Skip to main content

Spring 2026 Charlas con Café | The Politics of Childhood and Empire in the Americas: Case Studies from the Good Neighbor Era

Poster

When

1 – 2 p.m., March 27, 2026
The Center for Latin American Studies is partnering with the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry this spring to host the Charlas con Café Speaker Series – a weekly space to hear lectures from a wide variety of experts and discuss topics relevant to the Latin American region, Fridays from 1-2 pm (unless otherwise specified). Coffee and snacks starting at 12:30pm!
 

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. Case studies drawn from the recent book Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2025) illustrate the power that children, and ideas about children, had in forming consent and resistance to neoimperial designs on Latin America.

Presenter: Dr. Elena Jackson Albarrán, Professor of History, Miami University of Ohio
 
Elena Jackson Albarrán is Professor of History and of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University of Ohio. She earned both her M.A. in Latin American Studies and her Ph.D. in History at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the political and symbolic spaces for children in state, nation, and empire-building projects. She is author of two monographs, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Nebraska 2015) (winner of the María Elena Martínez Book Prize) and Good Neighbor Empires: Children and Cultural Capital in the Americas (Brill 2025) (honorable mention for the Grace Abbott Book Prize), as well as many articles and chapters on the history of Latin American childhood, empire, and historical methodology. She was recognized as the inaugural winner of the Teaching Prize (2025) from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH), for her advocacy for the Latin American Studies curriculum in an embattled higher education climate. She is a founding member of the Red de Estudios de la Historia de las Infancias en América Latina (2014), and serves as Executive Vice President of her faculty union.
 
In partnership with the School of Global Studies and the Department of History