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Central and South America and the Caribbean
Enrique Pérez Díaz
The history of children’s literature in Latin America could never be isolated from the five-
century history of the continent, a New World, a meeting-place of two cultures. In 1492,
when Christopher Columbus’s three caravels sighted land, the area was populated by
peoples having cultural and scientific wealth as rich as that possessed by any country of
the Old World. Unfortunately, due to the economic requirements of the budding
capitalist society, then just emerging from feudalism, America was viewed as a huge
store of raw materials, riches that the European kingdoms wanted to finance their wars.
In the course of a few years splendid civilisations—the Mayas, the Aztecs, the Incas, to
mention only the more advanced—were reduced to slavery; their palaces, religious
centres and scientific institutions were sacked and destroyed, their cultures practically
obliterated.
In the wake of conquest and colonisation another process, more rapid and more
complex, was under way: that of transculturation, especially accentuated by millions of
African slaves imported by the colonies to supplement the reluctant native labour force.
South America soon became a mosaic of cultures, religions and races that created a
culture that was heterogeneous, diverse, rich and ultimately unique. The European
powers imposed their creeds using the whip and the sword, and their main purpose was
indoctrination. But the mixture of races—Indian, African, Chinese and Spanish—
produced a collective nationality, peoples whose history makes them kindred even if
their languages may differ.
In the development of this new world its culture was dialectically enriched; the legends
that settlers and missionaries brought from old Europe were added to those told by
native priests and also to images evoked in their prayers and lamentations by the
African slaves. Figures of Latin folklore appear in the American folklore; myths,
cosmographia, the explanation of natural phenomena which always awed primitive
peoples are blended in an amalgam that is reiterated all over the continent.
With the invention of printing, the Creoles—natives conscious of their origin who
looked askance at their Old World ancestors—developed new oral and written forms,
which although strongly traditional—an oral tradition of myths and legends —looked
forward to literary forms.
Every critic, theorist, essayist and researcher interested in the subject agrees that
literature specifically for children first appeared in the Latin American and Caribbean
countries only between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth. Teachers, tutors and a few authors produced largely moralising and dogmatic