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.
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