Fostering "Our Best Immigrants": Brazil's National Children's Department, Child Health Initiatives, and Agricultural Education in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Brazil's Departamento Nacional da Criança, created in 1940, served as the central organizing body for the promotion of all aspects of child welfare policy.  In addition to its coordination of public services and its financial support for a variety of local and national programs, the department sponsored an annual Children's Week celebration and published popular parenting magazines.  These events and publications have left a rich evidence base from which to draw conclusions about how intellectuals and officials within the DNCr constructed children's roles in building Brazil's future.  This paper analyzes specific imagery, propaganda, and policy-making that promoted children as Brazil's "best immigrants." It examines programs and campaigns aimed at encouraging children's "fitness" (in terms of health, agricultural skills, and moral/civic values) to (re) populate Brazil's vast interior.  For example, throughout the  1940's many articles published in Criança, the DNCr's parenting magazine, encouraged agricultural education in the form of small-scale animal husbandry, gardening, agricultural clubs, and field trips to rural farms to instill a "love for the land" in Brazil's youngest generation. "Amor à terra" was also the thematic focus of the 1948 National Children's Week celebration. Finally, this paper analyzes imagery deriving from such publications and exhibits that used children to represent a sense of Brazilian national identity based on the racial, ethnic, class, and gender preferences of departmental officials.