“Children of Fate will be a point of reference in the history of childhood in Latin America and beyond, not only because of its skillful interweaving of laws and forgotten lives, but also because of the eloquent balance struck between social and legal histories and private and public relations. It is accessible without being simplistic, adventuresome without leading the reader somewhere very obscure. While the historiography is specific to Chile, the book has something for most scholars of Latin American history. It can also be read alongside the most debated writings on the history of European childhood.” - Tobias Hecht, Journal of Social History
“[Children of Fate] proved to be a fascinating and well documented investigation on how civil law in Chile handled the problem of poor, marginalized, illegitimate children during an 80 year period of modern history.” - Nancy Thomas, Mil Gracias Blog
“[A] groundbreaking study of the ways in which cultural, social, and legal constructs defining family and kinship produced and propagated social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality. . . . This book makes an important contribution to a relatively scant body of historical work on family, class, and the state in pre-1930s Chile. . . . Milanich’s study is also commendable for its effective use of a difficult and fragmented source set spread over several cities and institutions.” - Alison J. Bruey, History
“Milanich has written a fascinating and historically dramatic work that elegantly blends narrative and analysis. She places her study in a welcome comparative context that encompasses Latin America and the North Atlantic. . . . Children of Fate is an indispensable and original work that opens up a fundamental problem relating to the relationship between the family, class and the state in the liberal era. Its very originality drives forward a debate in which it will be an obligatory reference.” - Sol Serrano, Journal of Latin American Studies
“Nara B. Milanich’s engaging study of filiation, class, and the state in republican Chile represents a significant contribution to this literature. Her detailed and well-researched study will be of value to scholars of family law and childhood as well as those interested in the relationships among liberalism, patriarchy, and the reproduction of class and social hierarchy in nineteenth-century Chile.” - Christine Ehrick, American Historical Review
“Nara Milanch’s complex and engaging book, Children of Fate, analyzes the intersections between the history of childhood and the formation of the liberal state in Chile from the 1850s to 1930. . . . Milanich sets up an ambitious task for herself. . . . She accomplishes it beautifully. . . . Children of Fate is a model for future historical scholarship on childhood in Latin America.” - Eileen M. Ford H-Childhood, H-Net Reviews
“Nara Milanich has written a smart, innovative book about children in republican Chile that is sure to become a benchmark in several fields of Latin American history. Children of Fate will be of special interest to scholars of the modern period because it is among the first English-language books to identify itself with the ‘history of childhood’ genre. . . . It blazes through diverse sources such as lawsuits, wills, orphanage records, and genealogical albums to expose the gap in elite constructions between children defined as kin, who inherited status, and the rest — the kinless, rootless, and illegitimate. . . . By exploring how some children were counted as kin and some were not, Milanich makes it clear that historians’ neglect of children as a topic has impoverished our understanding of how class was made and remade in modern Latin America.” - Bianca Premo, Labor
“Nara Milanich’s Children of Fate is a fascinating study of the central role that family relations and kinship have played in Chilean society. Through a very extensive analysis of judicial cases, notarial records, and archival materials from the Casa de Huerfanos, she shows how illegitimate children and their mothers navigated a changing and complex legal world, looking for a place in a society formally and informally defined by family and class hierarchies.... Children of Fateprovides a very engaging analysis of Chilean history through the lens of children and family, redefining our understanding of this critical historical period.” - Angela Vergara, Canadian Journal of History
“This book is a major contribution to the field of Latin American childhood studies that emerged in the 1990s, as well as to studies of family history, gender, and the state. Scholarly, well-researched, and provocative, it is also well-written, engaging, and easy to read. Milanich weaves together her themes of childhood, kinship, family, class, inequality, and the state spectacularly well. Her discussion of the way in which the Chilean state reflected and upheld graduations of class and how this shaped both the life experiences of being a child and expectations about children is truly commendable.” - Jean B. Grugel, Bulletin of Latin American Research
“This richly researched and closely argued study by Nara Milanich examines the experiences of children from 1850 to 1930 to reveal how Chile’s liberal state, premised on individual equality before the law, produced inequality. . . . Most importantly, Milanich makes it clear that the history of childhood permeates metahistorical questions about social and cultural change and class and state formation and lies at the heart of the answers.” - Ann S. Blum, Hispanic American Historical Review
“With Children of Fate—a book that is thoroughly researched, insightfully argued, and beautifully written—Nara Milanich makes a compelling case for how attention to children can illuminate two issues central to the broader historiography of modern Latin America. . . . Children of Fate is a pathbreaking book that deserves a wide readership.” - Sarah C. Chambers, Journal of Family History
"Children of Fate is a social history of childhood . . . but this is not its only object of study . . . Milanich contributes to an understanding of Chilean state formation and the organization of civil society."
- Francisca Rengifo S., Revista de Historia Iberoamericana
“Children of Fate is truly original, with an extraordinary level of insight and analysis. Nara B. Milanich shows how class identity was manipulated by the liberal state in a way that maintained hierarchies, and she illustrates her arguments with rich examples gleaned from extensive archival research. A brilliant, first-rate book.” - Elizabeth Kuznesof, author of Household Economy and Urban Development: Sao Paulo, 1765 to 1836
“Children of Fate tells a thoroughly engrossing, emotionally moving story about children in Latin American history. Nara B. Milanich’s extremely powerful and original arguments about family, law, class relations, and state formation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America have major ramifications for rethinking Latin American social and labor history and will undoubtedly help reshape the agenda of future social and political history in the field.” - Heidi Tinsman, author of Partners in Conflict
“Children of Fate is a remarkable historical account of the intertwining of family law, vernacular kinship practices, and class in late-19th-century Chile.” - Clara Han, PoLAR
