Infancia educada: el niño nuevo

Abstract

We propose to explore the unique experience of education undergone by the children of MIR (Chile) and Montoneros (Argentine) activists, when their parents returned to their countries to resume armed struggle, leaving their children in nurseries set up in Cuba at the end of the 70s. For this purpose, we analyze a corpus of two documentaries and a book, within the second generation of children (HIJOS) from Chile and Argentine, El edificio de los chilenos (2010) directed by Macarena Aguiló and Susana Foxley, La guardería (2015) directed by Virginia Croatto, and the book by Analía Argento La Guardería montonera: La vida en Cuba de los hijos de la Contraofensiva (2013). This corpus on educated childhood permits the analysis of two issues. Firstly, the conception of the radical left about children and their education on new values and knowledge. The large cultural production of the second generation presents children under the array of State terrorism, suffering from missing parents and orphanhood, in clandestinity or exile, even being born in a Clandestine detention center, kidnapped, appropriated and delivered to new families. While on the contrary, in few opportunities there is access to the ideals that the Left projected on their children as suitable subjects in the revolutionary era. Secondly, these authors manifest the HIJOS interventions and their diverse ways to articulate cultural practices of memory in the present time, which reveal differences as regards particular political contexts in the transitions to democracy and personal choices.