Poverty: Care and Control in Peruvian Street Children's Everyday Lives Dena Aufseeser

351 Pages·2012·2.75 MB·English

‘Managing’ Poverty:
Care and Control in Peruvian Street Children’s Everyday Lives

Dena Aufseeser

A dissertation
submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Washington
2012

Reading Committee:
Victoria Lawson, Chair
Kim England
Steven Herbert

Program authorized to offer degree:
Geography
© Copyright 2012
Dena Aufseeser
University of Washington

Abstract

‘Managing’ Poverty: Care and Control in Peruvian Street Children’s Everyday Lives

Dena Aufseeser

Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Professor Victoria Lawson
Department of Geography

This dissertation examines the contradictory and complementary ways in which both neoliberal
development and children’s rights legislation shape national development and child poverty in Lima and
Cusco, Perú. It uses childhood as a lens through which to more critically analyze struggle over meanings
of development, poverty and appropriate uses of public space, looking at the ways in which children’s
rights and neoliberalism shape the regulation of poor children through a number of spaces, including
social services, urban space, and street children’s everyday lives. The project is based on 14 months of
in-depth ethnographic research, participant observation and interviews with street children, as well as
conversations with policy makers, educators, government officials and social workers. My research
design was specifically concerned with both recognizing children as active producers of knowledge and
with connecting their everyday experiences with broader systemic changes and processes of
development and governance. Rather than focusing on either a macro-scale or a more localized
analysis, it links the subjectivity of the poor both with political-economic shifts and discourses and with
identity projects. By focusing on street children’s everyday lives, this dissertation combines work on the
governance of poverty, most of which has remained focused on the global north, with insights from
critical development scholars regarding a need for a historical and sociopolitical account of poverty to
actively politicize the ways in which Peruvian street children negotiate control, care and survival.
Despite beliefs that children are outside of politics, childhoods play important roles in shaping
national development and reproducing particular value systems. This dissertation considers how linking
dominant development ideologies with the language of children’s rights serves to mitigate critiques that
development negatively affects the poor, reinforcing dominant development ideologies by allowing
them to be packaged in a more socially acceptable way. It analyzes in what ways children’s rights
discourse provides moral justification for international intervention and the increased regulation of
childhood based on Western models. In doing so, it contributes to critical poverty and development
studies by linking narratives of development, childhood and rights with the maintenance of poverty.
However, rights themselves are subject to competing interpretations and have also provided an
important organizing tool for local social movements, such as Peru’s child workers’ movement.
Additionally, children themselves are not simply passive in the face of increased state intervention.
They ‘manage’ their poverty in varied and often creative ways, engaging in spatial strategies to evade
police and social workers’ efforts to regulate their behavior, creating work opportunities for themselves
in the street, and in some cases, even playing up their own poverty and vulnerability in order to more
successfully street vend. There is a danger, however, in celebrating all acts of survival as resistance.
Instead, many forms of children’s agency represent contradictory resistance; while in some ways they
create more opportunities for themselves or avoid increased state regulation their actions often lead to
further marginalization or work to exclude them in other ways. This necessitates both a more nuanced
analysis of resistance as well as a need to more closely examine the indicators being used to measure
international development and urban ‘revitalization’. My project concludes with an in-depth discussion
of how feminist care ethics can inform more inclusive rights-based approaches to development.
Table of Contents
List of Figures .......................................................................................................................................... v
List of Tables ........................................................................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1: ‘Managing’ Poverty: Care and Control in Peruvian Street Children’s Everyday Lives ................ 1
1.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Adapting Neoliberalization: A New Emphasis on Poverty Reduction ................................................ 9
1.3 ‘Universal’ Paths to Progress: Neoliberal Development and Child Development ........................... 10
Children’s agency: Insights from Childhood Studies ......................................................................... 13
1.4 Poverty Reduction and the Spread of Authoritative Poverty Knowledge ....................................... 15
1.5 Social Reproduction and Shifting Responsibility for Kids ................................................................ 22
1.6 Children’s Rights in a Neoliberal Context ........................................................................................ 27
Rights as a form of regulation ........................................................................................................... 30
Rights, social control, and revanchism .............................................................................................. 34
1.7 Children’s Agency and Resistance ................................................................................................... 38
1.8 Chapter Outline ............................................................................................................................... 42
Chapter 2: The Politics of Knowledge Production: For a Relational Analysis of Poverty ........................... 47
2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 47
2.2. Situated Knowledge ....................................................................................................................... 52
2.3 ‘Choosing’ my Field Site .................................................................................................................. 54
2.4 Representing Street Children: Power, Positionality, Speaking for the Subaltern ............................ 56
2.5 The Politics of the Knowledge Production ...................................................................................... 61
Torn loyalties: The difficulties of interviewing and shadowing the police. ....................................... 62
Politics of knowledge production: Shifting Positionalities. ............................................................... 63
2.6 Introduction to Research Design ..................................................................................................... 65
The advantages and disadvantages of close personal relationships ................................................. 67
2.7 A Political Economy of Poverty in Perú ........................................................................................... 80
Charting centuries of International Exploitation ............................................................................... 81
Independence and the New Republic: What really changed? ........................................................... 82
2.8 Towards a relational understanding of poverty .............................................................................. 85
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Discourses of nation-building: Excluding the rural indigenous ......................................................... 85
Adverse incorporation: Denaturalizing Rural Poverty ....................................................................... 90
2.9 Fujishock: Embracing Neoliberal Policy ........................................................................................... 93
2.10 Migration to Lima: Opportunity and Discrimination ..................................................................... 97
2.11 Welfare Restructuring and Discourses of Poverty ....................................................................... 102
Poverty reduction through population control ............................................................................... 104
Juvenile delinquency: Blaming the parents for Lima’s gang problem ............................................. 105
2.12 Children’s Rights, Changing Livelihoods, and the Presence of Street Children ........................... 107
2.13 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 116
Chapter 3: Regulating Street Children in the Name of their Own Rights ................................................ 121
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 121
3.2 Regulating the Poor ...................................................................................................................... 129
3.3 Rights as a Form of Regulation ...................................................................................................... 131
Re-framing child labor as a problem ............................................................................................... 134
3.4 Implementing Neoliberalism: The State ........................................................................................ 138
The National Plan for Children and Adolescents ............................................................................. 141
Excluding the urban poor ................................................................................................................ 144
3.5 International Aid and Conditional Giving ...................................................................................... 145
3.6 ‘Protecting’ Children from Begging? Or Punishing Poverty? ......................................................... 149
3.7 Regulating Mothers....................................................................................................................... 154
3.8 Right to Work ................................................................................................................................ 158
International pressure and limitations to alternative rights-based approaches ............................. 162
3.9 The Wrong Kind of Child ............................................................................................................... 163
3.10 Enacting Neoliberalism: Situated Agents and the Geography of Social Services ......................... 168
Taming the Poor, enabling dependency and the role of social services .......................................... 173
Reclaiming identities as workers ..................................................................................................... 178
3.11 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 181
Chapter 4: Urban ‘Recuperation’, Child Protection, and Perú’s Begging Bill ........................................... 183
4.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 183
4.2 Urban ‘Recuperation’: Taking Space Back in the Name of Development ...................................... 187
4.3 Removing Informal Vendors in the Name of Order and Safety ..................................................... 189
4.4 ‘Out of Place’ on the Streets ......................................................................................................... 193
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Youth as danger: Punitive attitudes towards young people in public space ................................... 196
4.5 Urban Transformation in Lima ...................................................................................................... 198
4.6 Danger and Protection: Dual Understandings Applied in the Case of Generación ........................ 204
4.7 Criminalizing Poverty: The Politics of Working and Begging Children ........................................... 208
Regulating parents through the policing of public space ................................................................ 211
Prioritizing urban aesthetics over protection .................................................................................. 213
4.8 Police-Street Child Interactions, Identity Checks, and Discretion ................................................. 219
Removing ‘delinquents’: Identity checks ........................................................................................ 220
4.9 Resistance: Reworking Urban Policies on the Ground .................................................................. 225
Different interpretations of space .................................................................................................. 229
4.10 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 233
Chapter 5: Re-theorizing Agency: Street Children’s Everyday Lives ........................................................ 235
5.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 236
5.2 The Social Reproduction of Inequality .......................................................................................... 239
5.3 Children’s Agency and Political Subjectivity .................................................................................. 241
Children as political actors .............................................................................................................. 243
5.4 Towards a Re-theorization of Poverty: Street Children’s Perspectives on Poverty ....................... 245
5.5 Work: Survival, Opportunity and Marginalization? ....................................................................... 254
Work and social agency .................................................................................................................. 257
Learning from work ......................................................................................................................... 261
The negative stigma of street work................................................................................................. 264
5.6 Reworking Identities: Marketing poverty...................................................................................... 265
5.7 Reworking Social Services ............................................................................................................. 268
5.8 School as a Contested Site ............................................................................................................ 274
When social reproduction fails. ...................................................................................................... 279
5.9 Peer groups, Street Identity, and Contradictory Resistance ......................................................... 280
Re-inscribing differences ................................................................................................................. 285
5.10 Learning to Iidentify as a Political Actor ...................................................................................... 288
5.11 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 293
Chapter 6: Conclusion- Bringing Care Ethics into Children’s Rights and a Relational Analysis of Poverty295
Children’s Rights as a Form of Regulation ....................................................................................... 297
Towards a Situated and Uneven Neoliberalism .............................................................................. 298
iii
Children’s Agency, Resistance and Intersubjectivity ....................................................................... 302
Rethinking Children’s Rights and Poverty through a Lens of Care .................................................. 304
Works Cited ............................................................................................................................................ 310

iv
List of Figures

Figure 2.1 Regional Map of Perú ............................................................................................................... 50
Figure 2.2 Map of Municipality of Lima with main field work cites .......................................................... 72
Figure 2.3 Map of district of Cusco with field sites ................................................................................... 78
Figure 2.4 Children’s Occupations ............................................................................................................ 79
Figure 2.5 Map of the municipality of Lima with income and percentage of children working. ............. 101
Figure 2.6 Child malnutrition by department. ........................................................................................ 110
Figure 2.7 Primary school enrollment. .................................................................................................... 110
Figure 2.8 Percentage of children working in Lima and Cusco ................................................................ 112
Figure 2.9 Map of main NGOs that I interviewed, by view point ............................................................ 120
Figure 3.1 Cover of UNICEF’s annual report for Perú, 2011 .................................................................... 123
Figure 3.2 Map of street child population and street child services. ...................................................... 172
Figure 4.1 Billboards of urban ‘improvement’. ....................................................................................... 192
Figure 4.2 Billboard removing youth ....................................................................................................... 202
Figure 4.3 Map of Begging Bill campaigns ............................................................................................... 216
Figure 4.4 Map of important places in 14-year old street child’s life ...................................................... 225
Figure 4.5 Map of important places in 16-year-old street youth’s life .................................................... 230
Figure 4.6 Drawing of main plaza ............................................................................................................ 232
Figure 5.1 Houses in hills of Lima’s Northern cones................................................................................ 249

v
List of Tables
Table 2.1 List of organizations interviewed……………………………………………………………………………………….130
Table 2.2 Contents of interviews with street children……………………………………………………………………….132
Table 2.3 Percent of 12- to 16-year-olds enrolled in Secondary School……………………………………………..124

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