking at interactions between all sorts of different countries and the US obviously one of them but we're going to be talking about a bunch of different countries and sort of levels of politics too because the lens this book takes is looking at children. And what role children actually play in these kinds of relations are seen to play. Turns out it's a really interesting lens to look at this time and place through. So Elena, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
It's a pleasure to talk to you today. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Yeah, absolutely. I am a professor of history and Latin American studies at Miami University in Ohio and I teach themes of modern Latin American history, politics, culture, revolutions and I've traditionally I've been a Mexicanist for my first book focused on Mexican history also in that area of childhood and in the most recent iteration of my intellectual life I've kind of expanded out toward Latin American, Pan American and hemispheric relations still asking some of the same questions and broadening the scope of it.
That is helpful context you have for this book. Thank you for that introduction. Can you tell us more about this project and the specific questions you're asking in the book and how you develop some? Yeah, absolutely.
This book came out of writing the book that I wanted to read and that I wanted to cite that I had always kind of been searching for and that felt like a gap in my own research citations. And so it's kind of satisfying after you've scoured the literature a bit and looked for something and argument out there to realize, oh the argument hasn't been written yet. I'm the one who needs to write it. So this came out of a series of questions I had been asking about the concept of infantilization and infantilization is something that Latin Americanists in particular and I think also when the studies scholars are familiar with but I don't think it had been interrogated from the perspective of childhood studies all that much.
So when we look at the region of Latin America as part of imperial desires projected upon that region, we often maybe sometimes offhandedly refer to infantilization as a way of looking at the Latin American people, a populist, a body politic that provided a justification for empire or neo-colonial activities and later neo-extractivist and developmentalist activities in the region from either the West or the global North or the United States or Europe depending on that particular time frame. So infantilization of indigenous people, of women, of people who are able to differently is something that I think intersectional scholars are familiar with but as a childhood study scholar, I wanted to know a little bit more about how infantilization works. In order for infantilization to work as a way of creating a constructive collective imaginary about a people in a place, you have to already have some predetermined ideas about children and childhood and that's the angle that I didn't think had been brought into these questions of atmospheric relations and foreign policy and from a cultural angle all that much. So I wanted to examine the way that infantilization narratives and discourses and practices and attitudes were informed by the prevailing ideas about children at the time and I chose the good neighbor period because I was familiar with the archives in Mexico from the early 20th century where my starting point was and I found that the decades of the 1930s and the 1940s were really rich in terms of bringing children into the public sphere as part of official and soft policy during this time period.
So the archives in part determined the direction that I was taking with this book but also a desire to bring childhood studies and what we know from the field of childhood studies into this particular moment of foreign policy formation in history. Well, you just said one of my favorite words multiple times there, archives. So I definitely have to ask you more about what sorts of sources you've used to investigate these questions. Yeah, absolutely.
I also love archives. I think a lot of our listeners might share that. So like I said, I started from a deep archival familiarity in Mexico and especially the archive of foreign relations, the SRE in Mexico City, which allowed me to see some of the ways that official ideas about creating Pan-American imaginary and then a Pan-American political union was created from official levels. But also in that archive I found some really wonderful examples of reception.
In this book, one of the things that I'm trying to do throughout the book is stagger chapters that organize the official sector with the popular sector in alternating border throughout the three case studies that I follow. And so it really helps to get the official story out of the archive and then to be able in the follow-up chapter to match that with the reception of these ideas. So to give maybe a more concrete example, one initiative that I saw in the archives both in Washington, D.C. at the Pan-American Union, which is now the organization of American states, that archive and then comparing that with the different foreign affairs archives in Latin America.
It's to be able to develop what the official story of Pan-Americanism during the good neighbor period was going to be, but then peppered throughout there to find the instances solicited from school children, particularly across the Americas of how they were intended to engage with these official projects. So one example was the idea that the Americas should become united through the construction of a holiday called Pan-American Day or the other, the Samedicas in Spanish, which was determined somewhat arbitrarily to be April 14th on the calendar. And so I found some really wonderful attempts from coming from Washington, coming from the Pan-American Union to try to disseminate and propagandize this new holiday that all of the nations and the Americas would celebrate together on one day. And then I had to try to find evidence that Latin American countries were interested in participating in this.
And the short answer is they were far less interested in participating in creating a Pan-American Day sort of celebrations developed mostly around activities as school children would do than their counterparts in the United States. So being able to look at the archive, I was able to determine that there was definitely more of a top-down, hegemonic, if you want, at the very least imbalanced approach towards a desire to create Pan-American unity that hinged on United States leadership, then the Latin American countries were able to respond with their enthusiasm was certainly tempered in that domain. So all sorts of fun things for you to investigate, like why that round of day April, right? Like I can imagine you came across all sorts of things that were eyebrow raising to say the least, I suppose.
But you keep mentioning this idea of the kind of imaginaries of the child and children, which is of course really interesting, especially when you talk about some interesting things in the book where those ideas about children then come into actual contact with real children, like actual human children you can touch. And one example of that is you discuss the arrival of 455, I believe, actual human live children that end up in Mexico from Spain. How then do these rhetorics of children get used and combine with other discourses of nationalist goals, anti-colonial policies, like what are all these things that are being entangled around these actual real life human people? Yeah, great.
One of the case studies in the book is the Spanish exile children from the Spanish Civil War that came to Mexico in 1937. While this case study has been written about and there have been some documentary films and several of them have written memoirs later about their life, something that I found to be remarkable when I started to look at it from the angle of official rhetoric and language that was used to frame these children's arrival was the absolute power that language had, that family-based language had, and that reliance on popular understandings of what children were, what children meant in society, how those were circulating both within Mexico but also transnationally between Mexico and Spain, and also as a side between Mexico and the United States. In this particular moment, in the late 1930s, Mexico was really trying to project an image of international strength. Its economy was on the rebound.
It had a populist president in La Sado Cardenas who had enormous popular support. It was carrying out its social revolution through institutions and it was a real turning point for Mexico politically, socially and culturally. The arrival of the Spanish children provided a really interesting opportunity for the Card in this administration to use language as a form of soft diplomacy to invert the colonial relationship that it had had with Spain since the conquest. It did so by framing these Spanish children as orphans that were in need of protection.
There's this great quote upon their arrival when they disembark from the ship. They say, now, these young cubs of the Spanish lion will come to rest under the wings of the Aztec eagle. They take this paternalistic language to frame hosting these Spanish children. When we did even deeper, there's so much language and rhetoric that used family-based, hierarchical family power structure to remind Spain that they had lost their paternal rights over these children and that Mexico was assuming them.
By referring to Spain as mother's, and referring to Mexico as the new parent under the leadership of Cardenas who the people called Tada Cardenas, which is sort of like an nickname that suggests grandfather, like an uber patriarch, was a really important rhetorical turn. But I think even more powerfully than all of that was the consistent and insistent use of the term orphans to refer to these Spanish children, who it turns out when I went into the archive were not orphans. Most of them, many or most of them actually had living parents who had sent their children willingly into exile on it, understanding that this would be a temporary arrangement. But the archive was full of heartbreaking letters from mothers and fathers writing to the Mexican government, please send word of my children.
How are they doing? I haven't heard anything since they left months ago. And Mexico did nothing to redress this status, the orphan status of the children in the press, because there was so much political capital to be gained among, especially the more conservative with philanthropic crowds in Mexico, who really saw this as an opportunity to assume a position of power over Spain that Mexico has worked, we hadn't had an opportunity to really do. And so I see through the philanthropic women's organization, it was the auxiliary that helped Cardenas rehome the children in a boarding house in his home state in Ríshorcan.
The semantics surrounding the arrival of these children was absolutely laden with family-based language. There are two dynamics here that are coming into play. At the time, Mexico is actually undergoing its own cultural revolution that puts the child as a real active citizen and not a disempowered child that is in necessarily in need of a parental figure. There's a reification of the idea of a proletarian child and a self-activated child.
And so that prevailing revolutionary narrative about children has to be buried underneath the more western contemporary discourse of childhood in which the child needs protection. So there are these battling concepts of what a child means that the government is subtly nuanced in a lot of its press and publicity surrounding the arrival of these children that I found it really interesting to parse as I'm carrying out my analysis of what happens to these children. And I'll just add as a note that after I've laid out the kind of discursive and semantic treatment of children and orphans and mothers and fathers and how that maps on colonial relationships, I then look at what actually happens to the children themselves and how the children themselves either internalize their orphans or utterly disregard or reject it as they're carrying out their new life in Mexico, living alongside other Mexican children. And I find that to be a really interesting counter narrative to what's happening in the public sphere.
Yeah, that is really interesting to think about kind of the many things that are happening in this one moment. And I love how you pick out those specific phrases as well that really convey these ideas and the goals that are being used by the Mexican government. How did other, for example, political groups react to this? Did they kind of just go, yes, we agree with all the things you're saying or were there more varied reactions?
There were, there was some pushback to the to official rhetoric about the arrival of the Spanish children. First and foremost was kind of holding the card in this government to task about whether or not Mexico had fully cared for and provided for all of its own children before receiving refugee children. This is always a narrative whenever a country is opening a store to refugees asylum seekers or immigrants. There's often sometimes a native backlash that the government first needs to provide for every single one of its own citizens before it can turn to provide for others.
And so there certainly was that that strain. There was a political cartoon, at least one, probably several that were published at that time where it shows a middle-class woman swooning and she's surrounded by her domestic worker and friends and they're saying what's wrong with Esther? And her maid says, oh, she's just wishes that her future children could be born Spanish so they could receive the same benefits from the government that these orphans are receiving. So there was a bit of a commentary and backlash about whether or not Mexico was well situated to receive these children.
But I'd say the overwhelming response was one of pride and nationalism and a real belief that Mexico had reached a moment in its democracy, in its economic power, in its regional influence that it could receive these children. And Mexicans showed up at the port of Vericruz when the ocean liner with all the children on it arrived in hordes and the reception of these children was nothing short of celebrity status. And there was a train that received them and took them all the way from Vericruz all the way across the country to Michoacán and at every station they were met and given gifts and celebrated and a lot of positive publicity. Of course, once they were situated in their boarding school in Michoacán, some of that enthusiasm waned and attention turned to other things.
And that's when their material conditions deteriorated in some way as it kind of moved out of the limelight as a politically opportune moment. Interesting to see how different groups also found themselves. This is clearly such a thing that mattered to them to be involved in the conversations. This wasn't something that got buried in the back of the newspapers you found in the archives, which is of course really interesting to understand in and of itself.
But of course, the people at the heart of this particular incident are the children. How did they feel about all this rhetoric? Is that even something we can excavate? I found lots of evidence in the archive that the children were aware of their privileged position, especially relative to other children in Mexico at the time.
They had a direct line to President Cardenas, who they all called and addressed as Tada Carvinas, sort of claiming him as their own grandfather or paternal figure. And they would regularly write to him regularly about big things and small things regarding their conditions in the Esquela Españama-Hico, which is the name of the boarding school where they were housed. So I would find written communication directly to his office, directly to him, not to an agency or a bureau or any interlocutor saying our sleeping conditions are not adequate or the food and the cafeteria isn't good enough. Or can we please go on a field trip?
Or in some cases, there was one young girl. So these children ranged in age from two to 14, 15, and they were housed there for several years. One girl wrote directly to Cardenas and said, since I don't have any parents in this country, I want to get married. Will you please bless my matrimony or give me permission basically to get married?
Totally bypassing her own biological family, either by necessity, or by design, knowing that perhaps her father wouldn't, her biological father wouldn't approve of a marriage to another young adolescent whom he had never met. So I saw plenty of evidence of children becoming quite savvy about their political capital that they had and their special relationship and their special line to Cardenas as their sort of adoptive parent. And in many cases, he was actually happy to comply. He treated the Spanish children to all sorts of barbecues at his ranch in Michoacan and he would come and bring everybody bathing suits and take them swimming.
He would bring a handful of them to his residence in Mexico City, Los Pinos. He had his own four-year-old son, his only child, Cuot de Macardin, who went on to become a politician in his own right, who co-vorted with the Spanish children as a sibling and they all kind of referred to each other as siblings. And he unofficially adopted one of them and brought him to live as a kind of companion to his son in Los Pinos. It wasn't an official adoption, but it was an unofficial adoption and had him educated at the same school as his son.
So he really did see these children as a kind of special category of children, but the Spanish children were well aware of how that could be advantageous to them in their everyday life. So finding letters to the president from the children where they're kind of trying to bypass school authority or maybe their own biological family's authority and appeal to the authority that he represented as the state, but also as a father figure really reaffirmed this idea of the way that political language regarding children and childhood in official circles was being absorbed by the children and the population in general, in which the United States was really working on trying to create a sense of, to educate the populace about the Latin American countries, cultures and people that it hoped would be their economic partners and eventually as the period progressed, their political allies as we moved towards World War II. And but I think some of the lesser known ways that that manifested was really by carrying out curricular programs in the classroom. So what I looked at was I kind of compared Latin American classrooms and United States classrooms.
I really looked at what was happening in the United States classrooms in terms of creating pan-american curricular materials and activities surrounding this idea as of what I mentioned earlier about the Pan-American Day, but also the mirroring the public policy efforts to create stronger political and economic relationships with Latin American nations. So the Pan-American Union created a set of manuals for distribution in schools hemisphere wide that were published in English and Spanish and in Portuguese. They solicited input from school teachers, citizens, ambassadors, any kind of public civilians who wanted to participate and they compiled these in these manuals and workbooks that they published throughout the 1940s largely and distributed those, made those available to any school teachers who would want to use them. I saw these carried out to great effect in the United States in classrooms.
We saw a surge of Pan-American clubs, Spanish clubs, speaker series, pageants, parades, allegorical displays, representations, dioramas. We saw students creating school albums, resource maps, murals, having cooking contests, doing exchanges, all manner of activities. I mean, I really would argue that education about Latin America was at its absolute peak in the United States in the 1940s, the generation of school children in the United States growing up during those years had unprecedented access to information about Latin America. Now, what kind of information were they receiving?
And that is what was interesting. First and foremost, there was a heavy emphasis on representation and kind of embodied representation of national types and social types associated with ethnic dress, which was often referred to at that time period as costumes. And so we see lots of Midwestern kids wearing sombre de dos and cedapés in allegorical plays and school pageants during this time period in a real kind of good faith effort to learn more about their neighbors, but of course, not all Latin Americans wear sombre de dos and cedapés. Sometimes this information, this visual information was supplemented with critical understanding that different forms of dress are associated with different ethnic groups, different climates, different types of ethnic groups.
And so the other thing was that there's diversity in the region, but sometimes there was slippage and sometimes a Mexican type, like a charo type, kind of became broadcast as the stand-in for Latin Americans across the board. So we see widespread enthusiasm to go back to what you're saying earlier about the kind of to do this in fantasy work you have to have imagined ideas, right? So this is kind of the sort of thing where that is coming from or part of at least what that's coming from. And what about some of the work that these ideas are doing.
For some of these events and efforts to kind of make Pan-Americanism seem less imperialist or seem less racist, did that work? Well, something I found interesting was that one of the stated goals of the Pan-American Union was to make sure that these took place in school settings and that these cultural celebrations associated with Pan-American and Pan-Americanism were associated with children. And that's because there's an assumption that children are kind of a more palatable cultural conduit for more complex ideas or for what we would consider more hard policy ideas. That children representing solidarity and brotherhood and holding hands and embodying all of the different national types creates a template for imagining the Americas coming together that's easier to absorb and easier to internalize and to accept than if it were a slate of men and suits kind of standing on a stage shaking hands.
And I do think there is something to that. I think that there's something of childhood that allows for more complex or nuanced political ideas to have greater inroads in the public and popular and imaginary. One of the ways that I really see this carried out is when I look more critically at the curricular materials that were being distributed by the Pan-American Union through these manuals, was that a lot of Latin American information was presented in the forms of games, quizzes, and puzzles for the kids to learn about their neighboring countries. When I looked at the content of these games and quizzes and puzzles, I noticed that they were all promoting a form of resource knowledge that mirrored colonialist incursions into the region and that kind of pre-saged the neo-extractivist industries that would define the region in the decades to come.
So for example, they would have to memorize every bit of raw material that came from countries throughout the Americas. And this information was so specific and so unchildlike really in terms of the nature of its content that they needed to know what materials make linseed oil and what Hennigan is used for and where rubber is sourced and what ports have the deepest entry points for ships to come in, where the most potential is for hydroelectric power. And so looking closely at this really kind of detailed resource knowledge that these manuals were trying to convey, it suggests that knowledge about Latin America was really pragmatic in its scope coming out of Pan-American Union by extension what the United States was looking at Latin America for. I also noticed that in these materials which are circulated throughout Latin America, there is no mention of resources coming from the United States or resources that the United States is known for.
Throughout the book, I keep coming back to this idea that one of the discourses of childhood that prevails during this time period or is that of an infantilized body politic in Latin America that has creative potential and potential for development and for growth but that the industrialized capacity is reserved for the United States. And so there's this kind of binary construct of Latin America as a resource sending or a creative or raw material producing region and that the United States is reserved for leadership, industrial capacity, and capitalist growth and development. That kind of binary construct has held throughout the hemispheric history of the relationship between what some have called the two Americas or Lesothoméricas, this artificial construct that divides rather than unites them. So even within the context of Pan-Americanism which reports to bring all these countries together, it's doing so in an imbalanced way.
And it's using children's curricular material which seems sort of harmless and educational as a way to generate resource knowledge within across a generation that is preparing itself later for developmentalist attitudes towards Latin America. Very interesting to see where this is coming from given how much we look for this perhaps a little bit later in the time period but to see it here and the involvement of children is really interesting. Given all of this that we've discussed and of course all the details we haven't been able to include in our discussion, what do you most hope readers take from the book? One takeaway that I hope readers can appreciate from this book is first of all, discourses about childhood can be either infantilizing or empowering.
And I try to show that while infantilizing attitudes towards Latin America were coming from the United States or earlier Spain or sometimes the Western world in general, within Latin America there were other discourses of childhood that saw the child as empowered, as an active, sometimes business person, as a political being with their own expressions that were worth listening to. And so sometimes that infantilizing language in coming from outside of Latin America was either rejected or didn't hit its mark in Latin America because they had their own ideas about what children and childhood meant in that context. So the main thing is that we always need to historicize what it means to be a child and what that language about children might mean for the people who are speaking about children. So when you think about children, do you think about them as dependent, in need of protection or do you think of them as agents or central to the lives in which they're in the context in which they're interacting?
I think that we have kind of overlooked the way that language, politics, visual culture and rhetoric that center children have been instrumental to constructing transnational power dynamics and that some of the longer legacies that we've seen of power dynamics in the region have something to do with the soft politics that involves children, that centers children or that uses language about children in order to kind of justify more harder policy terms. Yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of ways that that can be taken forward in two different places and times beyond what you've done in the book. So I think a good place to conclude our discussion then on this project. But before I let you go, is there anything you're currently working on or looking to work on next?
You can get us a brief sneak preview on. Right now I'm kind of working a bit on the whole age spectrum and looking at how different age categories across different cultural contexts might be constructed in different ways. And so a bit of an extension of this theorizing of what does childhood mean in a certain place or time and looking at what other ages might mean. Adolescence or middle age or older age and I'm kind of trying to do a more synthesis of thinking about age as a category of analysis and as a social category.
And I have a fun little spinoff project that I am starting on that has to do with Uncle Sam. So again, these kind of family myths that are embedded in our popular imaginary and how Uncle Sam is received by children in the Americas in this middle of the 20th century as a father, figure, an uncle, a patriarch. So that's just kind of a fun little spinoff project that has emerged out of a lot of this Pan American stuff. Some of the icons of Pan Americanism that have a lot of imaginative power.
Well that certainly sounds very interesting to investigate. So best of luck. Thank you. In the meantime, of course, while you were off looking at all manner of Uncle Sam type things I imagine listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Good Neighbor Empires, Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas, published by Brill in 2034.
Elena, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thanks very much for talking to me today. It's been a pleasure.