Date:
Location:
This lecture describes the harrowing phenomenon of 19th-century child servitude in Peru’s capital, Lima, by upper-middle households. It builds upon a wide historical archive, mixing poems, short stories, print media articles, and, mostly, advertisements about the search for runaway child-servants. These graphic archives paint a grim picture of racialized bodies stripped of their agency and how children were trafficked: the ways they were exchanged for goods with the hope of better education or social mobility for their kids, or how these kids were simply abducted from their original families. Having unpaid servants at home also operated as a symbol of social status for Lima’s bourgeoisie.
Drawing on this 19th-century media archives, we can explore how depictions of Indigenous urban children, also known as cholitos, embodied contradictions of Lima’s ruling class: lettered men denouncing child servitude while also condoning violent structures within their own homes; opposing the complete dominance over the child’s body while also maintaining social hierarchies to satisfy their need of displaced domestic labor.
Finally, this presentation offers a connection to present-day advertisements/posts in Lima’s 21st century, exposing how the current industry of domestic labor in Latin America still replicates colonial structures of power and child servitude from the 19th century, by marginalizing Andean women and children.
Welcoming Remarks: Américo Mendoza-Mori, Lecturer Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, Faculty Director, Latinx Studies Working Group.
Speaker: Dr. Marcel Velázquez Castro, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Moderator: The Harvard Andean Working Group.
Presented in collaboration with the Harvard University Department of History, the Harvard Department of Anthropology, the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR), and Quechua Initiative on Global Indigeneity at Harvard
Contact: Jose Carlos Fernandez Salas jfernandez@g.harvard.edu