The Americas

Jackson Albarrán undertakes an ambitious project to take seriously the idea of age as a category of analysis, setting out to view the postwar period through the eyes of children. She refers to the period from 1920 to 1940 as “two child-centered decades.” This was true both nationally and internationally, in the wake of the 1924 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child and the advent of pan-American child conferences. Ambitious educators drove both the rapid expansion of public education and unwieldy shifts in the [End Page 525] national curriculum under the direction of the Rational School, the Action School, and then the Socialist School.

State-sponsored schools, periodicals, radio programs, and participation in boys and girls clubs created for probably the first time the notion of an age-segregated imagined community that was both national and international. For example, the government-sponsored monthly children’s magazine called Pulgarcito was filled with artwork submitted by the children themselves, creating a sense of community with unseen children elsewhere. Similarly, official radio programs offered prizes to students who submitted entries in response to questions based on program content. Winners of both print and radio contests became famous among their peers, a distinction to which all young readers and listeners could aspire.

As the subtitle suggests, this book helps us visualize the development of Mexican nationalism as that process was experienced by children. For example, the artwork submitted to Pulgarcito both emerged from and was judged by the standards of a national art curriculum pioneered in the 1920s, which is the origin of a visual shorthand for Mexicanness that is still recognizable today. Nationalism and internationalism reinforced one another. As schoolchildren corresponded with pen pals or traded gifts with peers in other countries, they were encouraged to think about what activities, images, or objects were “typically Mexican.” From these exercises, emerged clichéd symbols like the charro and china poblana, which came to represent the nation both at home and abroad.

Jackson Albarrán also exposes the way children, like their parents, engaged in a dialectical process of nation-building, in partnership and also in tension with the state. Government-produced puppet shows proved wildly popular among their young audiences, but the intended didactic messages behind the stories were not always interpreted as intended. For example, the writers of the play Comino Defeats the Devil intended children to absorb a message about how a united proletariat could unmask and overcome deceitful, greedy landowners. Many children were impressed instead only by the part of the story in which Comino gets to hit the bad guy with a stick, while others were too frightened of the figure wearing a devil mask to sit through the performance. Administrators, however, solicited and took seriously feedback from instructors who reported on how well their students responded to the pedagogical aims of the puppet program. They also adapted future puppet shows in response to the feedback they received.

To view revolutionary programs through the eyes of children is a challenge, in which Jackson Albarrán is aided by her own especially strong skills in visual literacy. For example, she is able to use children’s drawings as information-rich texts. Detailed analysis of children’s art can reveal how girls and boys responded differently to programming about streetcar safety, or what impressed them most in a puppet show. The same skills parse out from photographs the difference between adult observers at a national children’s conference and child participants: the adults expressed a hyperawareness of gender difference and tended to conflate gender and ethnicity, while the children did neither. However, even this resourceful approach to sources could [End Page 526] not overcome the bias in the source materials themselves—their over-representation of middle-class urban children, and their neglect of rural, poorer, and indigenous children who did not have the time or means to mail in answers to radio quizzes, submit their drawings for possible publication, or attend gatherings in the capital that reinforced the sense of children’s community.