Hygienic Discipline and Debates over Child Labor in Ecuador, 1900–1940

Angela Corsa, University of Arizona

This study explores debates over child labor in early twentieth-century Ecuador and shows that reformers participated in a wider global struggle over the meaning of children’s work. In Europe and the Americas, modern childhood did not simply emerge through the exclusion of children from labor. Rather, states, reformers, and experts distinguished between forms of labor that degraded children and forms of labor that supposedly protected, disciplined, and improved them. Ecuador offers a particularly revealing case because officials did not treat labor only as a social problem. They framed it as a hygienic and corrective tool for managing the “child problem”: mortality, morbidity, abandonment, delinquency, and perceived degeneration. I argue that Ecuadorian officials resolved the apparent tension between child labor and child protection by redefining labor itself. They debated whether children should work, and which forms of work threatened children’s development and which might secure it or discipline children through labor. In this framework, they insisted that unregulated street labor and idleness exposed minors to vice, illness, and degeneration, while supervised labor in homes, welfare institutions, and reform schools could serve as a hygienic and corrective practice. Labor, then, did not stand outside modern childhood. Properly regulated, it became one of the means through which officials sought to produce it. Drawing on police records, welfare files, institutional reports, and legal debates, I trace this through the daily practices of welfare agencies, the police, and the courts in early twentieth-century Ecuador. Institutions such as the Virgilio Guerrero Work School and practices such as the domestic consignment of minors in Quito reveal that labor functioned not merely as an economic necessity, but as a technique of reform. These interventions also rested on assumptions about age, gender, class, and thus helped define which children could be saved, how, and for what place in society.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 132. Labor, Discipline, and the Gendered Social Question