Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850 – 1930

Abstract

This richly researched and closely argued study by Nara Milanich examines the experiences of children from 1850 to 1930 to reveal how Chile’s liberal state, premised on individual equality before the law, produced inequality. Drawing extensively from judicial and notarial sources and the records of Santiago’s Casa de Huérfanos, Milanich elucidates the instrumental role of kinship in state and class formation. Families able to document their relationships had access to the state’s expanding repertoire of entitlements, which fortified their status and privilege. In contrast, a “kinless” underclass was excluded from legal, social, and political benefits.The concept of filiation, encompassing the parent-child relationship, genealogy, and civil status as legitimate or illegitimate, is central to Milanich’s analysis. Chile’s liberal civil code of 1857 instituted state oversight of the life cycle and tightened the means for establishing filiation. Milanich explores the law’s consequences by examining paternity investigations, a means for single mothers or their children to establish the rights of illegitimate offspring to support and inheritance from their fathers. The 1857 civil code eliminated this recourse, instead requiring fathers to make a formal declaration to establish paternity. Only children born before the code went into effect could still file paternity suits. Milanich demonstrates the importance of the principle of “social congruity” in the outcomes of such cases. When fathers failed to recognize their illegitimate children but raised them as social equals, the courts considered such treatment de facto recognition. In contrast, courts ruled that fathers who placed their illegitimate children to be reared by families of lower social standing or required them to support themselves from an early age demonstrated that they considered them social inferiors and thus not kin. Milanich contends that court interpretations of cultural practice illuminate how differential experiences in childhood established indelible class status.Milanich examines the fate of people “dispossessed” of filiation. For example, anyone who could not produce certification of parentage could not marry. Children born of informal unions were not only defined as illegitimate but lacked legal identity. This was the status of tens of thousands of children abandoned to Santiago’s Casa de Huérfanos. Although many children arrived at the Casa with notes identifying both parents and requesting that the parents’ surname be given at baptism, the Casa neither recorded fathers’ identity nor bestowed the requested names, systematically erasing filiation. As the state bureaucracy expanded, the deficits of kinlessness also grew in ways seemingly unrelated to family law: for example, shoeshiners who could not prove their age could not obtain licenses. The vast majority of kinless individuals, erased as social subjects, were poor, revealing yet again how kinship or lack of it marked, maintained, and reproduced class status.Milanich also explores the implications of child circulation, the movement of children out of their natal families. Children usually circulated out of socially and economically vulnerable families, often headed by single women. Children who moved into more privileged households usually did so as working dependents. That kind of fostering, especially of girls as domestics, was considered charity and consigned them, Milanich argues, to a lifetime of dependence and subordination. Children also circulated into other working-class households. Here, Milanich traces the economies of child nurture that reproduced Chile’s rural and urban informal labor force. Many young rural women who migrated to the city in search of domestic work bore children out of wedlock and placed them with class peers for nursing and raising so that they could return to work. Or they relinquished them to the Casa, which sent them to be nursed in the countryside. Children raised in the homes of others were called criados or huachos and worked without pay, identity, or rights. Children sent to rural families were likely to enter the floating population of peons, unattached rural laborers. These dynamics expose the centrality of child nurture practices to the reproduction of informal labor sectors.The premises underlying the laws and social practice that created and enforced the marginalization of illegitimate children contravene modern understandings of childhood. In an epilogue, Milanich explains that the transnational child protection movement of the early twentieth century provoked debate among Chileans about children’s rights and the nation’s filiation laws. Yet correction came slowly. Minor legal adjustments emerged by midcentury, but an overhaul of filiation law was delayed until 1998!The phenomena examined in Children of Fate resonate with trends throughout Latin America, giving this study broad relevance. Historians of the family will appreciate how Milanich’s analysis refreshes and enriches key concepts and reaffirms the centrality of family in state formation. Gender historians will be interested in her nuanced insights into the overlap of private and public patriarchy. Historians of labor will note her discussion of the reproduction of informal labor sectors. Most importantly, Milanich makes it clear that the history of childhood permeates metahistorical questions about social and cultural change and class and state formation and lies at the heart of the answers.

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