Childhood, Wardship, and Work Regimes in Amazonia

Highlighting childhood(s) in Latin America as plural, shaped by race, class, and gender, this presentation examines child work regimes in Manaus, a city in the middle of the Amazon in Brazil. This study examines how wardship legislation and practices reinforced structures of relational power, wherein orphanhood functioned strategically in the circulation and control of children. Drawing from Brazilian legal history, this analysis reveals that orphanhood was not merely a state of abandonment, but a legal and social construct deeply tied to racialized labor practices and women's incomplete citizenship. The Orphans Judges played a crucial role in distributing free labor under the pretext of protection, perpetuating Brazil’s legacy of slavocracy, paternalism, and patrimonialism. These mechanisms of control extended into the postcolonial period, sustaining racial and class hierarchies through the regulation of child labor. Missionary discourses, rooted in charity and Christianity, legitimized child separation during the colonial period. Framed as child-saving missions, the removal of children and insertion into wardship regimes operated within white savior logics that sought to impose a hegemonic notion of childhood and family and specific morals and lifestyle. The historiography of colonialism has largely overlooked these enduring consequences, allowing their postcolonial reincarnations. The paternalistic treatment of domestic workers, particularly the practice of raising non-white girls in servitude under the guise of civilization, exemplifies these persistent dynamics. Wardship laws in the nineteenth century not only constructed the problem of orphanhood but also imposed a solution that served elite interests by controlling and deploying child labor. Non-white caregivers and traditional child circulation practices were delegitimized as dangerous, necessitating forced assimilation into Western familial structures. This paper critically examines these historical processes to illuminate their contemporary manifestations in child labor and domestic servitude in the Amazon, revealing how colonial legacies persist in shaping childhood and labor regimes today.