The Casa de Huerfanos and Child Circulation in Late-Nineteenth-Century Chile‪.‬

Introduction In the past two decades, a number of outstanding monographs have explored the phenomenon of child abandonment and the significance of foundling homes in the European past. (1) More recently, historians of Latin America have turned their attention to these institutions, which appeared with increasing frequency in urban centers across the hemisphere in the late eighteenth century. (2) While conclusive generalizations about the nature of child abandonment in Latin America are somewhat premature given the current paucity of research, one issue deserving further inquiry has already emerged. In a recent history of child abandonment in Brazil, Maria Luiza Marcilio observes, "the informal or private rearing of foundlings in family homes was the widest system of protection of abandoned children, present throughout the history of Brazil. It is this [system] that, in some sense, renders original the history of assistance to abandoned children in the country." (3)