The Girl Who Jumped over Childhood: Evolutionary Time and Peru’s Youngest Mother in the World, 1939*

Abstract: This article examines newspaper coverage of the youngest mother in the world, a five-year-old who gave birth in Peru in 1939. It focuses especially on one newspaper article about her, published in a Lima tabloid one month after the delivery of her healthy baby boy. This reprinted article from a Colombian paper summarized the historical and historicist stakes of grappling with the case’s singularity, and it was accompanied by a Peruvian illustrator’s collage of similar cases of “astounding maternity.” Contextualizing the newspaper story and image within surrounding international media coverage, contemporary endocrinal science, and prevailing notions of evolution and pronatalism, the article argues that Latin Americans regarded the record-shattering birth as not only a medical but also a metaphysical event that destabilized existing ideas about the relationship between age, reproduction and development.