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Good Neighbor Empires
Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas
Series: - Critical Latin America, Volume: 4
Author:
A class of child artists in Mexico, a ship full of child refugees from Spain, classrooms of child pageant actors, and a pair of boy ambassadors revealed facets of hemispheric politics in the Good Neighbor era. Culture-makers in the Americas tuned into to children as producers of cultural capital to advance their transnational projects. In many instances, prevailing conceptions of children as innocent, primitive, dependent, and underdeveloped informed perceptions of Latin America as an infantilized region, a lesser "Other Americas" on the continent. In other cases, children's interventions in the cultural politics, economic projects, and diplomatic endeavors of the interwar period revealed that Latin American children saw themselves as modern, professional, participants in forging inter-American relationships.
Listen to the interview with author Elena Jackson Albarrán about her book on New Books Network!
This book has received an Honorable Mention from the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) for the 2025 Grace Abbott Prize.
"Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how childrenâs experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture." - Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023).
"Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century." - Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte
"Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of childrenâs agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century." - Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexicoâs Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)
Good Neighbor Empires:Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas is now available in paperback for individual customers.
Listen to the interview with author Elena Jackson Albarrán about her book on New Books Network!
This book has received an Honorable Mention from the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) for the 2025 Grace Abbott Prize.
"Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how childrenâs experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture." - Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023).
"Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century." - Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte
"Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of childrenâs agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century." - Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexicoâs Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)
Good Neighbor Empires:Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas is now available in paperback for individual customers.
Elena Jackson Albarrán, Ph.D. (2008), University of Arizona, is Associate Professor of History and Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University of Ohio. She is the author of the book Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), and co-editor of the volume Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina: entre prácticas y representaciones (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012), as well as several articles and chapters.
Good Neighbor Empires is a skillfully crafted study of children as actors and as symbolic centerpieces in the infantilized image of Latin America. Marrying deep research in transnational archives with engaging storytelling, Albarrán examines the social meaning of children by crafting a story where they emerge as powerful artists, exiles and diplomats in open-air art schools, dormitories and classrooms. By vividly demonstrating how childrenâs experiences and the metaphors surrounding them both reaffirmed and contested diplomacy and hemispheric understandings in the Americas, the book asserts the relevance of childhood studies and transnational history to understandings of Latin American politics and culture. - Sonia Robles, author of Mexican Waves: Radio Broadcasting along Mexico's Northern Border, 1930-1950 (The University of Arizona Press: 2023).
Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century. - Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte
Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of childrenâs agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century. - Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexicoâs Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)
Albarrán displays striking virtuosity in working at various scales of analysis. The book soars from sweeping summaries of governing ideologies to more up-close analysis of, say, one childâs painting, which the author proposes might have inspired the great muralist David Alfaro Siquieros.[...] Good Neighbor Empires should be broadly read. For Mexicanists, it offers new glimpses of familiar actors and institutions, including Cárdenas and the Secretariá de Educación Pública. It also adroitly navigates current theoretical debates in the history of childhood, particularly the slippery tendency to âoverdetermineâ the actions of youth as agential (p. 15). But this book is ultimately a fresh take on the fragile generational construction of the hemispheric order to come in the postwar years. - Bianca Premo, Florida International University
Elena Albarrán is an internationally renowned authority on the history of childhood in Latin America, and especially Mexico. Good Neighbor Empires masterfully tells a transnational history of children, their cultural production, and their public perception in Latin America during the 1930s and 1940s, a time in which the United States discarded military intervention and heavy-handed diplomacy in favor of an approach focused on the soft power of commerce, media, and migration. At the heyday of U.S. imperialism, cartoons had often represented the Latin American republics as children in need of Uncle Sam's guidance, and Latin Americans (both adults and children) remained infantilized in the U.S. imagination throughout the Good Neighbor era. Focusing on the agency of children in three contexts, from Mexican folklore to Spanish Republican refugees to Pan-Americanism as an effort to foster hemispheric "solidarity" during an era of totalitarian threats, the author shows that children and the families they belonged to emerged as part of a new populist rhetoric that reinforced both international capitalist cooperation and patriarchy. A cutting-edge contribution to the history of the Americas in the twentieth century. - Jürgen Buchenau, Dowd Term Chair of Capitalism Studies, UNC Charlotte
Albarrán makes significant contributions to the scholarship on both childhood studies and the history of cultural relations in Good Neighbor Empires. As well as examining the discourses of childhood that built upon colonial and neocolonial legacies and shaped Pan Americanism, Albarrán gives voice to the children who sometimes refashioned these discourses in surprising ways, based on their own understandings of childhood, Latin America, and the United States. Grounded in Mexican cultural history, but providing insights that demonstrate the usefulness of children as a category of analysis for understanding the entire hemisphere, she deftly weaves captivating tales of childrenâs agency as non-governmental actors in inter-American affairs with a fascinating account of the contested construction of U.S. neocolonial hegemony in the twentieth century. - Amelia M. Kiddle, University of Calgary, author of Mexicoâs Relations with Latin America during the Cárdenas Era (University of New Mexico Press, 2016)
Albarrán displays striking virtuosity in working at various scales of analysis. The book soars from sweeping summaries of governing ideologies to more up-close analysis of, say, one childâs painting, which the author proposes might have inspired the great muralist David Alfaro Siquieros.[...] Good Neighbor Empires should be broadly read. For Mexicanists, it offers new glimpses of familiar actors and institutions, including Cárdenas and the Secretariá de Educación Pública. It also adroitly navigates current theoretical debates in the history of childhood, particularly the slippery tendency to âoverdetermineâ the actions of youth as agential (p. 15). But this book is ultimately a fresh take on the fragile generational construction of the hemispheric order to come in the postwar years. - Bianca Premo, Florida International University
Acknowledgments
List of Tables and Figures
Introduction: Children, Empire, and Development in the Americas
â1âChildren and Youth Mobilized
â2âInfantilized Subjects and Governability
â3âChildren as Subjects, Objects, and Agents
â4âChapter Organization
Introduction to Part 1
1 Los tres grandes y unos chiquitos: Primitivism and Childhood in the Mexican Art Renaissance
â1âThe Infantilization of Latin America/ns
â2âChildhood as a Metaphor for Development
â3âPrimitivism, Folklore, and the Indian in Modern Art
â4âInstitutionalizing Hemispheric Aesthetics
â5âConclusion
2 Primitive Geniuses: the Transnational Circulation of Childrenâs Art from Taxco
â1âGuerrero and Vermont
â2âA Word about Rescuing Childrenâs History from the Archive
â3âElsa Rogo and the Transnationality of the Open-Air Art School in Taxco
â4âTaxco 1931: Primitive Paradise or Cosmopolitan Hub?
â5âTechniques in the Taxco School
â6â3,000 Miles from Mexico
â7âLittle Empresarios
â8âConclusion
Introduction to Part 2
3 Spanish Cubs of the Aztec Eagle: the Niños Españoles and Parenting as Statecraft
â1âManufacturing Public Opinion: the Spanish Civil War Comes to Mexico
â2âFrom Mother Spain to Dependent of the Mexican State, 1519â1937
â3âThe Orphan Myth and Cardenista Family Metaphors
â4âThe Living Parents of Orphans
â5âConclusions
4 Tata Cárdenas and the Escuela España-México
â1âThe Escuela España-México
â2âTata Cárdenas: the Revolutionary Father Figure
â3âBattle for Hearts and Minds: Communists and Catholics at the Escuela España-México
â4âThe Fate of the Niños de Morelia
â5âConclusions
Introduction to Part 3
5 A Hemispheric Family Affair: Washington and the Other Americas
â1âPan-Americanism and the Two Americas
â2âThe Other Americas Talk Back
â3âThe PAUâs Division of Intellectual Cooperation
â4âChildrenâs Exchanges as Official Pan-Americanism
â5âPan American Day
â6ââWe Make Sombreros!â Racial and Ethnic Representations of Latin America
â7ââOnce a Pan Am-er, Always a Pan Am-erâ: Pan Americanism in the US Classroom
â8âConclusion
6 Diplomats of Development: Childrenâs Exchanges in a Wartime Economy
â1ââAcercamiento Espiritualâ: Vertical and Horizontal Ties
â2âA Tale of Two Roberts: the âShort-Pants Ambassadorsâ of Wartime Brotherhood
â3âPromoting Resource Knowledge about the Other Americas
â4âConclusion
Epilogue
Conclusions: Two Americas, Other Americas, Nuestra América
Archives
Bibliography
Index
List of Tables and Figures
Introduction: Children, Empire, and Development in the Americas
â1âChildren and Youth Mobilized
â2âInfantilized Subjects and Governability
â3âChildren as Subjects, Objects, and Agents
â4âChapter Organization
Part 1: Artists
Introduction to Part 1
1 Los tres grandes y unos chiquitos: Primitivism and Childhood in the Mexican Art Renaissance
â1âThe Infantilization of Latin America/ns
â2âChildhood as a Metaphor for Development
â3âPrimitivism, Folklore, and the Indian in Modern Art
â4âInstitutionalizing Hemispheric Aesthetics
â5âConclusion
2 Primitive Geniuses: the Transnational Circulation of Childrenâs Art from Taxco
â1âGuerrero and Vermont
â2âA Word about Rescuing Childrenâs History from the Archive
â3âElsa Rogo and the Transnationality of the Open-Air Art School in Taxco
â4âTaxco 1931: Primitive Paradise or Cosmopolitan Hub?
â5âTechniques in the Taxco School
â6â3,000 Miles from Mexico
â7âLittle Empresarios
â8âConclusion
Part 2: Exiles
Introduction to Part 2
3 Spanish Cubs of the Aztec Eagle: the Niños Españoles and Parenting as Statecraft
â1âManufacturing Public Opinion: the Spanish Civil War Comes to Mexico
â2âFrom Mother Spain to Dependent of the Mexican State, 1519â1937
â3âThe Orphan Myth and Cardenista Family Metaphors
â4âThe Living Parents of Orphans
â5âConclusions
4 Tata Cárdenas and the Escuela España-México
â1âThe Escuela España-México
â2âTata Cárdenas: the Revolutionary Father Figure
â3âBattle for Hearts and Minds: Communists and Catholics at the Escuela España-México
â4âThe Fate of the Niños de Morelia
â5âConclusions
Part 3: Diplomats
Introduction to Part 3
5 A Hemispheric Family Affair: Washington and the Other Americas
â1âPan-Americanism and the Two Americas
â2âThe Other Americas Talk Back
â3âThe PAUâs Division of Intellectual Cooperation
â4âChildrenâs Exchanges as Official Pan-Americanism
â5âPan American Day
â6ââWe Make Sombreros!â Racial and Ethnic Representations of Latin America
â7ââOnce a Pan Am-er, Always a Pan Am-erâ: Pan Americanism in the US Classroom
â8âConclusion
6 Diplomats of Development: Childrenâs Exchanges in a Wartime Economy
â1ââAcercamiento Espiritualâ: Vertical and Horizontal Ties
â2âA Tale of Two Roberts: the âShort-Pants Ambassadorsâ of Wartime Brotherhood
â3âPromoting Resource Knowledge about the Other Americas
â4âConclusion
Epilogue
Conclusions: Two Americas, Other Americas, Nuestra América
Archives
Bibliography
Index
This book will particularly interest scholars of childhood, historians of International Relations, historians of Latin America, art historians, Global South studies scholars, undergraduate and graduate students in these fields mentioned, and those engaged with Pan American organizations and UNICEF.