Children of Fate

Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930

Autor: Milanich, Nara B.; Milanich, Nara B.
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822345572
eISBN Pdf: 9780822391296
Lloc de publicació: Durham , United States
Any de publicació digital: 2009
Mes: Octubre
Pàgines: 376
DDC: 305.23086/9450983
Idioma: Anglés

Descripció

In modern Latin America, profound social inequalities have persisted despite the promise of equality. Nara B. Milanich argues that social and legal practices surrounding family and kinship have helped produce and sustain these inequalities. Tracing families both elite and plebeian in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chile, she focuses on a group largely invisible in Latin American historiography: children. The concept of family constituted a crucial dimension of an individual’s identity and status, but also denoted a privileged set of gendered and generational dependencies that not all people could claim. Children of Fate explores such themes as paternity, illegitimacy, kinship, and child circulation over the course of eighty years of Chile’s modern history to illuminate the ways family practices and ideologies powerfully shaped the lives of individuals as well as broader social structures.

Milanich pays particular attention to family law, arguing that liberal legal reforms wrought in the 1850s, which left the paternity of illegitimate children purposely unrecorded, reinforced not only patriarchal power but also hierarchies of class. Through vivid stories culled from judicial and notarial sources and from a cache of documents found in the closet of a Santiago orphanage, she reveals how law and bureaucracy helped create an anonymous underclass bereft of kin entitlements, dependent on the charity of others, and marginalized from public bureaucracies. Milanich also challenges the recent scholarly emphasis on state formation by highlighting the enduring importance of private, informal, and extralegal relations of power within and across households. Children of Fate demonstrates how the study of children can illuminate the social organization of gender and class, liberalism, law, and state power in modern Latin America.

Contents
Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: State, Class Society, and Children in Chile
I. Children and Strangers: Filiation in Law and Practice
- 1. The Civil Code and the Liberalization of Kinship
- 2. Paternity, Childhood, and the Making of Class
II. Children of Don Nobody: Kinship and Social Hierarchy
- 3. Kindred and Kinless: The People without History
- 4. Birthrights: Natal Dispossession and the State
III. Other People's Children: The Politics of Child Circulation
- 5. Vernacular Kinships in the Shadow of the State
- 6. Child Bondage in the Liberal Republic
Epilogue: Young Marginals at the Centenary: One Hundred Years of Huachos
Appendix
Abbreviations
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index