“So How’s Your Childhood Going?” A Historian of Childhood Confronts Her Own Archive

Abstract

This chapter is an experimental reflection on historical methods for reading child-produced sources found in the archive; it uses Albarrán’s own childhood diary from 1986 as a starting point. Albarrán theorizes research methodologies in the context of writing child-centered history by pairing what the author knows now, with the benefit of hindsight, with what the child knower of the past documented. She is, and is not, the “same” subject as her child self. The diary is read under conditions similar to those in which decontextualized child-produced sources are encountered by historians in the archive to demonstrate the slipperiness of interpretation of such sources. Finally, the author subjects her 1980s American childhood to a comparative analysis with contemporary diaries produced in Chile under a violently oppressive dictatorship to shed light on the relativity of trauma as a quotidian part of child life. This self-critical reflection illustrates the role that the historian can play in mediating self-narratives in the broader context of geopolitical events and very different global positionalities.