The “Good Neighbor” period of inter-American relations, running from 1933 through the Second World War, is named for a metaphor of social relations and proximity. Under the guise of being neighborly in a diplomatic sense, the United States heavily invested in cultivating goodwill and mutual understanding with Latin America. But layered into this neighborhood schema for hemispheric relations were other metaphors that assigned a childlike state to Latin American nations when compared with the United States, a “mature” elder in this symbolic family. Adults funded Good Neighbor policies and wrote the dominant narratives about their symbolic children, but they gave real children plenty of work to do embodying hemispheric friendliness. Elena Jackson Albarrán seeks out those children’s voices and experiences in the historical record, showing that a few children, having been conscripted as political symbols, leveraged their visibility to pursue their own ends. Yet children’s involvement in cultural diplomacy mostly served the interests of the powerful adults, who were committed to naturalizing inequalities between nations, races, and older and younger people. Albarrán’s book mainly features Mexico and the United States, but it also substantively engages with other parts of the region.

Since the nineteenth century, thinkers and politicians throughout the hemisphere wielded figurative language that infantilized Latin American countries and their people. Family and age categories seemed natural, Albarrán argues, because they were rooted in the inexorable structures of the modern Americas: white supremacy, capitalist extraction, and US pretensions to global hegemony. Her first empirical case study considers how US artist Elsa Rogo trained a small cohort of boys in the cosmopolitan town of Taxco, located in the Mexican state of Guerrero, to produce artworks in the Primitivist style. These works reflected their youthful commitment to artistry, savvy, and access to resources. But when US audiences viewed their oeuvre, they attributed the boys’ talent not to individual promise or effort but to Mexicans’ supposedly inherent artistic disposition. Aesthetic admiration for Mexican art, one form of US good-neighborliness, still demeaned children, Indigenous people, and Mexico writ large.

The second case study shifts focus away from the United States-as-hemispheric-hegemon (always a refreshing move) to consider nationalist Mexico as an emerging revolutionary exemplar on the world stage. Albarrán revisits a well-known episode in Mexican history in which the left-leaning government of Lázaro Cárdenas accepted several hundred children from Spain, then in the throes of its civil war, as wards of the Mexican state. By caring for these “orphans,” Mexico wielded the sentimental power of suffering children for high-impact political theater. But the performance of the new and powerful Mexican state adopting needy children from the old colonial mother country, also involved real children, both Spanish and Mexican, whose experiences living and studying together at a special school sometimes diverged from the official script. The Spanish children experienced coercion and mistreatment, resisted, and opted out of the experiment by fleeing. Poignantly, the Spanish Republican parents whose children had been “adopted” by Mexico found little interest from the Mexican state in helping the families to reunite.

The final case study examines how official Pan-Americanism, promoted by the US government and disseminated by US mass media and educators, enlisted real children to enact “friendly relations” in the hemisphere. US teachers prepared schoolchildren to perform inaccurate, stereotyped representations of Latin America for local communities. US and Latin American teenagers became pen pals and tried to explain their nations to themselves and to each other. Pan-Americanism even underwrote a few actual in-person encounters between US and Latin American children, as in the case of two adolescent diplomats, one US American and one Brazilian, who represented their respective countries.

The book’s three parts, each comprising an introduction and two chapters, easily stand alone; all are well written and generous with contextualization, making the work suitable for undergraduate courses on history of childhood and family or US–Latin American relations. Today, when the current tone of inter-American relations is simply hostile, Albarrán’s book can be read as a caution against nostalgia for the Good Neighbor era. Metaphors of age and family, and the real-life exchanges they engendered, did nothing to put the regions’ nations on more equal footing. US-based Latin Americanist scholars must grapple with the politics of research and teaching in our field in light of this history.