PANEL ORGAN - KIIT University

what a baby, a girl or a boy is. Based on rigorous and long-term researches that contribute
to the understanding of children in Latin America through time, this panel brings
knowledge about children in Latin America past and present contributing to analyze
similarities and differences of childhoods and children in the region.
PAPER PRESENTERS
GUADARRAMA, Nadia Marin, School of Political and Social Sciences, Autonomous
University of the State of Mexico and State University of New York at Albany, E-mail:
Loving and Rearing Nahua Children in Early Colonial Mexico: The Reconfiguration of
Discourses about Meanings of Childhood and Practices of Childrearing
This paper illustrates why and in what terms the meanings of indigenous childrearing and
childhoods were discussed and depicted in a Mesoamerican setting of the XVI Century.
During that early colonial period, Nahuas from Central Mexico realized that Spanish
colonizers were interested in learning about and transforming even the most intimate
aspects of their lives, including the meaning of a child and childrearing. In the process,
friars and Nahuas had agreements or experienced contradictions regarding how girls or
boys should be raised. Today, ethnographic, ecclesiastic and civil documents written in
Nahuatl by male Nahua scholars and Christian friars are a window to explore this
sociocultural confrontation. Preliminary conclusions show that in this historical period, the
discourses related to childrearing practices as well as childhood entered into a process of
reconfiguration that ended up in the impoverishment of practices and moral patterns that
Nahuas built over centuries.
CORONA-CARAVEO, Yolanda, UniversidadAutónoma, Metropolitana Xochimilco, E-
mail:
Generational Changes in Children’s Involvement in Community Endeavors. Work,
School, Play and Ceremonial Life in a Central Mexican Town
This paper describes experiences of childhoods in four different generations in Tepoztlán,
Mexico. Through testimonies of people between ten and eighty-nine years old, it reports
childhood periods from the first to the last decade of the 20th century, structuring the
findings according to four main activities in which children have engaged in their everyday
lives: work, school, play, and ceremonial activity. The analysis of the data shows that
intensive participation in communal activities—particularly productive work, was the main
form of socialization among the first two generations. The progressive institutionalization
of schooling brought severe tensions between work and school, through the introduction of
different forms of learning unrelated to the cultural practices. In the last two generations
the forms of socialization in the community were displaced to the arena of religious
festivals, a celebratory setting in which the local view of the world is transmitted to
children and young people.
HECHT, Ana Carolina, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), yConsejoNacional de
InvestigacionesCientíficas y Técnicas (CONICET)/University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and
National Council of Scientific and Technical Investigations (CONICET),
E-mail: anacarolinahecht@yahoo.com.ar
Identity and Language Socialization of Toba Children in Buenos Aires, Argentina
This paper examines the role of children in the dynamics of sociolinguistic changes and the
construction of the ethno-linguistic identity. In general, it analyzes the relationship