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Seen and Heard in Mexico
Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism
By Elena Jackson Albarrán UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-6682-7
CHAPTER 1
Constructing Citizens
Adult-Produced Science, Space, Symbolism, and Rhetoric for the Revolutionary Child
What a beautiful spectacle, that after ten years of incessant divisions between brothers and persecutions among groups of Mexicans, after ten years of combat and blood, as though arising from the ashes and purified by fire, men of science are gathering to treat academically the instruction, the hygiene, the surgery, the medicine, and the beauty of the child.
—José Vasconcelos, opening speech of the First Mexican Congress of the Child, El Universal, January 2, 1921
We students should intervene in the decoration and setup of our classrooms, to perpetuate in our own style something of our national identity.
—Consuelo Durán, Herlinda Reyna, and Román Hernández, child delegates at the First Conference of Child Peasants and Workers, El Nacional, October 18, 1936
In perhaps a fated turn of events, the newly elected president, Álvaro Obregón, fell ill on a winter evening in 1921 when he was scheduled to deliver the inaugural address of the First Mexican Congress of the Child. In his stead José Vasconcelos, at the time head of Bellas Artes and the National University, issued poetic opening remarks that suggested the redemptive power of the child in the wake of a devastating decade of bloodbath. In less than a year Vasconcelos would take charge of the Ministry of Education, created in October 1921, arguably the most influential government bureau in the early twentieth century. Vasconcelos himself would take the first steps in expanding the school system into the rural reaches of the country, creating and implementing a national curriculum, with the goal of teaching every child what it meant to be Mexican. To that end Vasconcelos and a cadre of intellectuals (many among his cohort in the Ateneo de la Juventud, the generation of intellectuals that bridged the positivist científicos—nineteenth-century scientific advisers to Porfirio Díaz—and the revolutionary ideologues) used the First Mexican Congress of the Child to spearhead a movement that placed the child at the forefront of the long process of national reconstruction. This official gathering marked the beginning of a rhetorical and conceptual shift in the definition of childhood, both in Mexico and around the world. Intellectual, visual, and physical spaces opened up to make room for the child in society—albeit a symbolic child distilled to a handful of idealized characteristics. In the decades that followed Vasconcelos's opening salvo, revolutionary officials became both more professional and more concerned with children, especially in educational programs, creating what family historian Ann Blum has called a child-centered society in the 1920s and 1930s. By the end of the Cárdenas administration (1934—40), the heyday of the proletarian child, child-centered official rhetoric and reforms had become institutionalized to the point of rendering them autocratic and stagnant.
Confronted with a frustrating dearth of firsthand accounts from children, scholars have posited that the only way to study the child is through the official discourses, images, and strategies employed by adults to construct their worlds. To the contrary, I argue that an approximation of children's experience that privileges the child's voice is possible, and I dedicate most of the rest of this book to the child's perspective growing up in a society ostensibly tailor-made for their personal success and physical well-being. Yet understanding what it was like for children in the 1920s and 1930s to grow up as embodiments of the revolution requires an overview of the official discourse produced by adults that governed their world and the ways these adults refashioned Victorian and Porfirian ideas about children in the decades of revolutionary social reforms. Adults provided the rhetorical devices, and constructed the physical spaces, into which the new Mexican child must now fit.
The adult-produced sources consulted here constitute the leading ideas about children that emerged after 1921. Revolutionary officials produced an overwhelming body of documents, legislation, and propaganda during these decades with the intention of instructing the adults on raising the nation's children. Striving to replace the decimated population with a productive, ideologically committed generation, officials imagined an ideal revolutionary child and disseminated the image among the nation's mothers, schoolteachers, and community members. Sampling this literature reveals not just the institutional reform that marked this new child-centered era but the accompanying ideas about age—and attendant categories of race, class, and gender—that drove these reforms.
Congressional deputies debated educational reform programs that disclosed their ideas about biological age as it related to social roles and their decisions to build parks transforming the urban landscape specifically to include the child. Proceedings from the First Mexican Congress of the Child and the Pan-American Child Congresses—especially the one hosted by Mexico in 1935—not only disclose an explosion in the number of agencies and institutions designed specifically to socialize and perfect the child but also indicate that these agencies provided new professional opportunities for women by virtue of their state-sanctioned authority of issues relating to children. Specialized government publications and radio bulletins on child care and hygiene supplemented the educational programs and institutional reforms to ensure that adults aligned home life with the government campaign to construct the ideal citizen. Finally, presidential collections contain thousands of letters from average citizens who repeated the new rhetoric, reflecting at once the internalization of the public campaign for the revolutionary child and an astute use of this rhetoric for personal goals. Taken as a whole, these sources indicate a consensus among adults across social and economic classifications that the child belonged primarily to the nation. This abstract "nation" composed of myriad individuals with diverse backgrounds and authority levels existed most clearly in rhetorical treatments of the child.
Beginning in the early 1920s, officials strove to construct universal childhood through a common set of experiences and to subject it to a standard measure of normalcy defined by biology. Despite these efforts, the ideal childhood remained an exclusive category. As professionals honed their vision of young citizenship, differentiated models of childhood emerged: the protected childhood, a middle-class vestige of the nineteenth century, persisted alongside its emerging binary of the endangered childhood. Street children, working children (forced into early adulthood out of economic necessity or as a result of abandonment), and non-Spanish-speaking native children were targeted for reform to become the ideal children that professionals conjured up in conferences and debates. The stark socioeconomic differences that marked these competing versions of childhood evolved with the revolution. By the onset of Lázaro Cárdenas's administration, a new official model had emerged that rendered these distinctions irrelevant by overtly glorifying the working class: the proletarian childhood. The proletarian child, a political and rhetorical device, evolved hand in hand with the implementation of the Socialist School (Escuela Socialista) in 1935 and became the unofficial mascot of events surrounding the 1935 Pan-American Child Congress.
The conscious construction of childhood during these decades reminds us that adults owned the means of producing and disseminating knowledge; they operated the press, enforced legislation, and wrote the curriculum. Adults created the parameters within which the successive generations came to understand themselves as citizens. Lest this chapter create the impression of structural determinism, future chapters will delve into the complexities of children's growing self-awareness and responses to government and popular child-centered culture within this political climate. As we will see, the discourses, institutions, and physical spaces conceptualized for the socialization of revolutionary children did not produce clean or uncontested results. Nevertheless, the present chapter examines the science, the geography, the visual, and the rhetorical treatments of children that adults produced as a framework for understanding parameters in which multiple and contested citizenships were forged.
Each section below follows a roughly chronological trajectory that traces evolving official and popular treatments of childhood through the first decades of the twentieth century in different cultural domains created by adults, extending back and forward from 1920 to 1940. First, this chapter explores the professionalization and development of official attitudes about children as they emerged and evolved in the postrevolutionary decades, in particular by comparing and contrasting two high-profile conferences in 1921 and 1935. Second, it describes the way that reformers carved out physical spaces for children in response to scientific conclusions drawn by health and educational experts at these intellectual gatherings. As a result, these decades saw a transformation of city parks, school patios, and welfare institutions, newly designed to place children in the scrutiny of the public eye. Third, it examines the degree to which the Mexican public absorbed, employed, and negotiated rhetorical treatments of the symbolic child through their petitions to agents of the state. Finally, it reviews the ways that government officials and artistic intellectuals deployed rhetorical and visual tropes of the proletarian child as a national redeemer. While not strictly linear, the structure of this chapter should demonstrate the eventual emergence by the mid-1930s of a more politicized, though still idealized, understanding of revolutionary childhood.
Science: Conferences and the Professionalization of Pediatric Knowledge
The turn of the century marked the heyday of scientific approaches to pediatric knowledge worldwide. In the United States the Progressive Era (1890s through the end of World War I) ushered in a spate of social reforms that regulated children's health, hygiene, labor, education, and upbringing. Much of the legislation targeted the urban poor and immigrants; in the best of cases reformers looked upon these groups with compassion, although often they assumed a mission to civilize the perceived "dangerous classes." Porfirian positivists and American Progressives constituted the transnational intellectual milieu, a generation of social science intellectuals who exchanged and mutually informed national policies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. While Mexican professionals responded to Western scientific trends, adapting them to a nationalist discourse of constructing a modern mestizo nation, the period before the Americanization of social sciences (1930s—45) allowed Mexicans to enjoy a sliver of the global spotlight as an innovator in forging a modern nation. A wide range of citizen-building campaigns targeted women, children, and the family in the early twentieth century. Mexico emerged from its revolution enthusiastic to embrace a post—World War I era and join other modern nations that sought to expand the civic participation—if not full citizenship rights—of their historically marginalized populations. This section traces the evolution of scientific knowledge produced about and applied to Mexican children in the professional sphere.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of positivism—science-based methods of social improvement—with agents of hygiene focused on institutions for improving sanitary conditions. The Porfirian schoolhouse in Mexico City had as its goal the separation of the child from the home. In fact, schoolteachers literally washed the home off the children when they crossed the school's threshold, and the schools served as an enclosed fortress, completely distinct from children's familiar domestic spaces. Following the revolution, officials reversed the division of home and school and sought instead to bring both of these sectors in alignment with the revolutionary program. They carried this out most notably through the practice of social pediatrics and the 1929 introduction of home hygiene inspectors, concerned not just with children's illnesses but also with their place in the concentric human circles of the family, the classroom, and the community. In the revolutionary era scientific treatment of children acquired a strongly nationalist character administered by new professionals in the fields of eugenics, puericulture (the science of child care), pediatrics, and psychology. The overhaul of the educational system purported to draw the family into public education and extend the government's effort to sanitize institutions into the home.
A cadre of child specialists emerged who shared an intellectual continuity with the positivistas trained in the Porfirian era (1876—1911). Scientific knowledge about the child flowed from European techniques such as psychometrics and phrenology and acquired a Latin American flavor after being steeped in Vasconcelos's "cosmic race" ideology of mestizo racial fusion at the pinnacle of the human racial composite, a philosophy he developed over the course of his tenure as minister of education. The shift toward the child-centered approach to social hygiene received a boost from the 1924 Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child; by ratifying the agreements postulated in this international summit, Mexican officials positioned their nation among the foremost countries making economic and intellectual investments in the youth. A comparison of two major child-related conferences—the First Mexican Congress of the Child in 1921 and the VII Pan-American Child Congress in 1935—suggests the evolution of the professional treatment of children from one steeped in positivism to an attempt to foster meaningful civic engagement.
The touchstone event marking the revolution's commitment to children's health and hygiene came in the 1921 First Mexican Congress of the Child, financed and presided over by Dr. Félix Palavicini and sponsored by the government of Álvaro Obregón. The First Mexican Congress of the Child brought together the country's best and brightest professionals in a three-week showcase of strategies to prevent and correct any social, physical, or mental deviance among children. Professionals expounded on numerous topics in six sections: Eugenics, Education, Pediatric Surgery, Pediatric Medicine, Hygiene, and Legislation. Presentations outlined the successes and goals of the school lunch and free milk programs, the problems presented by children working alongside their parents in the markets, the creation of farm schools, ways to combat child delinquency, and legislation regarding child labor, among other themes. As a testament to its success, the event resulted in a second congress in 1923. Still, these early efforts established the child as a barometer of the nation's health. Integration of children into civic life had not yet entered the picture. The tenor of this conference stemmed directly from the Porfirian-style scientific approach to children, keeping in sight the end goal of perfecting the national population.
Palavicini's position as editor of the national daily paper El Universal also ensured favorable—and ample—coverage of the conference proceedings so that readers nationwide could be kept abreast of the progress of the revolutionary political elites. Months in advance of the conference's inauguration, Palavicini began to run public surveys about the significance of a professional gathering on this topic and published the enthusiastic acclaim in heady anticipation of the event. The children featured in the conference announcements, which Palavicini published almost daily, embodied the clean, cared-for, happy, lighter-skinned, middle-class ideal that the meeting sought to establish as the national standard (fig. 1). Palavicini's public canvasses both documented and fomented popular support for one of the revolutionary government's first professional initiatives in collaboration with the professional elites from the private sector. El Universal also benefited from a hearty dose of self-promotion, as Palavicini's charitable generosity in sponsoring the event did not go unattributed. Thus, the Porfirian paradigm of an alliance between government and intellectuals based on scientific "positive verification" had been restored, only this time draped in revolutionary rhetoric.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seen and Heard in Mexico by Elena Jackson Albarrán. Copyright © 2014 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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