ABSTRACT

Readers may ask what an essay on Latin America is doing in a book that takes the West, defined culturally and historically, as its focus. Certainly Latin America's conceptual relationship to the West has long been a complex and contradictory one. The region is often seen as part of the West and yet as one of “the rest,” or to invoke another famous formulation, as simultaneously “in” but not “of” the West. 1 But precisely because of this ambiguous relationship, Latin America provides a useful lens for scrutinizing western children's history and the analytic paradigms that frame it.