NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Children and Youth of Color in History

New Newsletter Feature!!!  Participate in a Discussion of this Column.

To Our Readers:  The Newsletter editors, responding to readers’ requests for opportunities to interact with authors and share thoughts about the ideas published in the Newsletter, will host a discussion of Miroslava’s column through the h-net listserv, h-childhood.   On March 30, Miroslava will make a start-up posting, inviting your response to her Newsletter column.  The discussion will be time limited; based on a model used by other h-net groups, we will monitor the discussion for three days, through April 1. Plan to join us on the 30th -- we are looking forward to a rousing and thoughtful conversation.  Not an h-childhood subscriber?  You can join at http://www.h-net.org/~child/

“Weaving the Threads”
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, UC Davis

The study of children and youth of color in history is an exciting and increasingly rich field yet it is widely dispersed. A cursory survey of works in the field indicates that this body of literature crosses many historical time periods and regions across the United States, focuses on various ethnic and racial groups, and addresses a wide variety of historical themes and issues. The goal of the Winter 2009 column is to “weave the threads”—or to draw the links—and to bring some cohesion to the field and, at the same time, to invite readers to share any observations, research, and interests pertaining to children and youth of color in history, as this column is open to dialogue and exchange.

In writing and thinking about the study of children and youth of color in history, I find myself pausing to consider what, if anything, unifies this body of literature? Is it useful to think about it as a field? Or, is it more productive to treat it like a subfield of youth studies or ethnic studies? As experience has taught me, treating it as a subfield of youth or ethnic studies marginalizes the study of children and youth of color, rendering it second class. Just as we would not call women’s history a subfield of United States history, the study of children and youth of color, I argue, merits attention to the particular themes and issues that unify the literature.

The basic premise of this column is that race and ethnicity, along with class, gender, and region, shaped the material realities and experiences of children and youth of color in ways that differed for white, or Euro-American children and youth. As we all know, childhood is a socially and culturally constructed concept. Children and youth of color, the body of works suggest, share more in common than they share with white children and youth. The question of whether it is a field is, of course, still open to discussion but in the meantime I proceed with the idea that this is a field of study with common themes threading the literature. For this issue, then, my goal is to identify and weave those threads into a larger fabric that maps the main currents of the field yet also allows for the variability and complexity of the field to surface. To illustrate the diversity and unity of the field, the column pays attention first, to the overall themes, and second, to the general experience of particular groups, including Native American, African American, Mexican American/Latino, and Asian American children and youths. In the next issue, Summer 2009, I will provide samples of current and forthcoming work illustrating the larger themes mapped out in this piece.

Some of the most salient themes in the study of children and youth of color in history are forced captivity and servitude, forced assimilation and accommodation, enslavement and slavery, resistance and survival, war and conquest, and racism, prejudice, and marginalization. In the field of Native American history, in particular, the removal of children and youths from their families and communities and their forced assimilation at boarding schools throughout the United States has received significant attention. Current studies not only document the ways in which federal and state institutions impinged on their everyday lives but also how Native American youngsters found ways to resist, survive, and in other ways deal with the realities of their experiences. Such insight comes from autobiographies, oral interviews, and personal letters of former boarding school students.

The study of African American youngsters, in contrast to their Native American counterparts, appears to have a wider range of topics from which to choose from. The experience of children and youth in slavery, most notably, has received significant attention. These works examine and analyze the conditions under which young people and their families endured, survived, and resisted the brutal system of chattel slavery in the United States. Despite those conditions, some authors demonstrate that young African Americans used songs and games, as well as other means, to deal with harsh realities of enslavement and find a way to survive.

In addition to slavery, scholars have produced studies on the crucial role of young people in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the black power movement of the 1960s as well as on the experience of Black children and youth in the juvenile justice system, specifically the juvenile court—and its precursor in the nineteenth century, the reform school. The latter works demonstrate how, in the post-slavery period, the court and larger system often imprisoned children and youth in order to gain access to their labor.

Scholarship on Black teens and girls, topics which have yet to be fully researched and written, has also emerged, as have the personal memoirs and testimonies documenting the meaning of childhood and youth for poor Blacks living in racially divided regions throughout the United States, both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, works on the experience of biracial youth across a wide spectrum of racial and ethnic groups, in the United States and Europe, have appeared, documenting the ways in which young people negotiated the meaning of race.

Scholars focusing on Latino children and youth have primarily studied the experience of Mexican and Mexican American youngsters, both girls and boys. These works have paid attention to education and the role of race, ethnicity, and the law in creating unequal and separate school systems for Mexicans and Mexican Americans throughout the southwest and specifically in places such as Texas and California. Youth culture, specifically of the zoot suiters of the 1940s, also known as “pachucos” and “pachucas,” has also been examined. These works demonstrate the generational conflicts these young American-born Mexicans faced with their largely immigrant parents as well as the tensions and violent exchanges they often faced in a society that largely misunderstood and marginalized them.

In addition to youth culture and schooling, scholars have produced studies on the experiences of Mexican American or Chicano youth in the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s; on the lives of poor and unwanted Mexican and Mexican American youngsters who ended up in the juvenile justice system; on the strategies Mexican immigrant children and youth deployed in the early twentieth century both in the border region as well as in the Midwest to survive impoverishment and marginalization. Other topics include generational conflicts, child labor, and growing up biracial in the United States.

Research on children and youth in Latin America, though not adequately surveyed for our purposes, appears promising. Mexican scholars, for instance, have dealt with the themes of labor and exile in the Americas.

Finally, the study of Asian American children and youth appears to be the most dispersed. Research has focused on Chinese Americans in the juvenile court, Korean adoptees in the United States, courtship and generational conflicts among Japanese Americans, and the role of gender, identity formation, and consumer culture in the lives of teen agers and college-age youths.

Clearly, this survey has only scratched at the surface of the kind of work that scholars have produced and are producing but it is a first step in pulling together a seemingly disparate, yet closely linked field of study. The task of identifying and examining the scholarship in this field, I must admit, is a daunting for one person alone, namely me.  I see this as a collective effort and invite you to send your comments and thoughts to the h-childhood discussion, beginning March 30.