Children Lost, Children Found: Literature, Education, and Memory in Transitional Argentina (1982-2000)

Abstract

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive historical analysis of childhood and the figure of the young “child” in Argentina’s transition from dictatorship to democracy (1983-2000). Moving young children from the margins to the center of national history and political narratives, the dissertation examines the importance of the Argentine child during this moment as a manifestation of socio-cultural and political anxieties about responsibility, memory, and citizenship. It uses historical analysis as well as literary and trauma theory to understand the ways in which a range of educators, state officials, human rights activists, and authors inscribed Argentine children, both real and imagined, as the inheritors of a violent past and saviors of a democratic future. To do so, the dissertation examines a range of materials from the late dictatorship period through the transition: educational laws and reforms, educational policy and conferences, children’s textbooks (manuales), children’s literature about the dictatorship (three works by pioneering Argentine author Graciela Montes), activist outreach on behalf of disappeared Argentines and their children (by Las Madres, Las Abuelas, and HIJOS), human rights education reports (by UNESCO, the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos [APDH], and the Ministry of Education), and finally, professional magazines about children’s literature and pedagogy (Piedra Libre and La Mancha). Collectively, these sources shed new light about how adults during the transitional period placed Argentine childhood at the center of transitional society, moving over time from a vision of children as victims and innocents to one of knowledge and agency.