not children, they have in their faces the premature gravity of a man, they already have the grin of suffering, of a pain or work [...] for that reason we say that such childhood is, we mean a certain childhood, not but a childhood by name” La Clase Media, January 5, 1909: 1. The marks are ours).
REPRESENTATIONS OF CHILDHOOD IN MODERN MEXICO In the last decades of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century, this perspective of childhood reached the top development in the Western world. For such purpose it had the support by the modern State and the creation of ideal political and cultural conditions, thanks to the consolidation of a set of institutional mechanisms that covered several areas and subjects, among it is worth emphasizing those among pediatrics, sociology, children’s psychology and school hygiene. Between 1880 and 1914 concepts and knowledge that had childhood as their subject matter got consolidated and diversified in several areas: Paediatrics, which gained full legitimacy by its incorporation into the different syllabus and medicine programs in several European, American and Spanish– American universities, by helping in that acknowledged and constant concerns such as children's mortality showed up for the first time as a national security issue in the political horizon of Governments, and pedagogy which incorporated the evolutionist viewpoint of Darwin’s works and envisaged school as a laboratory par excellence to conduct important school hygiene research, as well as the use of anthropometrical study rooms where children’s minds and bodies were thoroughly studied. For such a purpose, it counted with the emergence of a strong children's psychology in charge of the first psychometric tests regarding intelligence. Both pediatrics and pedagogy in the late 20th century were part of a "episteme", that
is, a systematization of knowledge that, in this case was organized around the need to “look towards the inside”, to make "the invisible conspicuous", to manage and produce administrative and dialectic apparatus that gave way to the conditions to perceive what is different, the individuals and the set of regulations (Foucault 1981) The scientific perception of medicine and pedagogy allowed the conceptualization of unknown aspects that changed the conception of the children's stage and the way of thinking and pondering its characteristics and concerns. At the same time, in those times, cultural conditions for a different perception of reality were created. Instruments that enabled such transformation were lithography, engraving and photography. Especially the former significantly helped to strengthen the confidence and optimism in the technique and progress that characterized the expectations of dominant groups and of an important sector of western society by the second half of the 19th century. According to the prevailing rules marked by positivism of the epoch, photography was scientific to the extent in which it provided visible evidence: “Photography was born in a time that claimed to be the age of absolute knowledge [...] By triggering a radical change in every technique for description, registration and representation, photography “accomplished” so to speak, or at least it made it possible, something that could be referred to an absolute knowledge of the visible world. The profound confidence –stubborn, even fierce– from scientists in this era consists of making photographically possible, everything that escapes to them, everything that outruns natural vision, what is too close or far away, what is hidden in the folds of the body, what is transparent, what disappears, and even the soul” (Huberman 1988: 71). The underlying premises in the very development of scientific knowledge during 2|2006
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