Children of Fate

In "Children of Fate", Nara B. Milanich argues that the social and legal practices surrounding the concept of kinship in Chile emerged in and helped sustain the social inequalities that have characterized Latin American societies historically. She focuses on the status of children to illuminate the ways Chilean social and legal filial practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries powerfully influenced and altered the lives of individuals as well as larger cultural patterns of social class, child rearing, and gender relations. The codification of civil law in the nineteenth century transformed the legal definition of filiation - the relation between a child and its parents - enhancing the power of men over women and fathers over children. "Children of Fate" traces the complex socio-cultural and legal-bureaucratic dimensions of family in Chile, exploring issues of paternity, illegitimacy, kinship, and child circulation over the course of eighty years of Chile's modern history. Milanich's narrative begins in the 1850s with the legal transformations wrought by the new Civil Code, which left the paternity of illegitimate children purposely unrecorded, and concludes in 1930 when changes in familial practices, public rhetoric, and law signal an important break in the histories of the Chilean state, class relations, families, and children. In a state in which natal kinship was a crucial part of an individual's identity, the legal and social practices surrounding the family created a huge underclass that was anonymous, bereft of kin, dependent on the charity of others, and marginalized from public bureaucracies. "Children of Fate" fills in the gaps that the abiding scholarly focus on states and their discourses leave, and reveals children as a productive lens for understanding class, law, liberalism, patriarchy, and state formation in post-colonial Latin America.