Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas

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 children’s 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 a...