Abstract
This chapter is an experimental reflection on historical methods for reading child-produced sources found in the archive; it uses Albarrán’s own childhood diary from 1986 as a starting point. Albarrán theorizes research methodologies in the context of writing child-centered history by pairing what the author knows now, with the benefit of hindsight, with what the child knower of the past documented. She is, and is not, the “same” subject as her child self. The diary is read under conditions similar to those in which decontextualized child-produced sources are encountered by historians in the archive to demonstrate the slipperiness of interpretation of such sources. Finally, the author subjects her 1980s American childhood to a comparative analysis with contemporary diaries produced in Chile under a violently oppressive dictatorship to shed light on the relativity of trauma as a quotidian part of child life. This self-critical reflection illustrates the role that the historian can play in mediating self-narratives in the broader context of geopolitical events and very different global positionalities.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Karen Sánchez-Eppler (2005) observed that boys tended to be more concerned with record-keeping, indexing, and “business”-related diary practices than girls.
- 2.
I analyze a similar phenomenon through a set of handmade “sextuplicate” letters by similarly aged Mexican schoolchildren in the 1930s, in which the repetition of their signatures suggests the conscious practice of replicating adult bureaucracy, in Seen and Heard in Mexico (Albarrán 2015, 229–231).
- 3.
French theorist Philippe Lejeune is the leading scholar of diaries.
- 4.
The traveling exhibition Infancias en dictadura was first presented at the Galería de la Memoria del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile from April 26–July 10, 2016.
References
Albarrán, Elena Jackson. 2015. Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Alexander, Christine. 2005. “Defining and Representing Literary Juvenilia.” In The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf, edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, 70–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alted Vigil, Alicia. 2015. “El diario de Conxita como documento histórico.” In Conxita Simarro, Diario de una niña en tiempos de guerra y exilio, 1938–1944, edited by Susana Sosenski, 31–48. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
Arias y Simarro, Rita. 2015. “Prólogo.” In Conxita Simarro, Diario de una niña en tiempos de guerra y exilio, 1938–1944, edited by Susana Sosenski, 7–11. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
Benjamin, Walter. 2006. On Hashish. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Castillo, Patricia. 2018. “Cultura material, memoria, y microhistoria de la infancia.” In Infâncias e juventudes no século XX: histórias latino-americanas, edited by Silvia Maria F. Arend, Esmeralda Blanco B. de Moura, and Susana Sosenski, 195–231. Ponta Grossa: Todapalavra.
Hunter, Jane H. 1992. “Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America.” American Quarterly 44 (1) (March): 51–81.
Infancias en dictadura: Testigos y actores (1973–1990). 2016. Exhibition catalog. Santiago de Chile: Galería de la Memoria del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos.
Lejeune, Philippe. 1990. La practique du journal personnel: equête. Nanterre: Centre de sémiotique textuelle, Université de Paris X.
Llobet, Valeria. 2017. “Francisca el 11 de septiembre: acerca de la producción de la experiencia infantil en Chile del golpe militar.” Castalia 29 (5): 6–15.
Maynes, Mary Jo. 2021. “Representing and Documenting Childhood in Autobiographies and Graphic Memoirs.” In Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Context, edited by Deborah Levison, Mary Jo Maynes, and Frances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rabe, Stephen G. 2016. The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. 2005. Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. 2013. “In the Archives of Childhood,” In The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane, 213–237. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Schlotterbeck, Marian. 2017. “The Politics of Childhood in Pinochet’s Chile: the 1979 UNICEF International Year of the Child.” Paper presented at the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Camden NJ.
Sosenski, Susana. 2015. “Las voces infantiles en la historia,” in Conxita Simarro, Diario de una niña en tiempos de guerra y exilio, 1938–1944, edited by Susana Sosenski, 13–30. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
Steedman, Carolyn. 1995. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Kelly Quinn, Charlotte Goldy and her History Methods students at Miami University and Susana Sosenski for inspiration and collegiality.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Albarrán, E.J. (2021). “So How’s Your Childhood Going?” A Historian of Childhood Confronts Her Own Archive. In: Levison, D., Maynes, M.J., Vavrus, F. (eds) Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63632-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63632-6_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-63631-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-63632-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)