Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas
Dr. Elena Jackson Albarrán
Tuesday, September 16, 2025 | 03:00 pm
Latin American and Iberian Institute (801 Yale Blvd NE)
801 Yale Blvd NE (campus building #165)
About:
Children and ideas about children have long been central to the power relations that inform hemispheric politics. Due to emerging media and transportation technologies in the 1930s and 1940s, children were drawn into the public sphere in unprecedented ways, their heightened visibility offering greater opportunities for metaphors of childhood to be applied to the changing relationship between Latin American nation-states and the rest of the world. Political and cultural rhetoric assumed certain qualities of childhood, modern Western constructs that the children of the Americas themselves embodied in uneven ways.
Dr. Elena Jackson Albarrán is a Professor of History and Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University. She is a historian of Mexico and a scholar of childhood, a founding member of the Red de Estudios de la Historia de las Infancias en América Latina (REHIAL), and authored the books Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (winner of the María Elena Martínez Book Prize 2015) and Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (honorable mention for the Grace Abbott Book Prize, 2025), among many other chapters and journal articles. She won the Teaching Award from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH, 2025) for her advocacy for Latin American Studies in the classroom.
Notes:
This event is free and open to the public.
