Introduction: Latin American Children's Literature and Culture

The development of research in Latin America about children’s and young adult literature or LIJ (the commonly used abbreviation for ‘literatura infantil y juvenil’) has transpired in close relationship to reflections on pedagogical praxis and enquiries around how to foster, encourage, and mediate literary reading practices. This close relationship motivated the call for our 2021 congress, ‘Aesthetic and Pedagogic Entanglements‘, the first IRSCL congress organised in Latin America. 1 The porous connections between the literary and the educational, and the openness with which these terms are approached, seems to be a distinctive feature of research in the field of LIJ in both Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking geographies. Latin America is, of course, a large and diverse region, which means that we must exercise caution in making generalisations from Mexico to Brazil to Chile. However, in light of the response to the call for this special issue and with our experience engaging with scholars and scholarship in the region to back us up, in this introduction we propose that Latin American children’s literature scholarship is produced by multiple entanglements of the literary and the educational and that these entanglements are also reflected in the ongoing struggle to legitimise the study of children’s literature in academic contexts. Research on children’s literature in Spanish-speaking countries is mainly carried out within education faculties, while in the humanities faculties the study of children’s and youth texts is not only scarce but also, in many cases, strongly resisted, usually based on some suspicion regarding the aesthetic quality and literary value of these works. Specifically, Latin American LIJ studies appear to be characterised by the intersections with two other fields of study: literature didactics and the social exercise of reading promotion. Within the realm