Untangling the Latin American child: heterogeneous temporalities of Latin American “modern” childhoods

Abstract

In this article, we analyse childhood and modernity as both analytical tools for understanding Latin American childhoods and as hegemonic categories, central to establishing social hierarchies and identity formations. Instead of taking for granted modern/traditional or North/South as heuristic categories that guide understandings of commonalities, differences, and singularities, we explore the usefulness of temporality. We propose a focus on how heterogeneous temporalities contribute to the production of childhoods in a historical narrative. This narrative incorporates multiple temporalities in a hierarchical regime in which those seen as “modern” and “civilized” are assumed as the only possible temporalities, while at the same time becoming part of the processes of differentiation, order, and social change. The temporal dimension involves exploring the tensions between biographical, state, and institutional time scales, and the multiple temporalities of globalisation. This requires the unravelling of the complexities of the historical dimension of being a child to understand how, specifically, Latin American childhoods are caught between heterogeneous temporalities. We apply these categories to analyse the case of child circulation in Latin America, as a historical example in which heterogeneous temporalities are expressed. Together, modernity and time(s) are powerful tools for unpacking the unequal distribution of the future(s) through the production of the “Latin American child”.