Saturday, January 5, 2013: 11:50 AM
Cathedral Salon (Hotel Monteleone)
“The Children of the Mexican Foreign Service, 1876-1911.”This paper analyzes how Mexican diplomats educated and cared for their children abroad. The paper focuses on the quotidian experiences of children in a transnational context, analyzing the anxiety and alienation children experienced through education in British and French boarding schools. These institutions were ‘contact zones’ that reinforced class and family identity, influenced class-based gender roles, introduced them to the norms and circles of British ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ and continental high society, but also forced children to confront complex racial, gendered, and cultural politics. The education and travel of elite Mexican children contributes to our understanding of childhood’s agency in the history of diplomacy and transculturation. As future leaders, the children of privilege gained experiences and accumulated social and cultural capital that would be of great use to Mexico—and their families—once they came of age. Children’s education received much attention as it not only enhanced the entire family’s status, but their subsequent marital choice helped to expand diplomats’ reach and effectiveness, making diplomacy the result of an extended, multigenerational, and frequently transnational family enterprise. As Bianca Premo has observed, Latin American children often “circulated” among different institutions, and were not often the “product” of a single household, but rather contrived families from teachers and classmates while living and studying thousands of miles away from their biological families.[1] Sources for this paper include published and unpublished diaries, family correspondence and institutional archives in the United Kingdom and France, as well as the Archives of the Mexican and French Foreign Ministries.
[1] Bianca Premo, “How Latin America’s History of Childhood Came of Age,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 71.