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Nara B. Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 18SQ-1930 (Durham: Duke University Press 2009)
IN THIS BEAUTIFULLY written and wellcrafted book, Nara B. Milanich convincingly argues that the family served as the nexus for class formation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chile. Combining poignant vignettes that bring to life the hardships faced by plebeian children with sharp analyses of civil law and elite discourse, this study makes a major contribution to the burgeoning historiography of children in Latin America. In addition, Children of Fate should become required reading for students of class and state formation beyond Latin America.
In a country where elite and popular narratives figured Chileans as uniformly mestizo, class, not race, emerged as the primary determinant of someone's place in the social hierarchy as the republican state took hold in the early nineteenth century. It was precisely at this juncture that the state came to confer rights and entitlements on practices and legal structures surrounding the family. As a consequence, the family came to establish a person's class location. Children from working, middle, and upper class families would be placed in their respective class positions based on filial ties; illegitimate children would consequently find themselves as part of a kinless underclass.
The Civil Code of 1857 figures prominently in Milanich's story. The brainchild of Andres Bello, one of Latin America's greatest intellectuals, the Code abolished colonial Spanish legal codes that had remained Chilean law throughout the first half century after independence. Chapter 1 examines how the civil code transformed family law, revolutionizing "the gender, generational, and class dynamics of filiation." (42) Most notably, the Code provided a legal structure for a liberal economy and for a patriarchal society. In the process, the code transformed the relationship between citizens and the state.
Milanich argues that the key difference between colonial and republican law focuses on the issue of paternity. While both laws disinherited illegitimate children, they acknowledged paternity differently. Colonial law granted paternity when there existed sentimental or economic ties between a man and a child or a man and the mother of the child in question. Drawing on 102 paternity suits, the author finds that women or children who took men to court over paternity...