GROWING BETWEEN GOOD AND PROPER: THE CHILD REARING AT THE INDIGENOUS COLONIAL DISCOURSES IN CENTRAL MEXICO

Currently, children studies have become a trending topic in the social sciences around the globe. It is essential to bring this perspective to the Mesoamerican Ethnohistory to understand the colonial realities of the indigenous groups in the past. For this aim, discourses related to childrearing produced during the early colonial times by friars and Nahua scholars were studied based on theories developed by the history and anthropology of childhoods, and through the use of textual and philological analysis. The main conclusion is that childrearing was not a mundane topic for Friars and Nahua scholars, but a relevant one where the roles of a mother, a father, and a child inside the household were discussed in their desire for shaping the colonial indigenous society.