Growing up in Latin America

Growing up in Latin America is a collection of essays centered on the representation of the political and historical agency of children and youth within the sociohistorical panorama of Latin American countries during the 20th and 21st centuries. Questions of gender, migration, violence, postcoloniality, and precarity are central to this volume.

Growing up in Latin America contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the representation of children and minors in contemporary Latin American literature and film. This volume looks closely at the question of agency and the role of minors as active participants in the complex historical processes of the Latin American continent during the 20th and 21st centuries, both as national citizens and as transnational migrants. Questions of gender, migration, violence, post-coloniality, and precarity are central to the analysis of childhood and youth narratives in this collection of essays.

Introduction: “Relational Agency of Minors in Latin American Narratives”

Marco Ramírez Rojas

Chapter 1. Some Notes on Latin American Childhood

Pilar Osorio Lora

Part I. Growing Up Queer: Narrative and Constructed Memories

Chapter 2. Growing up Queer in Mexico City: Rebellious Identities in Tryno Maldonado, Antonio Alatorre, and Sara Levi Calderón

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

Chapter 3. The Dark Night of Mexico: Picaresque, Sexuality, and Violence In El Vampiro De La Colonia Roma and Las Púberes Canéforas

Rafael Hernández Rodríguez

Chapter 4. Between Places: Physical and Mnemonic Spaces in the Paraguayan film 108 Cuchillo de palo

Rafaela Fiore Urízar

Part II. Coming-of-Age in Between Places: Narratives of Migration

Chapter 5. The Child That Looks: Childhood, Migration, and Ecology in El Camino

Alicia V. Nuñez.

Chapter 6. Feeling Good: “Affect Aliens” of the Colombian Diaspora in Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera

Astrid Lorena Ochoa Campo

Chapter 7. Childhood on the back of La Bestia: fictions about adults and migration to the United States

Rodrigo Pardo Fernández

Part III. In The Shadow of Revolutions

Chapter 8. Agency and Learning from the Edges: Everybody Leaves As a Female Novel of Formation in Post-Soviet Cuba

Marco Ramírez Rojas

Chapter 9. School Bullying As A Metaphor For The Socio-Political Situation In Castro’s Cuba (“A La Vencida Va La Tercera” By Yomar González – Camionero By Sebastián Miló)

Nicolás Balutet

Part IV. The Subalternities of Minors: Violence, Sexual Abuse, and Disabilities

Chapter 10. Children, Ghosts and Masks in The Mexican Narco-Zone: A Mediated Agency. A Comparative Analysis Of Four Fiction Films And Documentaries

Sophie Duffays

Chapter 11. She takes pleasure in the sins of the flesh: Child and Youth Abuse in the Narrative of Ecuadorian Female Writers of the 21st Century

Silvia Ruiz Tresgallo

Chapter 12. In the Name of Darkness. Coloniality and Disability in Mariana Enriquez’s Nuestra parte de noche (2019)

Carlos Ayram

Part V. Embodied Learnings: Ethics, Affects, and Transcendence

Chapter 13. Embodied Ethics in Los ríos profundos and La Rue Cases-Nègres

Jeffrey Diteman

Chapter 14. Formation and Ontological Transcendence in Giovanna Rivero’s 98 segundos sin sombra and Magela Baudoin’s El sonido de la H

Alexander Torres