South American Childhoods: Neoliberalisation and Children’s Rights since the 1990s (Studies in Childhood and Youth) 3030789489, 9783030789480

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STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

South American Childhoods Neoliberalisation and Children’s Rights since the 1990s Edited by

Ana Vergara del Solar Valeria Llobet Maria Letícia Nascimento

Studies in Childhood and Youth

Series Editors Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Nigel Patrick Thomas, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK Spyros Spyrou, European University Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus Penny Curtis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary scholarship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global challenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14474

Ana Vergara del Solar · Valeria Llobet · Maria Letícia Nascimento Editors

South American Childhoods Neoliberalisation and Children’s Rights since the 1990s

Editors Ana Vergara del Solar School of Psychology Universidad de Santiago Santiago, Chile

Valeria Llobet School of Humanities Universidad Nacional de San Martin San Martín, Argentina

Maria Letícia Nascimento School of Education University of São Paulo Sao Paulo, Brazil

Studies in Childhood and Youth ISBN 978-3-030-78948-0 ISBN 978-3-030-78949-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

The 1990s were a turning point in the history of children and young people in Latin America. The decade saw the end of the social integration models that were tried out heterogeneously in various countries of the region between the 1950s and 1970s but eroded in the 1980s by the increase in external debt. At the same time, studies on childhood and youth began to flourish in the academic sphere during this period. The reasons for these developments converge. Neoliberal- inspired reforms of the state in different countries of the region, together with the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990 and its ratification by various governments, shaped discourses, public policies, and social programmes. The scenario of expanded financial capitalism and social inequalities, by giving greater visibility to the issue of childhood, favoured research from historical, cultural, and social perspectives. The generational question, from whatever reading angle it was approached, became increasingly relevant in the humanities and social science disciplines, largely due to perceptions of the imminent close of what Eric Hosbawm called “the short twentieth century”. Questions about the political performativity of the knowledge about childhood produced in the field of academic research remain open (Carli, 2017). A historical perspective is essential to analyse the relationship between neoliberalism and childhood. Studies on neoliberalism allow recognition of two historical presents. The first of these is the decade under analysis, whose imprint came early or was delayed according to the country, v

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depending on whether the cycle of military dictatorships that swept through the region in the 1970s—and to which the origins of neoliberal economic programmes can be traced—came to a complete or partial end, or continued under new forms in the framework of democratic governments, with country-specific differences. With the global protagonism of international and financial organisations, the rise of managerial literature invaded the language of state governance (Bolstanski & Chiapello, 2002). The second moment corresponds to the close of a cycle of progressive governments, and the rise to power (or return in some cases, such as Chile) of governments that express themselves as standard-bearers of neoliberal programmes, inscribed in the global rise of the new Right. Neoliberalism begins to be analysed as a “new world reason”, one that penetrates subjectivities (Laval & Dardot, 2013). However, history is never linear and time crises occur (Hartog, 2003) that trigger discontinuities in historical processes. They reveal moments in the ascendancy of neoliberal programmes but also setbacks when they are faced by the emergence of resistance movements. Rather, it is interesting to think about the surreptitious forms of neoliberal logic, about its capillarity, in particular, in the field of childhood, and also about the limits faced by post-neoliberal or anti-neoliberal policies in a region like Latin America with its enormous egalitarian promises. The publication of this book is an invitation to re-examine the historical relationship between childhood and neoliberalism. It takes us on an analytic journey through different stages of Latin America marked by the globalisation of children’s rights in neoliberal agendas during the 1990s, their democratisation in the progressive agendas of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and their reversal in new neoliberal agendas in recent years. If a perspective based on the state policies adopted by various governments allows us to recognise that the expansion of the Convention on the Rights of the Child was recently embodied in legislation consistent with progressive governments—in which social groups and university sectors contributed to the approach and content of policies in the framework of debates and struggles around the redistribution of wealth and the rights of broad sectors—it is no less true that the lasting influence of certain state conceptions and logics, and new expertise in the study and management of poverty (Cortez & Kessler, 2013) sometimes contribute to the persistence of a discourse with a technical imprint but bereft of politicity.

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The situation of the rights of the child has been the subject of research that introduces historical and critical perspectives in analysing how a supposedly universal and highly affirmative discourse has been installed and appropriated in different regions and areas, and by different agents. A paradigmatic case has been the study of child labour in Latin America. Controversies between abolitionist positions and those seeking regulation are present in the academic field, with the emphasis on advances in prevention (Macri, 2017). In these pages, Zuker and Rausky analyse the tensions between the positions on the prohibition of child labour adopted by the ILO and shared by UNICEF, and interpretations of the phenomenon in studies on childhood from a decolonial perspective, which reveal that child labour sometimes obeys community and family logics that, combined with school experiences, make prohibition problematic and unsuccessful. Undoubtedly, this research raises concerns over the tension between a discourse with claims of universality and the social and cultural particularities of Latin America. Nevertheless, they also invite us to focus on state capacities and strategies for regulating child labour in a region in which processes of child exploitation are deepening that go back to pre-modern times and different forms of de-schooling. In the judicial sphere also, where legislations now recognise children and young people as subjects of law and their right to be heard, after strong criticism of juvenile justice the advance of a language of rights is in evidence, hand-in-hand with new stereotypes whose impact is to deny the very rights pronounced. The action of judges in the administration of juvenile justice has revealed the pre-existence of value judgements (Guemureman, 2010). In this book, Villalta, who has long experience in this field of legal anthropology, identifies in Argentina the figures present in judicial spaces: the child as victim and the child as contaminated by his parents, which trace the dilemmas at stake in listening to the children’s voice. The much-discussed asymmetry of the relationship between adults and children is constitutive, as Silvia Bleichmar argued, although in judicial spaces it is cut across by the always arbitrary, political, and subjective interpretation of the rights of the child by judges and other judicial operators. However, perhaps it is in early childhood policies, due to their later emergence on the neoliberal programme’s agenda, which traces of discourses from different historical moments are recognisable. In the case of Colombia, Amador situates the combination of the rights of the child, child development, and investment in early childhood in a common

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discursive horizon, as part of a governmental rationality, with a strong input by international organisations, old state social provision institutions, and third sector organisations. Yet, this rationality deepens inequality and exclusion in that children’s rights are no longer guaranteed by comprehensive policies aimed at greater social equality, but instead legitimise segmented and outsourced interventions. In the education sphere, neoliberal policy inroads have been profound. On the one hand, the educational reforms of the 1990s have displaced the idea of equality that inspired the expansion of modern educational systems in pursuit of equity; have accentuated the differences and inequalities between the state sector and the private sector; expanded the transfer of resources from the first to the second; and deepened segmentation and fragmentation. Nevertheless, they have also installed an economic management perspective that makes evaluation of performance and the incorporation of technologies the panacea of the future and, above all, seeks to displace educators (Puiggrós, 2017). The response of social groups and pedagogical movements has been to deepen emphasis on the right to education, which, in tandem with the rights of the child, has led to a critical review of the democratic nature of existing educational practices. In secondary schools, these neoliberal reforms have exacerbated the deterioration of state institutions and triggered the emergence of youth resistance movements that express their demands and defend their rights in the public sphere. If neoliberal policies gave rise to true social laboratories in the 1990s (Carli, 2006), their critical manifestations have not been immediate, but they unfailingly emerge. A paradigmatic case has been Chile. In this book, Guerrero Morales analyses the educational policies implemented from the 1980s to the present, which led to a reform characterised by municipalisation, a voucher system, and investment in schools as a business. It analyses the part played by these policies in the weakening of the educational bond between teachers and students as the former were converted into service providers and the latter into clients, a development that would not only impede child agency but also identification with educators. The extension of compulsory secondary school attendance in different legislations has not eliminated the problems of dropout, over-age, and lack of completion of studies, leading in many cases to the design of specific programmes to deal with these problems. Using a biographical approach, Cavagnoud studies in Peru experiences of secondary school teenage dropout, caused by breakdowns or prolonged deterioration of

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the relationship with the educational institution. She proposes thinking of dropout as a multicausal phenomenon and suggests that to understand it the stories of young people should be listened to and attention paid to the deterioration in the quality of educational institutions and experiences. Rabello de Castro, who has previously studied child and youth consumption in Brazil, and Tavares analyse here how the deterioration of state educational services for the poorest populations has led to student discontent, the emergence of a youth discourse and the politicisation of intergenerational relationships on the public stage. The mobilisation of poor secondary school youth seems to indicate new antagonisms. If the politicisation of university students from urban elites emerged in the 1970s at the height of military dictatorship, in the twenty-first century the politicisation of secondary school students occurs in the poorest sectors but in the context of democratic governments with progressive agendas and the expansion of rights. Perhaps the phenomenon of migration expresses most dramatically the deterioration of the forms of subsistence and minimal well-being of families. Phenomena such as armed violence, agribusiness, or drug trafficking, and more broadly poverty, cause the forced displacement of men and women, but also of children and young people. Studies on borders have developed significantly with the experience of globalisation, accentuating the question of their porosity and cultural crossings, but also power struggles, stigmas, and new nationalisms (Grimson, 2012). Today, global migrations call for complex scrutiny that takes account of the forms of the multiplication of work and the deterioration of shared citizenship, and for more work on cultural translation (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2016). In this book, Uriarte looks at a new phenomenon, the settlement in Uruguay of female migrants from non-adjacent countries and female work. She analyses the difficulties these migrants face in bringing up and educating their children, leading to the children being returned to their countries of origin to be cared for by relatives. She pioneers a thesis about transnational childhoods as a new historical variant of children’s cross-border experience, which requires attending to the dimensions of class, gender, and race, but also to territorial anchoring and/or displacement. In Herrera Mosquera’s and Pérez Martínez’s chapter, the migration experience of Venezuelan children is analysed paying attention to the issue of the voice and child agency. In that sense, their chapter “make visible a migration experience crossed by structural inequalities and poverty, as well as the lack of public networks of social protection”.

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Recurring economic crises in different countries of the region within the framework of global financial capitalism have spurred migrations in recent decades motivated by neoliberal adjustment policies—during the cycle of progressive governments, attempts were made to reverse these with economic policies but also with protective legislation. In this book, Unda Lara and Llanos Erazo analyse the migration of families from Ecuador to Spain towards the end of the 1990s, which, unlike migrations in earlier periods, were marked by an expulsion policy and the loss of basic rights for broad sectors. The authors focus on the experience of boys, girls, and adolescents, based on their testimonies, to problematise the interactions of the micro-social and subjective frameworks. The infringement of their rights emerges in family dilemmas between staying in the country of origin despite more precarious conditions or aspiring to a new life. In summary, this book offers a series of valuable studies exploring the complex, unstable, and conflictive relationship between childhood and neoliberalism in the southern continent of Latin America. Although some features can be recognised that are specific to nations, common elements are identified that, with some temporal variations in relation to the different governments, indicate the regressive and expulsive features shared by neoliberal agendas in the sphere of social rights in general, and those of children and adolescents in particular. If progressive governments have advanced in the content and design of public policies aimed at correcting the flagrant social inequalities that affect the lives of the most vulnerable sectors, attention should be paid to the persistence, sometimes invisible or naturalised, of neoliberal conceptions and logics. There is urgent need, also, to explore global trends in child and youth experiences and in the actions of institutions and agents, in order to recognise both the fulfilment of children’s rights and their denial under the rhetoric of universalistic discourses. The aim is to strengthen public intervention and debate on the present and future of children and adolescents in Latin America. Buenos Aires, Argentina

Sandra Carli

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References Bolstanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2002). El nuevo espíritu del capitalismo. Madrid, Spain: Akal. Carli, S. (2006). Notas para pensar la infancia en la Argentina (1983–2001). Figuras de la historia reciente. In S. Carli (Ed.), La cuestión de la infancia. Entre la escuela, la calle y el shopping (pp. 19–56). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Paidós. Carli, S. (2017). La infancia en perspectiva histórica: política, pedagogía y desigualdades sociales. Los desafíos de la investigación en América Latina. In L. Mantilla, A. Stolkiner and M. Minicelli (Eds.), Biopolítica e infancia: niños, niñas e instituciones en el contexto latinoamericano (pp. 43–60). Guadalajara, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara. Cortez, R. and Kessler, G. (2013). Miradas sobre la cuestión social en la Argentina democrática (1983–2013). Cuestiones de Sociología, 9, 11–28. Grimson, A. (2012). Los límites de la cultura. Crítica de las teorías de la identidad (p. XXI). Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno. Guemureman, S. (2010). La cartografía moral de las prácticas judiciales en los Tribunales de Menores. Los tribunales de Menores en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editores del Puerto. Hartog, F. (2003). Regímenes de historicidad: presentismo y experiencias. Puebla, Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana. Laval, C. and Dardot, P. (2013). La nueva razón del mundo. Ensayo sobre la sociedad neoliberal. Barcelona, Spain: Gedisa. Macri, M. (2017). Trabajadores infantiles y neoinformalidad. Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, 93, 92–95. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2016). La frontera como método o la multiplicación del trabajo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tinta Limón. Puiggros, A. (2017). Adiós Sarmiento. Educación pública, Iglesia y mercado. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Colihue. Sandra Carli holds a Ph.D. in Education (UBA). She is the Principal Researcher at CONICET based at the Gino Germani Research Institute and Full Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA. She coordinates the Study Program on the Public University (PESUP). Among her books on childhood and youth, stands out Memory of childhood. Studies on history, culture and society (Editorial Paidós, 2011) and The university student. Towards a history of public education (Editorial Siglo XXI, 2012). Among her latest publications are the article “The

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university student experience during the 60s and the outbreak of the Argentine´s 69. Juvenile emergence and feminine biographies” in History of Education & Children’s Literature (2019, vol. XIV pp. 97–97) and the chapter “The question of childhood in democracy (1983–2015). Between the restitution of rights and the struggles against social inequalities” (Editorial Galerna, 2019, in press). She directs the UBACYT project “The borders of the public university. Institutions, identities, and knowledge”.

Praise for South American Childhoods

“Children do not belong to another species, nor do they live in another world. On the contrary, they share risks and advantages with other human beings at the same historical moment. This book looks at South American childhoods starting from analysis of the social, political, and economic structures of the last thirty years, providing a great contribution for the study of children’s lives traversed by structural conditions, be it on some or on other continents.” —Lourdes Gaitán, Founding Member of Sociology of Childhood and Adolescence Group (GSIA) and Co-Director of Sociedad e Infancias, Spain “This book represents a landmark publication in childhood studies. The social study of childhood, based on the recognition of children as social actors with agency, is a field of study that has hitherto been dominated by Western European research and thinking, which sought to challenge the false dichotomy between childhood and adulthood. This volume makes a valuable contribution to this important field of study by applying these perspectives to South American childhoods.” —Adrian L. James, Emeritus Professor, Applied Social Sciences, University of Sheffield, UK

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PRAISE FOR SOUTH AMERICAN CHILDHOODS

“An exciting and significant intervention into childhood studies. The volume at once offers rich, textured, and vivid accounts of processes of neoliberalisation as they shape South American children and childhoods—and their unequal, violent, and punitive effect—at the same time as extending and complicating childhood studies, animated by the rich history of South American socio-cultural approaches to childhood. In the process, contributors offer novel ways of understanding human rights, nation, social reproduction, and generation in neoliberal contexts.” —Rachel Rosen, Associate Professor of Childhood, UCL Social Research Institute, UK “This book seizes new spaces to critique neo-liberalism from the vantage point of Latin American children. This continent experienced devastating swings between authoritarian regimes and the authors describe superbly the impacts on children on such crucial issues as child labour, migration, and children out of school. Children are often omitted from the Latin American political analyses. This book, with great skill and insight, gets them back into the picture.” —Irene Rizzini, Professor, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and President of the International Center for Research and Policy on Childhood (CIESPI), Brazil

Contents

1

South American Childhoods Since the 1990s: Between Neoliberalisation and the Expansion of Rights—An Introduction Ana Vergara del Solar, Valeria Llobet, and Maria Letícia Nascimento

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Part I Situating the Children’s Rights Approach: Discursive and Material Conflicts in South American Scenarios 2

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Rights Activism, Judicial Practices, and Interpretative Codes: Children in Family Justice (Argentina, 1990–2015) Carla Villalta The Problems of Child Labour: International Organizations and Local Contexts Laura Frasco Zuker and María Eugenia Rausky Early Childhood and Neoliberalism in Colombia: True Discussions, Government Rationality, and Conducting Behaviour Juan Carlos Amador

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Part II South American Schools: The Inner and Outer Courtyards of the Educational Systems in Neoliberalised Contexts 5

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The Pedagogical Bond in the Managerial Organization of Chilean Schools Patricia Guerrero Morales Life Courses of Out-of-School Adolescents. Neoliberalism, Vulnerabilities and Violation of the Right to Education in Peru Robin Cavagnoud Participation Rights in Brazilian Schools: Towards the Politicization of Intergenerational Relationships? Lucia Rabello de Castro and Renata Tavares

Part III

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South American Childhoods, Migration and Neoliberalisation: The Search for Less Precarious Scenarios

Children and Migratory Processes in Ecuador Between 1999 and 2009: From the Financial Crisis’ Trauma to the Promises of the Rule of Law René Unda Lara and Daniel Llanos Erazo Venezuelan Children on the Move in Ecuador: Fragile Lives of Risk and Hope Gioconda Herrera Mosquera and Lucía Pérez Martínez Back and Forth: An Analysis of the Processes of Transnationalization of Women’s Work and the Internationalization of Early Childhood Policies in Uruguay Pilar Uriarte Bálsamo Concluding Remarks Ana Vergara del Solar, Valeria Llobet, and Maria Letícia Nascimento

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Juan Carlos Amador is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth by the Clacso, Colegio de México, and Cinde agreement. He holds a Ph.D. in Education and is a Professor from Francisco José de Caldas District University in Bogota and of the University of Manizales-Cinde agreement. He is a member of the Youth, Cultures and Power group. Robin Cavagnoud is a Sociodemographer and holds a Ph.D. in “Latin American Studies” from the Institute of Advanced Studies of Latin America (University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III), is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), a Director of the Master of Sociology and a Researcher at the Center for Sociological, Economic, Political and Anthropological Research (CISEPA—PUCP). Based on a qualitative approach to population studies and an analysis of individual and multigenerational biographies, his research interests are focused on the evolution of family livelihoods through the role of children and young people, and intergenerational relationships, in contexts of vulnerabilities. Laura Frasco Zuker obtained her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at National University of San Martin. She is a Professor at La Matanza University and she is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research based at the Laboratory of Human Sciences Research (National University of San Martín). She is a member of

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the Social Studies Program in Gender, Childhood and Youth at the Center for the Study of Inequalities, Subjects and Institutions. Her research topics are related to girls and boys’ participation in productive activities, the meanings and practices linked to child care and gender inequalities. Patricia Guerrero Morales is a Psychologist and holds a Master’s in Psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She also holds Master and Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Paris 7 Denis Diderot. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She conducts research from a clinical perspective of work and from biosocio-cultural approaches on issues related to educational justice and on the director-teacher, teacherstudent, power, and agency in the classroom, in management, and in public policy. Gioconda Herrera Mosquera is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Gender Studies at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Ecuador). She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University. She has worked extensively in the relationship between international migration, gender, and ethnicity in Latin America, and particularly on the migration of women and indigenous groups from Ecuador to Spain and the United States. She is currently working on two projects: the deportation of indigenous migrants from the United States to Ecuador, and the Venezuelan migration to Ecuador. Her more recent publications include: 2021. “The Sociology of Gender in Latin America: from Social Mothers to Sexual Rights” in Rivera L. and Balda X. The Oxford Handbook of Sociology of Latin America. Oxford University Press. 2019. With Ulla Berg “Migration Crises” and Humanitarianism in Latin America: the case of Ecuador” in Ninna N. Sorensen and Sine Plambech (ed.) Global Perspectives on Huimanitarianism. DIIS Report.Coppenhagen. 2019. “From Immigration to Transit Migration?: Race and Gender Entanglements in New Migration to Ecuador” in Xóchitl Bada, Andreas Feldmann y Stephanie Schütze, (ed.) New Migration Patterns in the Americas: Challenges for the 21st Century. Palgrave, Migration and Citizenship series. 2018. With Jean Michel Lafleur and Isabel Yépez. (ed.) Migraciones Internacionales en Bolivia y Ecuador: crisis global, Estado y Desarrollo. Quito: FLACSO Ecuador, Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Université de Liège (ULG), ARES.

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Daniel Llanos Erazo has studies in pedagogy and sociology, Master’s in Social Policy, Salesian Polytechnic University of Ecuador, Ph.D. in Social Sciences, National University of Cuyo, Argentina. He is currently studying the Postdoctoral Research Program in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth, Clacso, Cinde, University of Lanús, Flacso Argentina, Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Mexico, University of Manizales, Colombia, Pontificia Universidad Católica de São Paulo. He is a National Director of the Education Area of the Salesian Polytechnic University of Ecuador. Researcher at the Childhood, Adolescence and Youth Research Center and member of the Research Group: Education and Interculturality of the Salesian Polytechnic University of Ecuador; Teacher of the undergraduate courses and Postgraduate Programs at the same university and Latin American Universities. Researcherof the Clacso Working Group “Childhood and Youth: Hegemonies, violence, inequalities and mobilizations”. Valeria Llobet has Ph.D. UBA in Social Psychology, Posdoctoral degree in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth from COLEF, PUC San Pablo, CLACSO. She is a Full Professor in the School of Humanities, Universidad de San Martín, and researcher in CONICET (National Council of Research) and a Director of the Center for the Studies of Inequalities, Subjects and Institutions. Her interests are childhood and children’s rights studies and gender. Last publication are Desde la Desjudicialización a la Refundación de los Derechos. Transformaciones en las Disputas por los Derechos de Niñes, 2005–2015, Teseo, Buenos Aires and “El encierro de los ni˜ nos y la distribución desigual de la precariedad”. En Revista Sociedad e Infancia. N. 4. Maria Letícia Nascimento holds a Ph.D. in Education from the Faculty of Education, University of São Paulo (USP). She also pursued postdoctoral studies (Sociology of Childhood) at the University of Sussex, UK. She is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of São Paulo and coordinates the Group of Studies and Research on Sociology of Childhood and Early Childhood Education (GEPSI). Her interests are children’s participation and public policies. She is currently working on the project “Study on children’s participation/children’s protagonism: what do research on the topic reveal?” (FAPESP, 2019). Last publication include “(In)visibilidade das crianças imigrantes na cidade de São Paulo: questões para pensar a cidadania da pequena infância”. Revista Espaço Pedagógico, v. 27, pp. 437–458, 2020 (with C. Morais) and “A infância na América Latina: aportes do campo dos Estudos da Infância

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em Argentina, Brasil e Chile”. Sociedad e Infancias, v. 3, pp. 211–235, 2019 (with M. Voltarelli). Lucía Pérez Martínez is an Ecuadorian sociologist. She obtained a M.A. in Sociology at FLACSO Ecuador university and is currently enrolled in a Master’s programme in Psychoanalysis at the Catholic University in Quito. In the last few years, she has researched about gender and migration. She is also an activist in the feminist movement and has taught sociology in various Ecuadorian universities. Lucia Rabello de Castro is a Professor of Childhood and Youth, Institute of Psychology, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Founder and Chair from 1998 to 2011, and present Scientific Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Exchange on Contemporary Childhood and Youth (NIPIAC/UFRJ/BRAZIL); Senior Researcher of the Brazilian Council of Science and Technological Development (CNPQ); President of RC53 Sociology of Childhood (2018–2022); Chief Editor of DESidades, an electronic peer-reviewed scientific journal in the area of childhood and youth. President Elect of the National Association of Youth Researchers in Brazil (REDEJUBRA) 2017–2021. She has published widely on children and childhood in Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English, such as “The study of childhood and youth in Brazil: dilemmas and choices of a ‘Southern’ scholar”, in S. Koller (ed.) Psychology in Brazil: Scientists making a difference, Springer, 2019. María Eugenia Rausky holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. She obtained her Master’s degree in Methodology of Social Sciences (National University of Tres de Febrero and University of Bologna). She is a Sociologist, Professor at the National University of La Plata, Argentina. She is a researcher affiliated with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council Center for Interdisciplinary Methodology of Social Sciences at the Institute of Research of Humanities and Social Sciences (Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences). Her publications are in the area of poverty, childhood, child labour, and methodology. Renata Tavares is a Ph.D. student in Psychology, at UFRJ (current), has a Master’s degree in Social Psychology from Universidade Federal Fluminense (2007) and a degree in Psychology from Universidade Federal

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Fluminense (2003). She is a member of the Research Group for Contemporary Childhood and Adolescence (NIPIAC). She works on the Associate editorial team in the journal DESidades—Electronic Journal of Scientific Communication for Children and Youth. She is interested in the fields of childhood, with an emphasis on the following themes: research, favela, epistemology, decoloniality. René Unda Lara holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences, Childhood and Youth (U. de Manizales—CINDE, Colombia), Master’s in teaching with a mention in teaching-communication (UPS Ecuador), Degree in Sociology and Political Science from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. He is a Research Professor at the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana de Ecuador, UPS; Coordinator of the Center for Research on Childhood, Adolescence and Youth, CINAJ, UPS; Director of the Master’s in Social Policy for Children and Adolescents, UPS, between 2002 and 2017; Researcher of the Working Group “Youth and Childhood” of CLACSO and co-coordinator between 2013 and 2016. He is a Chief Editor of the Journal of Social and Human Sciences, Universitas. Pilar Uriarte B´alsamo has a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Univer´ Grande del Sur. She works as an Adjunct Professor sidad Federal de Rio in the Social Anthropology Department and she is the Academic Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Migratory Studies Centre in the Faculty of Humanities. She carries out research in subjects such as human mobility, public policies, and human rights, in which she has been responsible for research and extension projects. Ana Vergara del Solar is an Associate Professor, Universidad de Santiago, Chile. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociological Studies (University of Sheffield). Her research interests are childhood studies and parenting, and her last publication is Vergara, A., Sepúlveda, M., Salvo, I. (2020) “Understanding and caring for parents: moral reflexivity in the discourse of Chilean children”; in S. Frankel and S. McNamee (eds.) Bringing Children Back into the Family. Relationality, connectedness and home. Book Series Vol. 27, Sociological Studies of Childhood and Youth. Carla Villalta holds a Ph.D. UBA in Social Anthropology. She is a Professor in Anthropology Department, School of Philosophy and Literature, Buenos Aires University, Argentina; Co-Director. Program of Political and legal anthropology. Institute of Anthropological Sciences, School of Philosophy and Literature, Buenos Aires University, Argentina;

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Researcher in CONICET (National Council on Scientific and Technological Research) and Member of Advisory Council, National Program of Science and Justice, CONICET. She is a member of Academic Committee Ph.D. of Human Rights, National Lanús University (UNLA). Her interests are anthropology of human rights; bureaucratic apparatuses aimed at poor childhood; displaced and appropriated children; adoption, foster care, institutionalisation. Last publications are “Madres en cuestión: sentidos y disputas sobre el ejercicio de la maternidad en y desde la cárcel”, Editorial Azul, UNICEN; “Justicia restaurativa y medidas alternativas al proceso penal en la Argentina. Transformaciones y disputas en la justicia penal para adolescentes”, Revista NuestrAmérica, Vol. 8, n. 15: 57–73, and “Prácticas de circulación coactiva de niños y niñas en la Argentina. Tramas institucionales, jerarquías sociales y derechos”, Runa, 40(2): 149–167.

CHAPTER 1

South American Childhoods Since the 1990s: Between Neoliberalisation and the Expansion of Rights—An Introduction Ana Vergara del Solar, Valeria Llobet, and Maria Letícia Nascimento

The book we present is concerned with the situation of childhood after the 1990s in South America, a period and territory of special sociological complexity. First, because it was a decade that saw the start, or the intensification, of processes of economic and political neoliberalisation, depending on the country in question. Second, it was the decade in which

A. Vergara del Solar (B) Universidad de Santiago, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] V. Llobet Universidad de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina M. L. Nascimento Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_1

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all the countries of the region ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (henceforth, the CRC). Third, post-dictatorial processes of political and social democratisation were underway. The interlocking of these three processes gave rise to a paradoxical situation, one that is especially characteristic of South America. As states in the region, characterised by predominantly authoritarian practices, increasingly discarded responsibility for social welfare and embarked on processes of political and social democratisation, they found themselves required to become guarantors of the social rights of children, as well as of their rights to protection and participation. This juxtaposition has generated tensions between logics and processes that have dissimilar orientations. It is these tensions that we are interested in exploring in this book. Thus, we found it necessary to examine in depth the local processes of institutionalisation and vernacularisation of rights (Engle Merry, 2003) that unfolded from the 1990s onwards, as a phenomenon contemporaneous with the state reforms promoted by the Washington Consensus. The latter was formulated in 1989 by the British economist John Williamson as “What Washington means by policy reforms”; it codified the economic liberalisation policies promoted by international financial institutions (the IMF, the World Bank and others) and North American state bodies, in relation to the governments of Latin America and other developing countries (Ocampo, 2005). In addition, since the 1990s legal and institutional reforms have been introduced that have modified some of the most enshrined state practices regarding childhood and the family, despite the reforms’ hybrid and incomplete nature. Amendments of the Civil Codes, and laws that alter parental authority and redefine family or marriage, are examples. Activists and professionals in the field of childhood have also questioned the de-contextualisation and typically overbearing nature of the unrestricted plans promoted by international organisations to eradicate child labour and universalise schooling (Liebel, 2016). One consequence of economic neoliberalisation of the economy was the generation of fluctuations between large increases of inequalities and moments of their decline that at best returned to the rates of the 1970s. In fact, although in some countries of the region absolute poverty has decreased, in most the socioeconomic gaps between adults and children and among children themselves have deepened, accounting for setbacks in the exercise of rights and in what has been called the “generational welfare imbalance” (CEPAL, 2013). At the same time, education and

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health care have been segmented into public and private systems, while families have been assigned responsibility as the main, and practically exclusive, guarantors of their children’s welfare. This was a result of state reforms that were a condition for the granting of loans by Northern countries and financing agencies to Southern countries under the Washington Consensus programme referred to above, and in the context of the external debt crisis experienced cyclically since the 1970s (Bidaurratzga, 2019). In this way, implementation of the CRC has been hampered by a confrontation between a universalistic approach to rights and states with diminished capacity to provide such rights. At the same time, their very universality has been pointed out as another source of injustice when promoted in contexts of racial, cultural, gender and class inequalities. For this reason, the emergence of a “universal child” or a “child subject of rights” creates a disputed territory about politics and moral governance (Fonseca & Cardarello, 2005; LLobet, 2009). One of the singularities that characterises South America is the complex combination between egalitarian aspirations for social transformation and social processes that deepen inequalities. Given the above, childhood studies will have to answer specific questions; one of the most significant of which will be whether this context supports the notion of the special nature of childhood in South America. The ideas of cultural, social and institutional modernisation—that dominated the twentieth century and underlie neoliberal reforms in particular ways—have had in childhood a platform for legitimation and political mobilisation (Carli, 2002; Milanich, 2012; Schuch, 2012). Thus, the “modernising” and “civilising” judicial reforms focused on, or started from, the problematised treatment of children from poor families in South American countries; the forms of treatment and regulation of boys and girls were considered harmful legacies of an authoritarian and conservative past (Schuch, 2012; Villalta, 2005). Yet an excessive emphasis on the particularity of South American childhood can lead us to ignore the influence of global processes. Both aspects should therefore be combined by exploring the “duality of similarities and differences” that exists between South American realities and global processes (Hall, 1992). Coincidentally, one of the main challenges currently facing European and North American childhood studies involves the need to know about

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realities that are beyond their initial geographical horizons. In particular, various authors have emphasised the importance of understanding contemporary realities of childhood in the “majority world” (Punch, 2003) or in the “global South”, including South American countries—in other words, in those countries and regions whose knowledge production is typically hidden from sight by the geopolitics of knowledge and the “coloniality of knowing” (Mohanty, 1988; Rabello de Castro, 2019). While recognising the knowledge related to South America produced by European or American authors, in this book we think it is important to increase the visibility of knowledge generated by researchers born or resident in the region. For all these reasons, we believe that research produced in South America about the period following the 1990s deserves wider circulation, especially those analyses that link processes of neoliberalisation to the exercise of rights and the reforms needed to guarantee them. Although there are local studies on the topic in countries such as Argentina (Barna, 2013; Grinberg, 2013; LLobet, 2009; Magistris, 2013; Villalta, 2011) and Brazil (Fonseca, 1999; Scheinvar, 2010; Schuch, 2009), putting these debates into a regional perspective is an outstanding debt that we seek to settle in part with this volume.

Neoliberalisation Processes in the Region: Their Heterogeneous and Instrumental Character As we mentioned already, beginning in the 1990s neoliberalism sank ever deeper roots in South America. The term neoliberalism is normally used in at least two senses. The first refers to neoliberal doctrine as a body of theory.1 The second refers to processes of neoliberalisation, or the specific historical processes aimed at implementing a neoliberal model in particular contexts. This is the sense in which the term is used in this book. It must be noted that a complex and non-linear relationship exists between neoliberal theory and neoliberalisation processes. The latter should be considered “impure”, dynamic and contingent; interpretations that view them as static and homogeneous should be avoided for several reasons. First, because the neoliberal proposals in our region have allowed the development of economic monopolies and processes of financial concentration; in addition, different types of state subsidy to large private companies have been sustained over time, and in moments of

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crisis, state support has been provided for financial institutions. These are all phenomena that contradict the theoretical postulates of neoliberalism formulated in the abstract. Moreover, the cycles of neoliberal governments in the region have been accompanied by restriction of freedoms (such as freedom of expression, for example), which also contradicts neoliberal theory (Harvey, 2005). Indeed, to varying degrees and in different forms, democratically elected South American governments have maintained the disciplinary role of the police and armed forces in the control of social protest and social movements (Borón, 2003), practices inherited from the dictatorships and from long before. In general, most countries have seen that social movements related to care of the environment and land tenure of indigenous peoples have been systematically repressed, while other movements and protests have been subject to more contingent dynamics (Delamata, 2019; Svampa, 2019). Likewise, the processes of economic concentration have implied that the media have increasingly become part of the economic groups, as they have turned into dominant communications holding companies (Becerra & Wagner, 2018). Thus, the pragmatic nature of neoliberalisation processes must be emphasised (Grugel & Riggirozzi, 2009; Harvey, 2005), in that practices and consequences that flout neoliberal theory are admissible to the extent that they serve the interest of a much broader class project aimed at renewing the foundations of capitalism. Second, the complexity of neoliberalisation processes is also shown by its negative consequences, particularly in a South America characterised by a dependent position in the global economy. Thus, environmental destruction; de-industrialisation; high inequality combined with wealth concentration phenomena; foreign exchange flight; the impoverishment of broad sectors of the population in addition to the deterioration and increased cost of basic services, among other problems, are complex consequences of the concrete processes of neoliberalisation in our countries. These consequences show the limits and the real effects of the so-called “neoliberal utopia” (Vergara, 2005). In this sense, rather than as failures of the neoliberal model, the contradictions and unanticipated effects mentioned must be understood as inherent in its structure. Such a model, then, consists of a theoretical utopia that functions as a system for justifying and legitimating a project that seeks in fact to restore the power of economic elites (both local and global) around the world. It also resets the conditions for capital

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accumulation and depoliticises society to avoid social resistance to the transformations underway (Clarke, 2005; Cypher, 2004; Harvey, 2005; Saad-Filho & Johnston, 2005; Taylor, 2006). Third, the complexity of neoliberalisation processes also manifests itself in the fact that, in South America, we are not dealing with a single, compact package of measures that has been applied on a single occasion and with a definitive impact. The countries of the region have experienced different speeds of change, in addition to partial applications of the measures. They speak to political cultures—of both the elites and popular sectors—that support and resist them in complex ways (Kingstone, 2018). Broadly speaking, the tension between “internally” and “externally oriented” development models (Salazar et al., 1999) has been present since the 1930s. Indeed, starting in that decade, the countries of South America experienced what was generally called the “end of the liberal era” or the “crisis of oligarchic governments”, a period that had been characterised by an extreme concentration of economic and political power in one minority sector, and a development model based on free trade and the export of raw materials (Grugel & Riggirozzi, 2009; Salazar, et al., 1999). The so-called “national-popular states” or “social states” emerged as a response to this crisis, with developmental, nationalist and relatively democratising perspectives whose materialisation varied from country to country. Their general orientation was to reduce external dependence through the protection of internal markets and achieve import substitution by means of the export of agricultural products or local industrialisation. At the same time, the state was viewed as an engine of development, aimed at promoting industry and sustaining state enterprises in strategic areas, as well as relatively universal public services and social policies. The social states or national-popular states looked towards Europe and the United States, but they were not merely a “version” of Keynesian developments or the New Deal. As much literature on the history of the state in Latin America came to recognise, these were local arrangements whose origins are linked to the specific conflicts, the preceding institutional fabric and peculiar forms of the “social question” in each country at the beginning of the twentieth century (O’Donnell, 1993, 2004). Indeed, while in the countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) the “social question” emerged as a consequence of massive immigration and accelerated and poorly planned

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urbanisation due also to migration from rural areas (Bohoslavsky, 2014; Suriano, 2000), in the Andean countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela) rurality, political citizenship and the social integration of “Indianness” persisted as specific problems throughout the twentieth century. In Brazil, for its part, the progressive visibility and regulation of Afro-descendants and indigenous people dominated the “tutelary power” of the state and configured a eugenic agenda that regulated the exclusion from citizenship of former slaves (De Souza Lima, 2002). At the same time, in cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, processes of immigration and urban growth took place that were like those that occurred in the Southern Cone (Matos, 2012; Patarra, 2003). This makes it impossible to analyse each national process as if it were simply the “end” of the oligarchic state. The responses to these local dilemmas, in the interwar context, resulted in the deployment of state bureaucracies in national territories that were still in dispute, as well as the growth of domestic markets and state and private employment. Educational and public health systems expanded both geographically and to new sectors of the population, labour legislation was reinforced and the state’s role established as a mediator in the capital-labour relationship. In the Southern Cone countries especially, these state processes allowed the emergence of a substantial and influential middle class, revealing inequality rates that were much lower than the Latin American average. However, the levels of industrialisation in the countries of the area during the post-Second World War period were insufficient, and the preservation of regressive tax structures made an effective redistribution of national income unfeasible, apart from their role in fiscal crises derived from the significant increase in social expenditure. These factors, added to the increase in political pressure on the states by elites, popular sectors and political actors from the right and left, led to what has been called the “crisis of the social or national-popular states” in the 1960s and 1970s (Silva, 2009). This took place in the context of the intensification of social mobilisations at a global level, of the Cold War and the added pressure of the United States. The latter had tolerated, not without contradictions, the previous development projects, but it considered the new political situation of Latin American countries to be a threat, particularly after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Despite the existence of democratic alternatives to resolve these crises (Hinkelammert, 2001), civil-military dictatorships were implanted in the region with United States support. This was the case of Argentina (1976–1983),

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Bolivia (1971–1978), Brazil (1964–1985), Chile (1973–1990), Ecuador (1972–1976), Paraguay (1959–1989), Peru (1968–1980) and Uruguay (1973–1984). Against this background, what Perry Anderson (2003) called the world’s “first neoliberal experiment”—almost a decade before Thatcherism in Great Britain and the government of Ronald Reagan in the United States—was implemented in Chile. Both Hayek and Friedman, founders of neoliberal doctrine, visited the country during this period and helped consolidate the idea of the “Chilean model” as desirable (Harvey, 2005), while the “Chicago school” provided the famous “Chicago Boys” as advisers and officials of the Chilean dictatorship and of several others in the region. None of the other civic-military dictatorships in the region generated neoliberalisation processes as coherent or systematic as those of Chile, but all, to different degrees, share the feature of financial deregulation, a central element of the capital mobility that characterises the contemporary phase of neoliberalism (Anderson, 2003). The dictatorships that dominated South America in the 1970s and 1980s were, indeed, very systematic in their plans to exterminate the political opposition, social activists, labour and peasant movements, etc. In effect, they developed active policies involving the violation of human, social, personal and political rights, whose key ideological and tactical elements originated in the teachings of the School of the Americas in Panama.2 All the countries of the region emerged into political democratisation processes between the mid-1980s and 1990s with unprecedented indices of inequality and poverty. After the return of democracy, the governments of Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia (1985–1989), Carlos Menem in Argentina (1989–1999), Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela (1989–1993) and the almost three terms of Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990–2000), were those that consolidated the processes of neoliberalisation and the premises of the Washington Consensus. The measures stipulated included budgetary and fiscal “discipline”; changes in public spending priorities; fiscal reform; the liberalisation of finance and trade; an open gate to foreign investment; privatisation of public companies; state deregulation and the guarantee of property rights. Later, other measures were added, aimed at consolidating the market as a mechanism for resource allocation, and subordinating politics and the field of social responsibilities to the economy, in addition to mitigating some of the negative effects of the changes introduced. These included modernisation of state bureaucracies, privatisation of the pension, health

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and education systems and the development of targeted social policies (Garretón, 2012) or “safety nets”. The measures listed above have been a driving force in neoliberalisation processes, since credit agencies have conditioned their support on compliance with them, and the free trade agreements signed by some countries also mandate them. In this scenario, decision-making bypasses the popular frameworks of democratic influence and is exercised in unelected but empowered bodies that are opaque to public knowledge. They are “shuttered” democracies, in which the borders of the debatable have been narrowed and naturalised (Polo, 2018). Chile provided a favourable setting for initial experimentation, in that the social and political effects of the adjustment measures could be controlled through repression. However, the existence of periods of hyperinflation in several of the countries of the region facilitated popular acceptance, however unstable, of the new measures, even in the context of democratic governments (Anderson, 2003). In this way, it has been postdictatorial democracies in South America that have given continuity to the “Chilean model”, even though this resulted in several rulers breaking their electoral promises and government plans by incorporating such neoliberal measures surreptitiously in a kind of “neoliberalism by surprise” (Stokes, 2004). The foregoing reinforces the idea of the contingent and pragmatic nature of neoliberalisation processes, since there is no necessary relationship in our countries between authoritarianism and neoliberalism, or between neoliberalism and democracy. Most of the elected governments of the region, thus, incorporated neoliberal policies to varying degrees, in the context of a clear material and ideological hegemony, since it has proved impossible to sustain a genuine alternative to neoliberalism (Borón, 2003). These elected governments brought about substantial changes to the development model of their respective countries, which led to a reduction in the weight of industrial employment and an increase in unemployment due to the privatisation of public companies, as in the case of Argentina. Starting in the 2000s, and in close relation to intense social mobilisations that were successful in the overthrow of governments that promoted neoliberal reforms (Silva, 2009), some progressive political agendas were developed that came to power. They have been called the “Pink tide” (Brand & Sekler, 2009; Sader, 2008), term used to name the wave of left leaning governments that assumed power in Latin America during this period. Starting from a more egalitarian perspective, they tried to modify,

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to varying degrees, the structural conditions of some countries in the region. Examples are Chavismo in Venezuela (1999 to the present), the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2005–2019) and of Rafael Correa and Lenin Moreno in Ecuador (2006 to the present), which are usually characterised by authors as similar given their more radical perspective and the deeper institutional transformations intended (Garretón, 2012; Rossi & Silva, 2018; Silva, 2009). Also usually included in the “Pink tide” is the Brazil of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores ), when led by Luis Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (2003–2016), the Argentina of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2003–2015) and the Uruguay of the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), under the governments of Tabaré Vázquez and José Mujica (2005–2020). The coming to power of these sectors meant a reappropriation of the rights agenda installed in the previous decade, and the adoption of a social justice rhetoric supporting political programmes that relaunched conditional transfers of income,3 with more generous payments and correspondingly less punitiveness as well. Indeed, although conditional transfers spread from the second half of the 1990s to practically the entire world, they vary considerably in terms of their greater or lesser tendency to demonise welfare dependency. Thus, programmes such as those developed in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina under the “Pink tide” were economically much more generous and morally less stigmatising than those deployed in countries like Colombia, Chile and Mexico (Molyneux, 2006, 2007; Tabbush, 2010). Moreover, legal transformations took place that consolidated a process of democratic inclusion and expansion, both for popular sectors and for groups with excluded sexual and ethnic identities. In countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador, regimes guided by these agendas currently continue in power, while, in others, they have been replaced by projects aimed at reinforcing the neoliberal project (Uruguay, Brazil), while in other governments have alternated between the two (as in Bolivia and Argentina). In such terms, it makes no sense to speak of a post-neoliberal phase in the region, as several believed at the time (Sader, 2008), since it is not a story with a known and predetermined ending, but rather a question of conflicts over hegemony which have contingent and variable manifestations (Borón, 2003), while within them contradictions and heterogeneities can be found. More recently, there has been talk of the “authoritarian drift” of neoliberalism (Borón, 2003), although we know that its strategic association with authoritarianism is of longer date, as we explained before. The

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reference here is to the existence of so-called “soft coups” (Arizmendi, 2018), in which the media and the judiciary have a greater role than the military, and which have been generated, for example, in Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia. Also seen as part of this drift is the strong criminalisation of social protest and the militarisation of public life, initially linked to the control of drug trafficking and armed insurgency (as in Colombia), but which has extended far beyond these objectives to include social demands or defence of the rights of indigenous peoples, as in the cases of Chile, Brazil and Argentina, or the demand for respect for democratic institutions and authorities, as at certain critical junctures in Bolivia and Brazil. In this way, South American neoliberalisation, sustained by an institutional and social model and by political and economic elites, can be characterised as an instrumental model whose aim is to maintain and expand the extreme concentration of power and wealth that we can appreciate in our countries, often indeed acquiring neo-oligarchic rather than liberal overtones. For some theorists, the resilient nature of the regional neoliberal project transcends government agendas and coalesces around the formation of a transnational civil society with enormous capacity for pressure and agenda setting, which competes or is strategically articulated with communal and local narratives and practically configures a global social class (Fischer & Plehwe, 2013). At the same time, in different periods and with different intensities and expressions, more stable mobilisations or social movements have taken place in the region that reject neoliberal reforms or some of their effects (Silva, 2009). Among the actors involved in mobilisations, public and private sector workers, teachers, students, residents of popular urban neighbourhoods and peasants must all be mentioned. As more stable social movements, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers of Brazil or “Landless Movement” (Movimento Sem Terra, MST)4 —the world’s largest such movement and with sister organisations in several South American countries—must be highlighted, in addition to those related to environmental protection, indigenous movements and human rights movements, whether related to repressive violence, childhood, gender, sexual dissidence or other issues. Human rights movements, in particular, had recourse to international fora and saw their struggle reinforced in the final period of the dictatorships by forming alliances with global actors. In the same way, local activists joined international organisations and, after time spent in

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these settings, secured posts in the different, now democratically elected governments (Grinberg, 2014). This process has generated porosities, translations and traffic between global and local spheres, between civil society and the state and between rights narratives and neoliberal rationalities, which mark and characterise the processes by which the CRC has been incorporated and institutionalised in the national arenas. We will now turn to exploring these processes.

Regional Institutionalisation of the Rights Focus: Legacies, Translations and Imports As already pointed out, institutionalisation of children’s rights has coincided contextually with the processes of neoliberalisation and democratisation in South America in the 1980s or 1990s, depending on the country. In a complex and dynamic setting, human rights activists in leadership roles were part of the global, regional and national scenes and, at the same time were in a key position to “translate” (Engle Merry, 2006) the universal and global principles into local contexts. Indeed, many of them—both on a personal level as well as that of their organisations and collectives—played prominent roles in attracting international condemnation of Latin American dictatorships; they were global players in this process who grasped their power to give force to the struggles for social transformation. Actors like the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo 5 ), for example, contributed to the drafting of the CRC and later helped to give visibility to the rights of children in Argentina. While these local and regional actors gained recognition in the global context and helped shape the rights of the child, it was they and other actors who, once the CRC had been adopted, also tried to influence the laws and institutions in different countries. However, these South American contexts were far from virgin territories as they had had their own long debates about the protection of children since the late nineteenth century. Indeed, debates about childhood as a subject of public protection policies and specific rights were neither a novelty of the 1980s and 1990s on the South American scene, nor in Latin America as a whole. Many historical studies have shown that, since the first Pan-American Congress of Pediatrics in 1916, numerous and acrimonious debates led not only to

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the gestation of local laws and institutions in the different Latin American countries, but also to the creation in the 1920s of the first specialised regional institution, the Inter-American Children’s Institute, based in Uruguay. This institute, created as a body to support the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge to improve the situation of children in the Americas, became part of the Organization of American States during the second post-war period (Guy, 1998; Rojas, 2018). According to the viewpoints generated by the normative innovations and the debates in the UN at the time of the finale of the Cold War and the so-called decade of women’s rights in 1970, what had been considered the pioneering South American and Latin American discourses on matters of child protection were re-scrutinised, with a critical emphasis on their conservatism. According to this viewpoint, the moralism, class bias and paternalism with which childhood was characterised in the concerns of the first decades of the twentieth century were nothing if not conservative. It is noteworthy, however, that this new reading of the previous approaches and practices relating to children occurred in our region and in Europe simultaneously. Particularly in Europe, the debates on the political participation of children that took place during the Soviet revolution and the view of children as subjects with autonomy held by authors such as Janusz Korczak were silenced in both the 1924 Declaration on the Rights of the Child and that of 1959. The view prevailed in these rights instruments of children as objects in need of protection. Expressing a point of view steeped in philanthropic concerns in the ideological context of post-First World War Europe, children were placed at the centre of the stage. It was precisely this emphasis on moral obligations, strictly speaking, rather than rights, that attracted the relatively sparse criticism that the 1924 declaration received from its contemporaries. In turn, the treatment of children as “little kids, they are only children, [who] will be people later on” (Korczak, 1993) was pointed out as a problem. For its part, In South America, anarchism, for example—an important and threatening political expression in the first two decades of the twentieth century—coincided in treating children as political actors with full capacity for participation. Its positions were held in check, in the debates themselves, by laws that punished such expressions of child agency as serious problems, and in actions of direct political repression. In Argentina, for example, anarchist groups advocated the political participation and autonomy of children (Barrancos, 1987). Indeed, the presence

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of working children in the revolts of 1919, the so-called “Tragic Week” (Semana Trágica)6 was the factor that triggered the approval that same year of the Patronage of Minors7 Law, which created an institutional apparatus for vulnerable children in Argentina. In turn, the New School movement, whose guiding principles were the freedom and activity of children, found early local expression in countries like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, influencing teacher training (Jafella, 2002) in the context of expanding national educational systems. In this sense, if in Europe concerns about childhood were catalysed by the Great War, in South America the motivation came from the emergence of the “social question” and its characteristics related to mass migration and the growth of labour movements. These are the historical contexts that shaped the specific institutional and legal forms in which concern for the protection of children found expression at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1930, all the countries of South America in particular, and Latin America as a whole, had legislation and institutions for the protection of this “minors”, and the welfare of children was at the heart of the organisation of the national-popular projects that we described earlier (Cosse, 2005; Milanich, 2012; Nari, 2004). These states succeeded in consolidating a normative ideal of the family by organising the delivery of social benefits around legal marriage, children born within wedlock and the figures of the male worker and the female mother and housewife (Valdés, 2008; Vergara, 2015). Unlike the oligarchic period—imbued as it was with a liberal understanding of the family as a private space that must be kept free from state interference—these states legitimised public action in matters of family and childhood by moralising the role of the male father figure, empowering the female mother figure in health and educational matters and adhering to the principle of child protection. In fact, the protection of children came to be one of the settings in which South American and Latin American “modernity” played out; a transition was proposed from a family organised around the absolute power of the father—in dialogue only with the power of the church— towards a family whose relationships, forms of upbringing and modes of organisation were scrutinised and shaped by state projects. This work was not, however, exclusive to states, since workers’ and feminist movements and the nascent progressive political parties participated in the task of consolidating the nuclear family in the popular sectors. In this sense, in our countries, the modern notion of “protected childhood” was much

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less a product of the influence of a developing bourgeoisie than of the action of the state and progressive movements (Giberti, 1997; Vergara, 2015). In this context, the feminist movements of the Southern Cone promoted debates around the protection of the working mother and her offspring and proposed the need for deployment of state institutions to guarantee her autonomy, in a characteristic use of what has been called “strategic maternalism” (LLobet, 2020; Molyneux, 2007; Nari, 2004). These debates took place both at the Pan-American level and inside the different countries. Consequently, images that portray the children’s rights discourse consolidated in the CRC as “foreign” and imported omit the rich Latin American and South American history of debates around these rights (LLobet, 2020). Indeed, it was South American actors who formulated certain positions in the CRC drafting process based on their experiences of dictatorship. This was the case of the right to identity, also called “the Argentine article”, due to the activism of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo to establish the real identity of the sons and daughters of people who were illegally kidnapped or “disappeared” and handed over to families close to the regime. (Regueiro, 2010). A similar case involves the debates around the restrictions thought to be necessary to prevent international adoption from becoming established as a model for practices involving the children of political opponents or minority racial groups (Fonseca, 2002), and which involved a specific altercation between Latin American and Northern representatives. During the CRC drafting process there were numerous coordination and construction efforts in South America and in Latin America in general. In 1985, the Defence of Children International convened a regional meeting in Colombia, which gave initial impetus to a network of civil society organisations seeking to influence the drafting. In 1987, one hundred twenty civil society organisations approved the Charter of the Rights of the Latin American Child and produced specific recommendations that were taken to the meetings of the CRC drafting committee in Geneva (Villalta & Gesteira, 2020). If the CRC drafting process and its antecedents prevent it from being considered alien to the South American experience, it is nevertheless true that the Convention’s institutional features give precedence to state forms and the social dynamics of developed countries and adopt a paternalistic

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or morally superior tone towards the developing world (Pupavac, 2001; Reynolds et al., 2006). In the South American case, both the family and the community are scenarios and actors in social protection. That is, historically welfare provision and social protection have had not only the social state and its institutions as relevant actors. Families and community organisations, or the forms of communal life to be found among indigenous peoples and rural communities, have also played a central role. This plurality of settings and meanings calls into question the idea of children as individual subjects abstracted from their social relationships, as advanced in some readings of the CRC that for this reason seem more foreign to Latin Americans. The CRC’s institutionalisation in the South American nation states was accompanied by judicial and legal reforms promoted in the 1990s by international organisations and debates. Therborn (1996), for example, points out that the new style of politics inaugurated then, due to its emphasis on human rights, has some major characteristics which are linked to the establishment of an international agenda that is interwoven with the internal affairs of states in their search for social change and governance reform. This agenda operates, on the one hand, through international organisations of the UN system, which have played key roles in the countries, especially following the international debt crises mentioned earlier. On the other hand, it operates through a system of International Civil Society Organizations (ICSO), active at both local and international levels, which have changed the public agenda by introducing issues in the media and by financing papers, conferences, research, etc. The activism of organisations such as UNICEF, UNFPA and the IDB involved the adoption of an updated perspective on the state bureaucracy in local reforms, which incorporated the premises of the Washington Consensus, together with proposals for democratisation, transparency, accountability and auditability, as central tools for the institutionalisation of a human rights focus. The decade of the 1990s was thus one of the institutional, and not only economic, consolidation of neoliberalism. It incorporated and mainstreamed agendas of gender equality, children’s rights and, in general, what UNICEF referred to as an “adjustment with a human face”, in its leadership of the group of international bodies that sought to put a brake on the IMF’s state austerity agenda. In other words, if the

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neoliberalisation process altered the socioeconomic structure, the transnational perspective and the human rights focus contributed new ways of governing the state. This complex background implied that constitutional reforms carried out in several countries of the region—notably in the case of Brazil— proposed an advanced normative framework with the incorporation of gender and childhood issues, instruments of social participation and mechanisms for civic oversight of governmental action. These constitutional and normative reforms sought to graft radical advances and transformations onto a pre-existing institutional order with a long history and of variable robustness. In effect, the bureaucratic-institutional fabric dedicated to childhood towards the end of the twentieth century was at least three-quarters of a century old and comprised institutions that, in some cases, long preceded such norms, such as the Defenders of Minors, a figure that already existed in the Viceregal legislation. Others had undergone a process of formalisation and nationalisation, such as the Societies of Ladies of Charity, which in most countries of South America had concentrated assistance to minors since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tensions specific to the 1990s were added to this historical accretion of institutions, norms and social meanings on the issue of “vulnerable children”. In effect, the CRC was incorporated into the national laws of countries whose governments were in the process of far-reaching and radical transformation in the direction of the “minimum state”, a sine qua non of neoliberal reforms, as mentioned already. The transition from dictatorships to neoliberal governments took place around the disappearance of the labour movement as a political subject (Basualdo & Lorenz, 2005; Canitrot, 1980; Delich, 1982) and consequently of the “male worker and family head” as the subject central to welfare (Merklen, 2005; Tabbush, 2010). Thus, social benefits went from the logic of solidarity distribution to that of minimal networks, to later adopt, in a coincidental and veiled manner, the intergenerational logic of the “fight against poverty” and the protection of children’s rights. Faced with the social consequences of the impoverishment caused by the neoliberal reforms together with the Latin American tradition of concern for children’s welfare, the rhetoric of children’s rights focused, more than anything, on poverty and the class bias of institutions for vulnerable children. Thus, a UNICEF official, for example, pointed out in the early 1990s that the institutionalisation of the CRC made it

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necessary to “de-judicialise poverty” and limit state intervention to nondiscretionary time frames (Llobet & Villalta, 2019; Villalta & LLobet, 2015). The centrality of the social agenda did not exclude civil society organisations, which underwent transformation and flourished in the same period. Indeed, the incorporation of the CRC went hand in hand with the emergence and professionalisation of the so-called “tertiary sector”, whose trajectory in South America stems from two roots: traditional philanthropic organisations and Catholic charity on the one hand, and human rights organisations on the other. Both traditions merged in the shape of professional groups specialised in pressing issues and kept afloat by international funding and connections for specific projects, to which we referred earlier. The activities of human rights organisations, present ever since the South American dictatorships as mentioned already, show the importance of international connections in supporting demands and denunciations against repressive states. In this scenario, not a few activists ended up joining national and international officialdom due to their role in incorporating the rights agenda in public policies (Grinberg, 2014; Schuch, 2012). At the same time, the functions assigned to civil society organisations in the CRC itself allowed the consolidation of a non-state field that has been important to uphold issues that states hide from sight, while being characterised by its ideological and thematic diversity. The centrality of child poverty and the state’s treatment of the children of the poor were thus the themes that dominated the 1990s and shaped local laws designed to adjust to the CRC. Such laws focused, therefore, on reforming the judicial sector concerned with “minors” and institutions for “abandoned children”, separating criminal matters from those of a social nature. We can see there, too, the contradictory signs of the times that make criticism of the state for its inefficiency and incapacity the spearhead of privatisation and democratic reforms. Such tensions were reflected in the political debate, which sought to order the field into “discursive fronts” (Fonseca & Cardarello, 2005) so that the battle for rights was kept separate from contexts of the de facto restriction of social and economic rights. But they also ordered the academic field, which began on its path towards childhood in tandem with concerns about social control, diversity and social inequality. We will turn to this in our next section.

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The Development of South American Childhood Studies: Inquiring into Social Control, Diversity and Childhood Inequality General Aspects of the Field An initial influence in the formation of South American childhood studies, around the 1990s, was the European, and especially French, historiography of private and everyday life (Ariès, 1987; Ariès & Duby, 1991; Donzelot, 1990), which facilitated a socio-historical understanding of childhood. As these studies became more established, several authors criticised the indiscriminate and decontextualised use of these references, which helped to better frame the question of what was historically specific about Latin American and South American childhood (Giberti, 1997; Herrera & Cárdenas, 2013). This has meant that, while some of the concepts formulated in other regions of the world have served to open the imagination to new questions, such concepts have been problematised in research carried out locally. At the same time, the field’s development was influenced by the democratising agendas of the post-dictatorship period, which were analysed in the previous section. For this reason, the questioning of total and authoritarian institutions and a motivation to propose alternative ways of connecting with children gained force. Before “looking at the child”, sociology, pedagogy and the history of education began to examine, in detail, the mechanisms by which childhood was produced, in a critical tradition that lies at the heart of South American academic culture and goes back to earlier readings of Paulo Freire8 and Orlando Fals Borda.9 Linked to this tradition, we find works that question the classical academic division between an interest in knowing reality and—under the influence of popular education and participatory action-research perspectives—transforming it. Something similar happened with a psychoanalysis that was clinic-based but had a strong socio-critical orientation (Carli, 2011), and developed legal-critical perspectives on official protocols with respect to those classified as “minors”, mentioned earlier, and in which the proposal of new forms of action is fundamental. Given this background, researchers in the field were also interested in the mechanisms of control over and repression of children, and the construction of child subjectivities in the civic-military dictatorships. In addition to configuring notions of children as “vulnerable subjects” to be

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the object of targeted social policies, as part of the processes of neoliberalisation these dictatorships contributed to relaunching the idea of risk associated with poor children. This process drove a growing focus on security in public agendas on childhood, and was analysed in sociological studies in the field which focused on issues of violence, criminality and the criminal prosecution of children (Guemureman and Daroqui, 2001; Schuch, 2009; Zapiola, 2010). The field advanced, moreover, by questioning the tendency of South American states and some pro-children’s rights activists to universalise childhood. Supporting a homogenising notion of “protected childhood” (Fass, 2012; Hecht, 2002) as a family and institutional ideal has been useful for activism in our countries, by putting ethical principles at the centre of debates and legitimising demands. However, it has also allowed governments to evade public responsibilities and attribute problems to the eternally alleged “incapacity” of poor families (LLobet, 2009). In this way, and in tune with European childhood studies, there was a particular interest in exploring the diversity of childhood in the region and its lived contexts. This has meant confronting a curious paradox: on the one hand, from a universalistic point of view children lose all their particular qualities when we are dealing with the study of the human being and human development in general; on the other hand, their worlds seem exaggeratedly specific when they are conceived as detached from the historical and local processes from which the experiences and social identities of other groups are configured (Vergara, 2009). Within the framework described, there has been interest in conducting research on rural childhoods (Silva et al., 2013), children living on the peripheries of cities (Gobbi, 2017), children descended from enslaved African populations (Anjos & Cipryano, 2006) and indigenous children from peoples as different as the Mapuches (Szulc, 2011), the Diaguitasquilmes (Remorini & Palermo, 2016) or the Xikrin (Cohn, 2002). Among other topics covered by ethnographic and linguistic research have been the cultural diversity of childhood; the heterogeneous meanings assigned to childhood, parenting, and care; the minorisation and guardianship of racialised populations, and processes of acculturation, reindigenisation and identity (Arroyo & Silva, 2012; Marchi, 2007; Neufeld & Thisteu, 1999). South American literature has also highlighted the social and economic inequality in which children develop, as well as the prejudice and segregation of social groups. In this way, the impact of social inequalities on

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access to rights and on school careers, as well as in limiting the voice of children from popular sectors and their families, are concerns that are in the focus of particular investigations or are part of the context to be considered. Child labour has been another focus of interest. Not only working conditions or their effects have been studied, but also the interesting organisations of working children (NATS) that, despite international norms on the matter, have emerged in countries such as Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia since 1980, as Liebel (2006) has described in detail. Other social movements have also caught the attention of researchers, such as those of street children in Brazil (Chisté & dos Santos, 2019; Rizzini & Mena, 2019),10 or issues such as children involved in the armed conflict in Colombia (Opsina-Alvarado et al., 2018; Valencia-Suescún et al., 2015) and the daily lives of children in land occupations in Argentina (CELS, 2016). There are also studies on migration and the reception of children from neighbouring countries (Henao-Agudelo et al., 2016; Suárez-Cabrera, 2015). It is important to consider that the national histories of the countries of the region both converge and diverge in different aspects (Szulc & Cohn, 2012). The long process of colonisation meant an erasure of local cultures, the imposition of a given religiosity in addition to values and habits, the subordination of racialised groups and the establishment of “civilising” logics. After the nineteenth century independence from the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, the South American republics in formation also promoted processes of normalisation and moralisation aimed at cultural homogenisation. They developed campaigns of extermination against the indigenous population, based on modernising Europeanising and openly racist conceptions. Such logics, called by Quijano (2001) a “coloniality of power”, have tended to become institutionalised in the formation and consolidation of national states and their highly racialised class borders. They are expressed in a social order based on patterns of domination and guardianship (Quijano, 1992; de Souza Lima, 2002) that are articulated in specific ways in the different countries, even though they all share common features. This double movement observed between commonalities and specifics represents an enormous challenge for the development of the field. Indeed, as we have noted already, the constitution of modern childhood in South America occurs within the context of the emergence and

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consolidation of centralised bureaucratic states since the end of the nineteenth century, and is linked, in turn, with processes of nation-building. Within this framework, historians and other social scientists have paid special attention to the first decades of the twentieth century, a moment in which a progressive medical, legal, family and educational institutionalisation of childhood became evident. These developments showed the importance of public policies on childhood for the construction of social or national-popular states in several countries. In Brazil in particular, child protection initiatives, when extended to poor children, expressed a concern to protect the child labour used by factories, or to segregate “abandoned” or “delinquent” children in specialised institutions (Alvim and Valadares, 1988). Nevertheless, the process of social assistance was extrapolated to childhood more broadly and included the family and sometimes the community. South American researchers have also been interested in the influence of feminism in the emergence of a home-grown Pan-American movement in pursuit of children’s rights, developed from the Pan-American Children’s Congresses (Guy, 1998; LLobet, 2012, 2020), and institutionalised in the Inter-American Children’s Institute (Rojas, 2018), whose emergence we discussed in the previous section. At the same time, the most recent decolonial perspectives incorporated in the field have made it possible to identify regional commonalities; understanding the experience of colonisation calls for questioning the stability of national borders and the marked state-orientation of the pioneer studies. Such studies seek to incorporate South America’s position on a global scale, and to recover the historical dimension of a domination that has been always racialised. Following this line of thought has meant investigating the revolutionary and civil resistance discourses of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, which incorporated childhood into the framework of anti-imperialist and emancipatory rhetoric. Curiously, however, the period after the 1990s in South America has been one of those least studied, not just as context alone, but also as a historical time whose political, economic, social and cultural dimensions need to be explored in search of the transformations of childhood they have produced. An example of a review along these lines is “Childhood: between school, the street and the mall”, compiled in 2006 by Sandra Carli, and limited to the Argentine case. In this book, the sociocultural and economic transformations of the neoliberalisation process were displayed in order to gain a better understanding of the kinds of childhood being generated.

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One hallmark of the economic and cultural globalisation promoted by neoliberalisation has been the expansion of the culture industry through television and electronic media consumption. Research carried out in the region has focussed on this topic also (Salgado et al., 2006; Vergara et al., 2010). As we have seen, the development of the South American field of childhood studies has been heterogeneous. Although many of the issues that affect childhood are common, there have been multiple research approaches. Undoubtedly, the variety of research questions has made it possible to construct a broader vision of childhood in the subcontinent. In addition, this is an interdisciplinary field in which psychologists, sociologists, educators, historians, social workers, anthropologists and geographers, among others, combine efforts to account for the complexity of the issues addressed. Since the 2000s, the field has produced research, contributed publications and organised conferences and seminars focused on childhood and on the discussion of children’s contexts, cultures and experiences (Voltarelli, 2017). In part, the scientific and cultural policies of the Pink tide governments facilitated the holding of congresses and seminars, and these promoted intra-regional dialogue and increased the visibility of Latin American production outside the region. At the same time, as we have seen, the field has engaged with part of the knowledge production emerging from institutions in the northern hemisphere. The issue of children’s participation in the field of policies and practices directed at children (Rizzini & Tisdall, 2012), mainly after the publication of the CRC, has emerged as a common question and is one of the research lines whose production has increased in recent decades (Nascimento, 2019). Likewise, South American specialists participate in international events, which allows more effective dialogue between researchers from different continents.

The Chapters of the Book and Their Links with the South American Context As we have seen, the centrality of poverty, with its omnipresence in the subcontinental agenda and its importance given the socioeconomic impacts of the neoliberal reforms of the decade, colonised debates on the rights of the child from the 1990s onwards. This colonisation had sui generis effects, notably the scant and belated attention paid to the political

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rights of children, especially those that concern their voice and participation. The “resemantisation” of rights, that is, the ways in which they were reappropriated locally and endowed with specific meanings and a special scope, is part of the debate addressed in Villalta’s chapter, “Rights activism, judicial practices, and interpretative codes: children in family justice (Argentina, 1990–2015)”. The interpretative route by which the child’s right to be heard emerged as an issue in Argentina was due more to a change of the meaning of the family—and the corresponding modification of parent–child relationships in the legal framework and cultural context—than to a new profiling of children as subjects of participation. An effect of this particularity—the interlocking ways of analysing childhood and the family—is the prominence of family protection regimes in the debates about childhood in South America, and especially in the Southern Cone. Furthermore, the role of international organisations and professionalised local civil society groups in setting agendas on social problems is controversial. While it is true that, in many cases, they have contributed to problematising and bringing to light infringements of rights and conservative regimes, especially relating to the rights of girls, and have criticised the most violent forms of parental authority, on other issues they have not necessarily permitted advances. Such is the argument that Laura Frasco Zuker and María Eugenia Rausky present in their chapter “The problems of child labour: international organizations and local contexts”. The authors argue that the pre-eminence of international narratives in the framing of problems like that of child labour is conflictive when viewed from the experience and concrete situations of children and their families. The need to incorporate nuances, differences and heterogeneities is a challenge for both states and international organisations, a challenge that is not just methodological but, above all, a question of justice. As discussed earlier, tensions and contradictions have marked the interlocked processes of neoliberalisation and the institutionalisation of children’s rights in South America. As shown in Juan Amador’s chapter, “Early childhood and neoliberalism in Colombia: true discussions, government rationality, and conducting behaviour”, even in the Colombian context—in which perspectives of minimal protection and emerging concerns for early childhood have predominated, entwined with prescriptive and moralising discourses on development—there are contradictions, differences and resistances. The entrapment of early childhood and the logic of children’s rights in exclusive institutional frameworks

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simplifies and depoliticises citizenship, while presenting areas of conflict in which some forms of resistance can emerge. As mentioned earlier, school and children’s right to education has also been a recurring theme in South American childhood studies, mainly due to the difficulties faced by the poorest children in school spaces, but also because of the centrality of the development of educational systems in the production of childhood in the region. It is worth returning to the humanist idea that the school is the place for children to access the knowledge produced over the centuries, that is, a space for preparation, whether for letters, in the case of the children in the higher social classes, or for work, in the case of the lower classes (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1992). Focusing a little more on the education of children from the perspective of neoliberalisation in South America, some aspects are worth emphasis. In many countries of the region during the twentieth century a mixed system of education existed, which included state schools and private fee-paying schools, the latter being denominational or secular— and, in some cases, such as Chile or Argentina—private and statesubsidised. However, from the 1970s onwards, the proportion of private schools grew as responsibility for the provision of education, a state attribution, was partly assumed by education entrepreneurs with a view to the education of those classes with the greatest purchasing power and to profit-creation, whether or not this was formally permitted. Private education is provided as a service aimed at the urban middle and upper classes, in line with a neoliberal project of society. In this way, the education system today is characterised by a duality that has been described as fragmentation: private education for middle and upper classes children and a run-down state system for lower-class children. In effect, admission to school is conditioned by the purchasing power of families, as well as by their urban or rural location (Neves, 2001). Although the countries of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay) had achieved basic education coverage of over 90% early in the last century (Argentina, for example, had reached basic education coverage for 80% of boys and girls by 1920), in other countries of the region the influence of multilateral organisations (UNESCO and UNICEF, in the 1970s and 1980s; the World Bank, in the 1990s) contributed to the development of public schools during the 1990s. These organisations supported states in the provision of universal educational services, with the objective of reaching the largest number of school-age children at low cost. Although the universalisation of basic

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education, especially in primary education, is considered one of the great advances of Latin American education in that decade, the effect was an under-resourced expansion of the national systems of basic education (Kruppa & Benevides, 2001). Against this background, since the late 1990s a sociology (Rabello de Castro & Kosminsky, 2010) and an anthropology of childhood (Szulc & Cohn, 2012) have developed in our region. One of the main issues has been education, among other aspects, both in its effects on the reproduction of inequalities in the former case, and on the subject of school culture in the latter. Regarding the reproduction of inequalities, the chapter “The pedagogical bond in the managerial organisation of Chilean schools”, by Patricia Guerrero, highlights the effects that the neoliberal management system promoted in Chilean schools has had on everyday human relationships. It examines both the links established between teachers and students and the processes of (re)cognition of the teaching profession. In other words, the idea of the attachment on which pedagogical relationships are based gets lost in the treatment of education as an efficient sequence of services, instead of as a right. The chapter also reconstructs the transformation of Chilean education based on neoliberal principles, deals with the consequences of this process in the daily life of schools and finally suggests ways for a return to education as an interpersonal relationship, or, from Freire’s perspective, as a human and social relationship and a joint practice of freedom. At the same time, in our countries there has been a close relationship between access and performance in formal education and the socio-legal system for the protection of “minors”, to which we referred earlier. As in the case of “minors”, between the 1960s and 1980s those “pupils” whose school performance did not meet expectations of school success became objects of protection, care and control (Rabello de Castro & Kosminsky, 2010). In this sense, just as socio-legal systems targeting “minors” have tended to confine them in institutions, South American schools have historically tended to expel the children of the poor, both formally and informally. In this way, the biography of “minors” has typically been shaped by alternating internments, escapes and expulsions between one system and the other (Vergara, 2009). Thus, visibility must be given to the situation of children who have been excluded from school, either for economic reasons, due to their “disruptive behaviour” or because the school had no interest in them. In

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Brazil, for example, recent data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) show that 3% of Brazilian children between six and fourteen years old (around one million children) are out of school (IBGE, 2019). The phenomenon of school exclusion is not only of interest to educators but is an issue to be addressed by childhood studies, due to its complexity and the need to understand why children stop going to school or do not want to return to school. Relevant to these questions is Robin Cavagnoud’s chapter “Life courses of out-of-school adolescents. Neoliberalism, vulnerabilities and violation of the right to an education in Peru”, which explores the situation of children and young people no longer in school and looks for the reasons for pre-completion dropout. The text reflects on the increase in social vulnerability that has resulted from expansion of neoliberal models of education, including the privatisation of education and low-cost public education. The author provides a contextualised understanding of the reasons for dropout and recognises that desertion of school is contrary to the right to education as a basic social right. He illustrates, moreover, the heterogeneity of the experience of being a child and a young person given the complexity of childhood in the South American context. Adolescents are also seen as subjects of law in the chapter “Participation rights in Brazilian schools: towards the politicisation of adult-child relationships?” by Lucia Rabello de Castro and Renata Tavares. Here students occupy state schools as part of a movement that seeks greater participation in education-related public policy decisions. The research presents and discusses the students’ attempt to engage in direct action over issues that directly affect them, actions that fracture the adult–child hierarchy. The chapter highlights the opposition faced by the children from their families, the negative media coverage received and reactions from school authorities. In the search for a quality public education, the experience of school occupations leads to broader questions about the power of adults and of neoliberal educational principles. In recent years, meanwhile, the issue of economic migration has gained special importance in global and South American childhood studies, and for that reason is essential to include in this book. It is important, in part, due to the increase in transnational family mobility, and arising from that, for the lessons we have learned in studying it, which means querying some of the most common notions of family, parenthood and upbringing. In the context of South American neoliberalisation processes,

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of the prolonged economic crises in northern countries and the resurgence of migration policies, the current panorama is shifting and complex. Not only have displacements from South to North intensified, but also those from South to South, between South American or Latin American countries. The migrations involve different dynamics, in which the same country can be both a sender and a receiver. We have included three chapters on this topic in this book. René Unda and Daniel Llanos, in “Children and migratory processes in Ecuador between 1999 and 2009: from the ‘financial crisis’ trauma to the rule of law promises”, explore the subjective experience of Ecuadorian children whose families have migrated to Spain but who remain themselves in their country of origin. They link this experience with the structural conditions that resulted from the first wave of neoliberal measures (1999–2001). Gioconda Herrera and Lucía Pérez, in “Venezuelan children on the move in Ecuador: fragile lives of risk and hope”, investigate the migration of Venezuelan families and children to Ecuador, in the context of Venezuela’s current humanitarian crisis. In the third study, “Back and forth: from women to childhood: An analysis of the processes of transnationalisation of women’s work and the internationalisation of early childhood policies in Uruguay”, Pilar Uriarte refers to the situation and experience of Dominican and Cuban women who settle with their children in Uruguay. The chapters outlined above show us that migratory decisions are taken in the context of “expulsive societies” (Sassen, 2015), as Unda and Llanos call them, that is societies that are unable to offer decent living conditions for the majority of their inhabitants or ensure their rights. This is the structural framework within which the different members of the family, including children, take decisions, reach agreements, experience migratory processes and build imaginaries and expectations for the future. Migration decisions, at the same time, are not merely individual, but involve family in the broadest sense—including both nuclear and extended families—despite the conflicts and tensions in these groups such decisions may involve. In her chapter, Uriarte insists on the need to conceive of the families and children involved in migratory processes as transnational, and to develop a notion of the circulation of care. This need to reconceptualise responds to the fact that family ties are not severed by migration and the different members, in one country or the other, not only maintain contact but also work out arrangements

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aiming, for example, to ensure the best possible care and well-being of the children involved. Indeed, these chapters lead us to confront those notions of family, childhood, fatherhood and motherhood that are most commonly deployed both in the social sciences and in daily life. As Uriarte shows, a failure to understand the precarious situation experienced by Dominican or Cuban women in Uruguay, for example—and the fact that such precarity increases when they travel with their children—leads us to attribute emotional detachment or lack of care unjustly to parents who decide to send children back to their countries of origin, to be in the care of relatives. Our impression is that the very term “children left behind”— which the literature tends to use in reference to children who remain in their countries of origin and which connotes some kind of parental abandonment—is proof of the difficulty in appreciating both the continuity of ties and the complexity and diversity of care relationships. Considerations like these should not lead us to idealise migratory processes by imagining migrants as superbeings capable of facing any difficulty, or to deny the families’ need for reunification that many receiving countries impede (Hernández, 2016). Nor can we ignore that children who do not live with their parents often, if not always, experience nostalgia or loneliness, and that while migration may increase relative well-being, it does not overcome conditions of poverty or avoid new forms of labour precarity, violence and discrimination in receiving countries, as the chapter by Herrera and Pérez shows with great clarity. Studies of this kind remind us that the agency of children and their families cannot be thought of in a decontextualised way or in the abstract, but rather are exercised within structural and historical limits and given conditions of existence, a premise that has been central to the field of childhood studies since its beginnings. As the three chapters discussed show, whether or not they have participated directly in migration decision-making, children and young people understand them, join in with family migration arrangements or migrate on their own account, despite the costs that such movements entail. In this sense, children’s agency is to be understood within the framework of relationships since the family and its affective relationships are one of the most important for children’s life trajectories. As Lara and Unda also affirm, the rights of children and their material and emotional well-being cannot be thought of as opposed to those of their parents and relatives. We must therefore make the effort to articulate them on both an analytical and normative level. In

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particular, in contexts in which for reasons derived from globalised labour markets migration has become feminised, we must pay equal attention to the experiences and impacts that these processes have on parents of both genders, as well as on both girls and boys.

Concluding Remarks Although neoliberalisation and the spread of a focus on rights are also present in the countries of the global North, the joining of these two currents produces special effects in South America due to the region’s marked inequality and sustained wealth accumulation; the judicialisation of child poverty through massive systems of institutionalisation and correction; the importance of informal and unrecognised economies and cultural regimes and the concentration of the population in highly populated, socioeconomically segregated cities, deregulated in their growth and with high levels of daily violence. We have tried to show in this introduction and our brief outline of the chapters in this book that South America has never been simply a region that has received and imported modernising influences from the countries of the North in order to make the changes needed to implement them. As we have seen, the region was a world pioneer of neoliberalisation; one of its countries, Chile, is still the country in which its processes have been most consistent, stable and systematic. Regarding the rights approach, we noted how it has been debated in the region ever since the early twentieth century and how the different measures and systems implemented—some with very negative effects and others giving more reason for hope—arose in response to the discussions and concerns raised at that time. Although always looking at the European countries and the United States within the framework of a history of colonisation and geopolitics that has installed both economic and cultural hegemonies, the countries of the region have developed these processes simultaneously with what happened in the global North. For this reason, the processes of neoliberalisation and the implementation of the rights approach in the region must be investigated and understood in non-linear ways which pay due attention to their complexity, as well as recognise how they are interlocked with broader configurations of localised historical phenomena. Something similar happened, more recently, with South American childhood studies, which developed in the 1990s at the same time as their European equivalents. They stemmed from the work of researchers

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with critical perspectives who began to develop socio-historical interpretations and to stress children’s status as social actors. In the late 1990s, and especially in the first decade of the twenty-first century, contact with European childhood studies led to the raising of questions and concerns that threw light on previously less explored aspects. Thus, for these studies to be consolidated in our region, works have had to be assembled that were previously widely scattered. The participation of several authors in the field has been “occasional” (Rabello de Castro & Kosminsky, 2010) due to the difficulties of pursuing longterm research interests in our countries, and the weakness of the local publishing industry. At the same time, dialogue between researchers is shaped by the opportunity structures created by the editorial policies of the most prestigious publications, which tend to make established authors in the English language into key referents in the field of study. The result is that Latin American researchers often have more fluid dialogue with works of the global North, or read more systematically from them, than they do with those of their Latin American colleagues. Given these factors, the creation of a field of studies and a South American area within it is a work still in progress, but one that has allowed the elaboration of a distinct perspective on studies of education, public policies, socio-criminal control and others. Despite the lesser degree of articulation between the studies carried out in the region, it is worth returning to the idea we suggested earlier of the relative simultaneity of European and South American childhood studies. An example is the Brazilian work of Florestan Fernandes, a respected sociologist who, in 1941, conducted research into the street games of groups of children living in immigrant barrios, as part of a study on manifestations of popular culture in São Paulo. This line of research did not continue afterwards, as subsequent neoliberalisation changed the composition of the neighbourhoods. The working class was expelled to the peripheries of the big cities, and streets became conduits for automobile circulation and traffic rather than for pedestrian permanence or children’s games. This led to an impoverishment of the cultural wealth expressed in urban living which began to reflect an increasingly uniform global production, without any special characteristics. How many other studies and ways of living childhood were not equally restricted? This work and others of equal importance for understanding the diversity of South American childhoods were left in a kind of limbo because

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they were no longer relevant to the processes of neoliberalisation. Nor apparently were children, except as a reason to puzzle over the supposedly unanticipated effects of the “neoliberal utopia”: their vulnerability, their poverty and their absence from school. Despite its commitment to change, the agenda of topics and concerns is still in debt as far as a critical analysis of the processes of neoliberalisation is concerned. With this book, we hope to go some way in settling this debt while drawing the attention of new audiences to some of the work done in the region. In this introduction and the chapters that follow, we hope to do justice to the rich kaleidoscope of childhood studies in South America, without claiming in the least to exhaust a topic that remains open. The historical moment of its development, dominated by neoliberalisation, converges with the emergence of a narrative of children’s rights as a novel language of social justice; as well as with regional intellectual traditions, strongly influenced by theories of dependency, marginality and decolonialism; Freirean perspectives of education as liberation and, in general, by powerful critical developments that place the hope of social transformation at the centre of intellectual concern. The flourishing economy that, for moments, marked the decade of progressive governments after the 1990s offered a favourable background for academic production, as the investment of these governments in research and education helped shape a plural intellectual field that would otherwise have been restricted to the middle and upper sectors.11 With its diversity of perspectives, this book seeks to throw new light on the question of “South American childhood". The context is one of social inequalities whose historical continuity pervades and articulates Latin American modernity. It is a contemporaneity marked by a mixture of time scales that range from the frantic hypermodernity of global megacities to the cyclical agrarian temporality of the rural village, and in a fractured geography that is simultaneously global and local. The “South American childhood” emerges, then, as an analytical device that seeks to capture, not necessarily successfully, all these layers of meaning and causality. But, above all, the “South American childhood”arises as a political statement that lays claim to the racial and historical heritage of the promise of the “Patria Grande”, which arose out of nineteenth century regional independence movements, and which reappears in thoughts of a “South American people” as an “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006).

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Notes 1. Neoliberal doctrine had its origins in the creation by Frederick Hayek and his mentor, Ludwig Von Mises of the “Mont Pelerin Society” in Switzerland, in 1947. Members included Milton Friedman, Frank Knight and, for a time, Karl Popper also. They described themselves as liberals, or “true liberals” because they regarded social liberals as “socialists”. Hayek’s idea was to purge liberal theory of some more recent “accidental adhesions” such as the notion of social justice and the social responsibility of the State for people’s well-being, as well as solidarity and other characteristics of the Welfare State (Vergara, 2005). They also opposed theories of state intervention such as those of John Keynes, believing state decisions on matters of investment and capital accumulation to be far inferior to the free flow of the market and its signals. For neoliberal theory, the state should only protect the formal equalities that are characteristic of a market society, that is, equality before the law and equality before the market, avoiding the formation of economic monopolies (Friedman, 2002 [1962]). Thus, the state must guarantee institutional arrangements and use its monopoly of violence to protect freedom of action, expression and choice, including the freedom of companies and corporations operating in the market. So that free competition can be fully expressed, those productive and service sectors previously under state control must also become part of the private sphere (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberal theory assumes that privatisation, free competition and deregulation will effectively generate higher productivity, efficiency, full employment and cheaper goods and services. In addition to its political economy aspects, neoliberal theory includes a broader conception of social structure in which the market predominates over society, and the economy over politics. It advances towards an anthropological conception based on “possessive individualism” (McPherson, 2005) and on the natural inequality of people. Finally, it adheres to the ideal of the modern prototypical family, to the value attached to tradition and norms (Vergara, 2005), and the social and sexual division of labour (Garretón, 2012). 2. The School of the Americas or “Latin American Training Center” was founded in 1946 by the U.S. Army in Panama and was used to provide training in the “fight against subversion” or counterinsurgency, with methods that included torture and murder. It was moved to Florida in 1984 and in 2001 was replaced by the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”. 3. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo is an Argentinian human rights organisation that fights for the recovery of children who were taken from their parents, during the repressive action of the last civic-military dictatorship, and

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

handed over to families close to the regime. It is estimated that around five hundred babies were in this situation, of which 130 have been identified, already as adults. Conditional transfer programmes consist of the periodic provision of sums of money or goods to a defined population, in programmes that require, in exchange, formal adherence to some conduct; for example, in poverty plans, children’s attendance at school and compliance with health monitoring programmes (Castiñeira et al., 2009). Movement formed in 1984 in Brazil and that includes more than 350,000 families, which is fighting for the reorganisation of land in the countryside through land reform. The “Tragic Week” is the name given to the final stage of a long workers’ strike that was violently repressed by the Argentine police in the second week of January 1919, leaving hundreds dead. It was the only pogrom to take place in Latin America. Children are referred to using this term by social and political regimes due to the precarious conditions in which they live. Although, strictly speaking, the category “minor” can be applied to any person who is below the age of adulthood, in practice it has been applied to lower strata children. As pointed out by Carli (2002), the category acquires an added meaning when it refers to situations of poverty, abandonment or child marginality. A Brazilian educator who died in 1997, Freire was a pioneer of critical pedagogy and popular education, aiming to transform the practice of education by developing a critical awareness of social reality and establishing dialogic relationships between educators and students. A Colombian sociologist who died in 2008, Fals Borda developed a proposal for participatory action-research that was aimed at the collectivisation of knowledge, overcoming the dichotomy between researcher and researched, at the articulation of knowledge and the collaborative exploration of alternatives for social transformation. The National Movement of Street Boys and Girls (MNMMR) participated in the 1980s in the composition and drafting of the Statute of Children and Adolescents (ECA), a Brazilian document that defines and guarantees the rights of children. The demands of the MNMMR were included in articles 227 and 228 of the Federal Constitution of Brazil of 1988 and regulated in the ECA (Law No. 8069 of 13 July 1990). In Brazil, there is a recent trend to investigate the incorporation of children into social movements, such as the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), the “sem terrinha” mentioned previously, and the movement of urban land occupations in the big cities.

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Reynolds, P., Nieuwenhuys, O., & Hanson, K. (2006). Refractions of children’s rights in development practice: A view from anthropology. Childhood, 13(3), 291–302. Rizzini, I., & Mena, R. (2019). População infantil e adolescente nas ruas Principais temas. Civitas - Revista De Ciências Sociais, 19(1), 105. Rizzini, I., & Tisdall, K. (2012). Introdução: a importância do debate internacional e interdisciplinar sobre participação infantil e juvenil. O Social em Questão, XV (27), 15–20. Rojas, S. (2018). La infancia como preocupación social en América: El caso del Instituto Internacional Americano de Protección de la Infancia (1927–1949). Revista De Ciencias Sociales Universidad De Costa Rica, 159, 13–27. Rossi, F., & Silva, E. (2018). Introduction. Reshaping the political arena in Latin America. In E. Silva & F. Rossi (Eds.), Reshaping the political arena in Latin America. From resisting neoliberalism to the second incorporation (pp. 3–22). University of Pittsburgh Press. Saad-Filho, A., & Johnston, D. (2005). Introduction. In A. Saad-Filho & D. Johnston (Eds.), Neoliberalism: A critical reader (pp. 1– 6). Pluto Press. Sader, E. (2008). Refundar el Estado. Posneoliberalismo en América Latina. Instituto de Estudios y Formación de la CTA-CLACSO. Salazar, G., Mancilla, A., & Durán, C. (1999). Historia contemporánea de Chile. Estado, legitimidad y ciudadanía. LOM. Salgado, R., Pereira, R., & Souza, S. (2006). Da recepção à produção midiática: As crianças, a cultura midiática e a educação. Alceu, 7 , 165–181. Sassen, S. (2015). Expulsiones. Brutalidad y complejidad en la economía global. Katz. Scheinvar, E. (2010). Derechos, ¿para qué humanos? Control biopolítico y prácticas de derechos humanos. Communication presented in Congreso de FLACSO, México. Schuch, P. (2009). Práticas de justicia: antropología dos modos de governo da infancia e juventude no contexto pós-ECA. UFRGS. Schuch, P. (2012). Justiça, cultura e subjetividade: Tecnologias jurídicas e a formação de novas sensibilidades sociais no Brasil. Scripta Nova Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales XVI, 395(15). Recovered from https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/ScriptaNova/article/view/3442. Silva, E. (2009). Challenging neoliberalism in Latin America. Cambridge University Press. Silva, I. O., Silva, A. P. S., Martins, A. A. (org.) (2013). Infâncias do campo. Belo Horizonte - MG, Autêntica Editora. Stokes, S. (2004). Mandates and democracy. Neoliberalism by surprise in Latin America. Cambridge University Press.

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Suárez-Cabrera, D. L. (2015). Nuevos migrantes, viejos racismos: Los mapas parlantes y la niñez migrante en Chile. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 13(2), 627–643. Suriano, J. (2000). La cuestión social en Argentina, 1870–1943. La Colmena. Svampa, M. (2019). Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina. Conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. CALAS. Szulc, A. (2011). ‘Esas no son cosas de chicos‘. Disputas en torno a la niñez mapuche en el Neuquén, Argentina. In D. Poveda, A. Franzé, & M. I. Jociles (Eds.), Etnografías de la infancia: discursos, prácticas y campos de acción. Editorial La Catarata. Szulc, A., & Cohn, C. (2012). Anthropology and childhood in South America: Perspectives from Brazil and Argentina. AnthropoChildren, 1. Recovered from http://popups.ulg.ac.be/AnthropoChildren/docannexe.php?id=930. Tabbush, C. (2010). Latin American women’s protection after adjustment: A feminist critique of conditional cash transfers in Chile and Argentina. Oxford Development Studies, 38, 437–459. Taylor, M. (2006). From Pinochet to the “Third Way”. Neoliberalism and transformation in Chile. Pluto Press. Therborn, G. (1996). Child politics: Dimensions and perspectives. Childhood, 3(1), 29–44. Valdés, X. (2008).Notas sobre la metamorfosis de la familia en Chile. In A. Vergara & P. Barros (Eds.), Niños y jóvenes en el Chile de hoy: su lugar en los nuevos contextos familiars (pp. 19–40). Universidad Diego Portales. Valencia-Suescún, M. I., Ramírez, M., Fajardo, M. A., & Ospina-Alvarado, M. C. (2015). De la afectación a nuevas posibilidades: niñas y niños en el conflicto armado colombiano. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales.Niñez Y Juventud, 13(2). Vergara, J. (2005). La utopía neoliberal y sus críticos. Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 10(31). Recovered from http://ve.scielo.org/scielo.php?script= sci_arttext&pid=S1315-52162005000400003. Vergara, A. (2009). La intervención social como conflicto. El caso de la infancia y juventud en Chile. Revista El Observador, 3, 19–36. Vergara, A. (2015). The cultural politics of childhood: Public policies in postauthoritarian Chile. Children & Society, 29(4), 288–298. Vergara, A., Chávez, P., & Vergara, E. (2010). Televidencia y vida cotidiana de la infancia. Un estudio de casos con niños y niñas de Santiago. Polis, 9(26), 371–396. Villalta, C. (2005). ¿De quién son los niños pobres? El debate por la tutela administrativa, judicial o caritativa en Buenos Aires de fin de siglo pasado. In S. Tiscornia & M. V. Pita (Eds.), Derechos humanos, tribunales y policía en Argentina y Brasil (pp. 71–88). Antropofagia and Equipo de Antropologia Política y Jurídica, FFyL, UBA.

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Villalta, C. (2011). Entregas y secuestros: el rol del estado en la apropiación de niños. Editores CELS- Del Puerto. Villalta, C., & Gesteira, S. (2020). La Convención sobre los Derechos del Niño en la Argentina. Trayectorias, experiencias y activismo. UNICEF. Villalta, C. & Llobet, V. (2015). Resignificando la protección. Nuevas normativas y circuitos en el campo de las políticas y los dispositivos jurídico-burocráticos destinados a la infancia en Argentina. Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 13(1), 167–180. Voltarelli, M. A. (2017). Estudos da infância na América do Sul: pesquisa e produção na perspectiva da Sociologia da Infância. Doctoral Thesis, PhD in Education, Faculdade de Educação, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo. Zapiola, M. C. (2010). La ley de Patronato de Menores de 1919. ¿Una bisagra histórica? In Lionetti, L., & Míguez, D. (comps.), Las infancias en la historia argentina. Intersecciones entre prácticas, discursos e instituciones (1890–1960), Ed. Prohistoria, Rosario.

PART I

Situating the Children’s Rights Approach: Discursive and Material Conflicts in South American Scenarios

CHAPTER 2

Rights Activism, Judicial Practices, and Interpretative Codes: Children in Family Justice (Argentina, 1990–2015) Carla Villalta

In August of 2015, a new Civil Code was implemented in Argentina, which radically transformed the legal coordinates concerning children by replacing the notion of “minor” with the categories of boys, girls, and adolescents, and by replacing the logics of incapacity with the principle of progressive autonomy. In this way, although the right of children to be heard and have their opinions taken into account in all judicial and/or administrative decisions affecting them had already been recognised in a number of national and provincial laws, it was now expressly established through substantive legislation. As a result, eliciting the opinion of children in all judicial or administrative processes in which they are involved was now a requirement.

C. Villalta (B) School of Philosophy and Literature, Buenos Aires University, Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_2

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Far from being an out-of-the-blue creation or an uncritical replication of international treaties on children’s rights, the amendments embodied in this legal instrument are the corollary of a series of debates and challenges that various children’s rights activists have been pushing forward in Argentina since the early 1990s. These criticisms, aimed primarily at the judicial system, gained great momentum with the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (hereinafter, the CRC) in 1989. Moreover, they became particularly significant in Argentina because—as in other countries in the region (Fonseca, 2004; Schuch, 2009)—they took place in a post-dictatorial context, in which human rights organisations openly questioned the various ways in which minors were treated (Villalta & Llobet, 2015). Thus, during these years, alongside a steady rise in neoliberal policies in the region, many activists believed that a judicial reform would provide a solution to the practices that were more often than not in violation of children’s rights, and they sought to promote a new way of conceptualising children that would stop considering them as objects of tutelage and decisions made by others, and would emphasise their capacity and their right to participate in decisions affecting them. This chapter describes some of the characteristics of this process in the Argentine context by focusing research on the transformations and tensions that the newly established right of children to be heard has brought about in the judicial sphere. To this end, on one hand, an indepth analysis is made of the linkages that the advance of the language of children’s rights has had with the neoliberalisation processes in the region, by promoting a new notion of the subject and encouraging different kinds of judicial reforms. On the other hand, it discusses the practical uses and meanings that the diverse judicial agents of the civil courts in family matters—those intervening in family conflicts—attach to the child’s right to be heard. To do so, instead of using a regulatory approach aimed at assessing whether or not institutional actions are consistent with a purported “rights-based perspective”, or an ontological approach that considers rights as timeless attributes of individuals and excludes from its analysis any practices, uses, and meanings they adopt (Fonseca & Schuch, 2009; Villalta, 2013), the purpose here is to analyse the specific interpretative keys that institutional agents use to make children’s “words” in the judicial sphere intelligible, and to investigate their underlying conceptions of childhood. Based on the results of qualitative research that took place in the family justice system in different Argentine cities during 2015, this paper seeks

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to contribute to the discussion about the processes of institutionalisation of the rights of boys, girls, and adolescents in our region, and about the tensions derived from the attempts to incorporate a rights-based approach in the legislation and practices of different institutions. It is organised in two parts. The first part explores the ways in which the processes of expansion of the language of rights have converged with the propagation of neoliberal policies, which, particularly in this region, are characterised by promoting programmes for the modernisation of justice and the reform of the judicial system. The second part describes the many ways in which a child’s voice is heard and vested with specific values at family courts. In this way, on one hand, it seeks to understand the ways in which the processes of neoliberalisation converged with the interest of the various activists who were fighting for a reform of the judicial system, and how the rights-related concepts were used locally to mean different ideas, that is, they were “appropriated” and resemantised (Merry, 2010). On the other hand, by looking into the perceptions of judicial agents about what listening to children is like and what purpose it serves, the paper analyses how the modern conceptualisation of childhood is transformed and reproduced (Colangelo, 2005).

The Judicial Sphere and the Children and Adolescents In Argentina, children’s rights activism over the last thirty years has had a considerable impact on the institutions that serve children and their families. In fact, the legal-bureaucratic circuit—consisting of juvenile and family courts, the official counsel-for-minors’ office, and administrative bodies for the protection of rights, among others (Villalta, 2013)—has changed both in appearance and in many of its practices.1 Indeed, as Patrice Schuch (2009) argues in the case of Brazil, the expansion of the language of rights has had varied effects on the reorganisation of institutions, practices, knowledge, and care devices. Thus, if during the early 1990s, for example, a judge would have hardly ever summoned a child to appear at a hearing to listen to his or her views regarding the protection measure ordered to protect him/her, his/her adoption, or the parental visitation scheme his/her parents might have been arranging, today this constitutes a common practice and a regulatory imperative embodied in various national and provincial laws, and also in the National Civil and Commercial Code.2 Thus, it is usual for children and adolescents to be

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summoned at least once to make their voices heard in court. Furthermore, if this does not happen, the “invalidity of the entire proceeding” can be pronounced; that is, the judicial process can be challenged and, consequently, the judicial judgement rendered ineffective. These transformations have not occurred in a void of meaning, nor were they the automatic consequences of the progress made in children’s rights. Rather, they were the result of a long, controversial, and conflictive process, which took place in both national and international arenas, in civil society and in international organisations. This contested process resulted in the emergence of new concepts about children and their rights and also about the role of the institutions and agents responsible for their protection. Indeed, the activists who promoted these changes and other reforms had to challenge and question different institutional practices that tended to relegate children and adolescents to a minority and dependent status. Since the early 1990s, different actors impugned the typical methods used by the judiciary to address the needs of children and adolescents (e.g., its tutelary logic, the indetermination of the terms of intervention, the euphemisms used in its actions), and demanded that the different amendments and reforms include a CRC3 perspective in the institutional and legal arrangements on child protection. Thus, a process of partial reforms began, marked by the many critics directed mainly to the extremely “flexible” categories that marked the old legislation and also to juvenile judges, who were seen as the archetype of all that opposed the “new doctrine of comprehensive protection”. In this sense, an approach that was largely binary and dichotomous based on the opposition between the figure of the “child as a subject of rights” and the “minor subjected to tutelage” was the blueprint for the reform (Villalta, 2013). The judicial sphere, thus, was the central focus of criticism. Either because their procedures revealed a class-related paternalism that, far from providing “protection”, merely replicated social inequality and selectively acted on poor children, or because there was little chance that children would be heard and decisions would be made on their behalf, much of the initial criticism was directed at the justice system and juvenile judges. In this context, family court judges were also subject to much criticism. During the 1990s, when they deemed a child to be abandoned or at risk, it was still a common practice to apply a provisional solution called “protection of person”, that implied to have the child institutionalised, without even hearing him/her.4

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This massive criticism directed at judicial practices and their agents took place in the context of the rising neoliberal paradigm. In fact, the 1990s in Latin America were marked by rapidly developing neoliberal policies, whose most evident outcome was the aggravation of social inequality and the decrease of public investment. Although these policies had been introduced by the dictatorships that ruled several countries in the region during the 1970s and 1980s, later on, in the fin-desiècle scenario of democratic governments and troubled post-dictatorial processes, they were once again promoted to emphasise values such as efficiency and the modernisation of the state. Thus, transparency, accountability, and decentralised management were some of the core topics of the numerous institutional reforms promoted by multilateral credit organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In addition, values such as the autonomy of subjects and the right to participate were core to foster the reconversion of different government agencies and to build new interpretative frameworks on the relationship between civil society and the State. In fact, as Nikolas Rose (1999) pointed out, neoliberalism implied both a transformation of the government’s rationalities and technologies, and a new specification of the governable subject for whom the core values of responsibility, autonomy, and freedom of choice were heralded, with the ideal individual being an “active citizen” characterised by his/her free choice capacity. In Latin America, these processes of neoliberalisation, as they have been extensively analysed (Mac Dowell Santos, 2007; Merry, 2007; Poole, 2006; Schuch, 2009, 2010; Sierra & Chenaut, 2002), were strongly characterised for promoting the modernisation and reform of the judiciary. Promoted mainly by a variety of international and multilateral credit organisations, these programmes invoked the values of participation, autonomy, and responsibility. The aim to modernise and democratise society through the judicial channels, regarded as “judicialisation of politics” or “globalisation of the legal principle and judicial reforms” (Schuch, 2010; Sousa Santos, 2000) implied also a growing appreciation of the legal discourse and the “culture of rights” (Delamata, 2014). In this context, criticism of the juvenile justice system in Argentina at times took on an efficiency-based slant denouncing arbitrariness and interpreting it as tantamount to a lack of transparency, and the questionings raised then became bound up with a normative and technocratic vision of rights. Thus, the persistence of the old tutelary practices was seen as

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an archaising remnant and as a sign that judicial institutions had not been sufficiently modernised (Vianna, 2002). Furthermore, the children’s right to be heard and to have their opinion taken into account proved to be an optimal vehicle for both fuelling criticism of the existing system and promoting a new perception of childhood. It was thus argued that children in the judicial system had traditionally been regarded as a sort of appendage of the family or as subsumed therein, and their participation in conflicts had been overshadowed, inasmuch as they were perceived as beings that could only be objects of decisions that different adults made about them. For this reason, they lacked their own status within family justice, they were represented by others (legal or promiscuous representatives5 ), they were only rarely heard in the judicial sphere, and if they were, it was only up to the judges and officers involved to decide whether or not to give them the floor. These situations were criticised as being a typical example of the paternalism associated with the old doctrine of irregular protection. Hence, the right of participation proved to be a powerful tool both in terms of reprioritising the criticism to the justice system and of disseminating other sensitivities and affectivities (Schuch, 2009) consistent with the “global citizenship”, central to neoliberalism. Thus, efforts were made for a vision that would lead to considering the child as an autonomous, capable, responsible, and competent being—a “child citizen” who, due to his/her condition as a developing person, should enjoy special protection guided by the principle of the “child’s best interests”, a rather vague6 formula proclaimed in the CRC as the set of rights regarding protection and participation. In this way, children’s right to participation has helped to spread a new vision of the world, a new ‘matrix of meanings’ (Ribeiro, 1999), which has in turn contributed to exposing the objectification of children. Furthermore, this criticism was underpinned by some of the tenets of the new social studies on childhood, which provided ground for challenging the prevailing definition of childhood in contemporary Western societies, portraying children as fragile, incomplete, immature, and malleable beings, or as potential individuals or persons in transition (Cohn, 2005; Colangelo, 2005; James & James, 2001; Jenks, 1996; Szulc & Cohn, 2012; Varela, 1986). However, in some institutional spheres, this new matrix of meanings tended to reify an individualising and atomistic notion of childhood. From this perspective, the abstract child-subject-of-rights (Llobet, 2014)

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was considered as a being isolated from his/her context, while the intergenerational, class, interethnic, or gender social and power relationships in which children and adolescents are immersed were pushed to the background or made invisible in favour of the concept of a universal, uniform, and unproblematic child (Colangelo, 2005; Fonseca & Cardarello, 2005; Szulc, 2019). The familisation of childhood (Vergara et al., 2015) was the typical form of addressing any interpretation involving children, as they were traditionally considered as “sons and daughters”—particularly in the judiciary—and therefore as being dependent on the adults. The new language of rights propitiated an antagonistic representation of childhood, but at the same time reified the interpretation of children. In such vision, as stated by Valeria Llobet (2010, 2014), the expert discourse proposed by the psy knowledge field mediated and provided conceptual bases on which to anchor the new and alternative views to be built but, along the same lines, it limited the political power of the discourse on rights by favouring a depoliticised vision of the needs. In turn, children’s right to participate and, consequently, the importance given to the “children’s voice” has overshadowed other rights and has led to a hierarchy in which economic, social, and cultural rights have lost ground to civil and political rights, among which the right to participate plays a central role (Marre & San Román, 2012). This right is much more conducive to the “universalisation of [Western or Nordic] childhood” (Gadda, 2008; Vianna, 2002). Likewise, the topic of “giving voice” to children in order to comply with their right to participate as set forth in the CRC has led to a restrictive interpretation since, in many cases, it was regarded as the creation of special instances for children to speak out and be heard. This is how the so-called children’s parliaments or assemblies emerged in different institutional bodies.7 In this way, based on such initiatives, the children’s voice was at times exoticised or idealised. On one hand, this exoticism arises from the space in which their voice is heard, and it is this artificial device that relegates their voice to a realm of rarity and fascination. On the other hand, this same notion places children in a category of presumed “transparency”. Images associated with child authenticity and naivety are reconstructed and children are perceived as holders of the truth. Thus, instead of understanding childhood as a relational category, the separation from the adult world is recreated and intensified. Consequently, the more isolated

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the voice of children is from the adult world, the more truthful and purer—less contaminated—it appears to be. While these were some of the general characteristics of the expansion of the children’s right to participate, in the Argentine judicial system the incorporation of this right—and particularly the criticism and challenges from many children’s rights activists—led to a series of changes in the justice system. As it dissolved some of the usual meanings associated with children, it eroded typical patterns of action, and introduced tangible changes to the usual procedures. However, as we shall discuss shortly, it also gave rise to different uses and multiple interpretations of what listening to children truly means. Accordingly, if this right—as we have pointed out—can be interpreted as a vehicle for transformation, it can also be regarded as a powerful marker of the ways in which childhood is perceived and interpreted in the judicial arena, because the regulatory imperative of listening to children has given rise to different strains and also to peculiar ways of construing how this right should be guaranteed.

Images of Childhood in Justice---When Children Speak, and Judges Listen and Interpret During 2015, at the request of the National Secretariat for Childhood, Adolescence and Family, the Argentine governing body for childhood policies, I conducted, in collaboration with other researchers, a research project on children’s right to be heard in family courts. This qualitative research was conducted in seven cities in Argentina8 and combined semi-structured interviews to different actors (including family judges, prosecutors, public defenders for minors, NGO agents, public bar associations, agents of administrative bodies for the protection of rights), surveys of judicial files, and systematisation of jurisprudence. The research focused on family justice at courts with exclusive jurisdiction on matters governed by Family Law. However, far from relying on regulatory parameters to assess whether the child is being heard, it sought to find out the ways in which such listening is implemented and to understand the values and interpretations attached to this right by the different agents who interact on a daily basis within that institutional context. Accordingly, the interviews held with the different judicial and administrative agents were aimed at finding out the ways in which the child’s right to be heard is actually conceived and put into practice, as well as the interpretations that have been built around it.

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From the narratives of the agents from this particular institutional field, one thing is clear: listening to children in the family justice field is now not only a regulatory imperative, but also a “moral value”, inasmuch as it is inherently mandatory and desirable, and has both a cognitive and an emotional nature (Balbi, 2017). In current family justice practices, there is a quite peculiar hearing known in court jargon as the “hearing of the 12th”, in reference to the CRC section that establishes the children’s right to be heard. At this special hearing, the child is summoned to appear in court so that the judge can meet and talk with him/her.9 In a relatively short period of time, children have gone from being considered mere spectators of proceedings in which they have no say, to mandatory participants in the court proceedings. Central to this shift were the actions deployed by a number of activists. In addition to a reconversion of procedures, these actions mainly promoted new values and sensitivities allowing “child participation”, regardless of the practical ways of implementation, to be considered essential to moving away from the reification operated by the minority paradigm. In fact, the reconfiguration of juvenile and family courts, the emergence of new institutional figures (among others, the children’s ombudsman and the child’s counsel), the creation of administrative bodies for the protection of rights throughout the country, the propagation of specialisation courses on the subject, the consolidation of social and/or territorial organisations, and the associations of professionals and activists constitute the ingredients of a process that was not linear and is yet neither complete nor finished, but which has reshaped the field of agencies serving children. This process has seen conflicts of all kinds, and it continues to be beset by multiple power struggles over who is the most suitable or legitimate agent to understand where children’s needs lie and how their rights should be guaranteed (Villalta & Llobet, 2015). While the child’s right to be heard is now a moral value for judicial agents, a closer look at how they implement it reveals a variety of meanings tied to their specific ways of interpreting rights. Some of these are more permeated by the technocratic and individualising nature of the neoliberal ideology, while others are closer to an emancipatory approach. However, as we shall discuss below, they are essentially related to certain ways of conceptualising childhood that cannot be reduced to the tutelary or minority paradigm, but which are interwoven with deep-rooted conceptions of childhood, its special nature, and ways of protecting it.

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Thus, in analysing how different judicial agents construe the child’s right to be heard, it is possible to identify two core meanings that pervade their opinions and permeate their arguments in different ways: On one hand, the need to “avoid re-victimisation of children;” on the other, an almost constant reference to the possibility that children’s discourse may be “contaminated” by their parents. So the idea that listening contains a potential danger for the child (re-victimisation) and the assumption that children are malleable and easily manipulated by adults (contaminated discourse) are some of the assumptions that influence the ways in which children are listened to and the different degrees of value that agents attach to their words. Below, I reconstruct and analyse the different ways in which agents interpret the meaning and purpose of listening to children.

Construction of the Victim Child Several interviewed agents brought up the idea that judicial institutions are a cold and poorly conditioned place for children and adolescents, and that appearing there is an unpleasant and even traumatic experience. Therefore, they often listen to children outside court settings. As a judge put it, exercising the right to be heard produces “a great deal of stress” on children and this is why they try to restrict summonses when they feel they are unnecessary. Similarly, many of the interviewees pointed out that, if children were summoned to court many times, they would be “re-victimised”—“when I see that there are other hearings, I try not to re-victimise the child” (Public defender for minors, Rosario, 2015). In the same vein, other agents claimed that the children’s right to express their opinion should not be an obligation, since it would be rather traumatic for them: “There are children for whom it is terrible to be summoned because they are afraid, they start to shudder, they can’t sleep (…) you summon them to court and they cling on to their mothers and they don’t want to come down, and they don’t want to… for some it seems to be a relief and for others, a stressful situation” (Public defender for minors, Mendoza, 2014). In this context, respect for the children’s right to express themselves also implies respect for their refusal to do so. Indeed, other agents with a more extreme view argued that the misuse of this tool can turn listening into an “act of violence”. As an example, one judge said: “I will not use something that is a legal guarantee and that ends up being a harassment

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for the child; I will not call them hundreds of times until I get them to tell me what I want to hear (…) it ends up being an indirect harassment” (Family Judge, Comodoro Rivadavia, 2015). While many judges agreed with the above, many others were critical about it. They pointed out that this argument was the typical justification in the 1990s—when listening to children was not yet a moral value—to oppose children being heard, by claiming that appearing in court was a harmful and terrible thing for a child. It was also criticised by those who believe that this far widespread idea actually masks the impossibility of listening differently from the way that is customary in the judicial sphere: Sometimes it happens that children... in order not to re-victimise them— because that’s the argument: ‘no, we’re not going to listen to them so many times because otherwise we’ll re-victimise them’, and the actual problem is not listening to them so many times. This is not how you re-victimise children. They are re-victimised if they are interrogated and made uncomfortable (...) Many times children do want to talk (...) and it is a right that I cannot take away from them, let alone think that if I listen to them I am re-victimising them. (Member of interdisciplinary team, Resistencia, 2015)

The concern not to re-victimise children is intended to protect them from unnecessary intrusions, but it can nevertheless lead to a restrictive interpretation of children’s right to be heard. Thus, an a priori interpretation that is regarded as valid per se—such as one that holds that speaking in front of a judge is stressful or harmful—may lead to a perception that children are victimised if they are heard. Therefore, in trying to protect them from potential re-victimisation, their right to be heard may be construed in a way that leads to the idea that not listening goes in the best interests of the child. Such arguments, which echo specific images of childhood linked to fragility, immaturity, and need for protection, are sometimes intertwined with other views on the manipulation or contamination children may suffer.

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Contamination of Children’s Discourse Judges consider that one of the main tasks involved in listening to children is to determine when what the child says is genuine and true, and when it is imposed or false. In other words, listening to children is important, but so is being able to detect whether what they say is true or merely a reproduction of their mother’s, father’s, or other responsible adult’s discourse. Indeed, while all judicial agents consider that listening to children is of utmost importance and many of them said that children’s words are sometimes “enlightening”, they also argue that children are or can be manipulated by adult household members. The idea that they are mechanically imitating a parent’s discourse is synthesised in phrases such as “they are just playing the audio tape of the parent they live with” or “they have been brainwashed”. Almost all the agents gave examples of situations where, in their view, children appear to have an external discourse, describing it as “prepared”, “influenced”, “conditioned”, or “colonised”. Regarding their strategies to reveal what is behind such discourse, some officers explained that the ability to make this distinction is an integral part of a “practical knowledge” that they have developed throughout their experience. This allows them to “listen between the lines” and to realise “when children have been manipulated by the adult who brought them” (Public defender for minors, Comodoro Rivadavia, 2015). Other respondents stated that if children seem to become one of their parent’s “war loot”, they are inclined not to summon them at all or not to interview them in the presence of their parents or their parents’ attorneys or any adult who might represent a source of pressure, in order to avoid “contamination”. Yet, for this purpose, it is of paramount importance to be knowledgeable in psychology and to cooperate with an interdisciplinary team. According to many of the interviewed judges, it is psychologists who, with their expert knowledge, are able to discern between a discourse expressing a child’s will and one conveying an adult’s will. In this case, pre-eminence is gained by the opacity of the child’s discourse and his/her psychologisation (Llobet, 2010), that is, the idea of a child whose words must be construed through expert knowledge. Therefore, when it is necessary to bring clarity to what the child has said, judicial agents resort to the interdisciplinary team. In this way, the child’s voice is much more reliable, as

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it is backed by a technical team ensuring its genuine and uncontaminated nature. As one of the judges put it: A child’s opinion weighs heavily and is of great value, but it is much better when this opinion is backed by something else, then it is not just the child’s opinion, there is a team that says that it is genuine, that his or her discourse is not contaminated (...) and that they have assessed the maturity of what the child is saying. (Family Judge, Comodoro Rivadavia, 2015)

In this sense, when manipulation is suspected, the child’s voice loses much of its value. Instead, the interpretation of the professionals in the psy field prevails, because it is they who are properly qualified to interpret what the child is really saying and to detect the “mind indoctrination” (Public defender for minors, Tucumán, 2015). While manipulation remains a pervasive suspicion for judicial agents in listening to children, there is also the spectre of the imaginary and unrealistic nature of the child’s words. Thus, it is sometimes assumed that children habitually fantasise or say things that are not true, which is why judicial agents fear that what the child has said will lead them into making an unwise decision. Thus, they either do not listen to the child’s statements and underestimate them out of fear of being misled or seek expert opinion.10 However, along with the belief that children’s discourse is easily manipulated, it is also possible to identify an opposite but complementing and reinforcing stance: the idea that the child’s discourse, if given the proper conditions, is genuine and transparent. In this way, if the judicial authority can provide children with confidence, they will succeed in moving away from the stipulations of adults trying to manipulate them and finally in expressing what they really feel and want. In this regard, a number of agents admitted that, at times, the “genuineness” and “spontaneity” of children arising from their particular “childlike nature” prevail over the attempts of their parents. Children are very spontaneous, and they really do express themselves without fuss, without trimming what they want to say. (Family Judge, Comodoro Rivadavia, 2015) Sometimes kids are brought in to give a version of the facts and kids say what they want to say. (Public defender for minors, La Plata, 2015)

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In addition to these stances—the contaminated discourse and its opposite, the spontaneous discourse—other agents identify that what prevails in the judicial sphere is either a “clinical approach” or a “formal hearing”. As one respondent put it, listening to children at court is about listening with distrust: The point that children have to be heard is theoretically supported by everyone, but we are very far from the paradigm shift it entails. I am saying this out of experience, from attending hearings—the child is heard but the situation tends to have a very clinical approach. So, the child is indeed heard, but we must assess whether this child is being influenced, whether he or she has been induced. (Member of interdisciplinary team, Mendoza, 2014)

Similarly, and with a critical slant towards the routines of the judicial and administrative environments, a lawyer from an NGO promoting children’s rights argued: I think there are two different ways of listening. One is listening just for the sake of complying with the law, and the other one is an active listening; they are two different things. That is, one means ‘I am listening to you, but I don’t care about your opinion’, and the other means ‘I am listening to you, I care about your opinion and as a judge or as an administrative body I will take what you are saying into account. I may disagree, I may debate your opinion because I have my own’, but this is where active listening is built, which means a two-way listening as well. (Lawyer, NGO, Buenos Aires, 2015)

These considerations bring us to the ways in which the interviewees value and give specific meaning to another component of the children’s right to be heard: the right to have their opinions taken into account.

Ways of Interpreting a Child’s Words or the Purpose of Listening Even though a child’s opinion is considered very important for the court’s decision-making, it was also suggested that it is not determinant of the judge’s final ruling. All surveyed judges agreed in statements such as: “taking the child’s opinion into account does not mean doing what the child wants”, “the full complexity of the intervention must be assessed”,

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and “although what the child expresses is taken into account, it is never a matter of responding mechanically to the child’s will”. However, in investigating the reasons for this type of considerations, it is possible to identify two main lines of argument. These are based on different concepts and meanings regarding children and their needs and capacities, and also regarding the implications of the authority and the responsibility of adults in relation to them. Thus, the first of these nodes concerns the fact that the child should have a say, but cannot and should not make decisions; while the latter emphasises the fact that the child’s words are not equivalent to his/her “best interests”.

“Lifting the Load Off the Child’s Shoulders” Some issues that were repeatedly raised by different actors were: relieving children from the burden of making decisions, not holding them responsible, explaining to them that what they say will not be determinant for the judge’s decision, and that they are not a witness for one of the “parties” to the conflict. Furthermore, respondents stated that it is important that children understand that they are not the ones making decisions. In this way, they feel more freedom and less pressure to speak out and reveal what is really happening to them. These types of considerations are closely connected to those regarding the stress and damage caused to a child or adolescent immersed in a conflict or tug-of-war between his/her parents. For these interviewees, this is magnified if children also think that what they say will define the final judicial decision. Undertaking the responsibility for the decisions to be adopted as an adult and as a judge is a guiding value in most interpretations of what it means to take the child’s opinion into account. As one of the judges stated, it is up to the court to find a balance and listen critically: I think the truth is somewhere in between not giving any importance at all to what the child says—it’s a formality that I must comply with so they won’t say I’m against the Convention—and, on the contrary, basing my decision on what the child says—all in all, the child said so, so I’m on the safe side against criticism. This too is irresponsible, firstly because of the child’s young age and secondly because they can really be under influence. (Public defender for minors, Buenos Aires, 2015)

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Therefore, lifting the decision-making burden off of children’s shoulders is understood as a form of care or protection by the judge—a judge who must discern when the child’s discourse is or is not true, who must not require the child’s opinion many times because that would re-victimise him/her, who must not let the child make any decisions because that is a burden for him/her, and who—as we will see below—must keep in mind that the child’s words cannot be equated to his/her “best interests”.

The Child’s Words Are Not the Same as the Child’s “Best Interests” Another widespread assumption in this area is the idea that what children say at hearings does not always match their “best interests”. The judicial task is then to identify the real message underlying their words or, as one of the judges said, to “be able to distinguish between ‘objective wants’ and ‘subjective wants’ in identifying what is good for the child”. Thus, discerning between what the child wants and what is good for him/her is a further skill that judicial agents must develop in taking the child’s opinion into account. In an attempt to explain this distinction, some judges devise metaphors in terms of care, appropriate upbringing, and limits: If you’re about to cross an avenue with your kid, and your kid wants to cross it by himself, that’s the kid’s will, would you let him do it? No. You grab him, or you hold him, or you pick him up (...) Now, if instead your kid wants to have dinner and go to bed at nine, ten at night, what would you do? You feed him and put him to bed. Here the kid’s will matches his best interests. Here we do the same thing, that is, we assess the situation in the same way. (Family Judge, Mendoza, 2014)

Almost all respondents expressed that children often ask for things that are dangerous or that can cause them harm and that they may even ask for “fickle things” without much meaning or grounds. For example, in the words of this judge: We have to draw a distinction between breaching their right and a mere whim. If I can see that it is not a mere whim, that there is a real feeling that makes the child anxious, this may not agree with what I think, but that does not mean that I must make my position prevail (...) Conversely,

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if I can see that it indeed is a mere whim, I do not order the child to be heard, so his or her wish is not granted. (Family Judge, Rosario, 2015)

The idea of a capricious, irrational, and even despotic child nature (Jenks, 1996) has thus emerged in different ways from the agents’ interpretations of children’s words. Therefore, listening becomes selective insofar as it builds on this type of assumptions and meanings that are not based on a paradigm of either rights or tutelage—as usually considered from a dichotomous viewpoint—but are anchored in deep-rooted representations of childhood in general. Moreover, this type of opinion is not exclusive to the judiciary, but rather it is widely spread throughout all child protection institutions. As with the idea of a contaminated child’s discourse, the idea that children and adolescents ask for things that are contrary to their best interests transcends the judicial boundaries. Some of the statements that have been frequently expressed at the interviews to officers of the administrative bodies for the protection of rights in the different cities are: “you consider what the child has said, but you suggest or propose the best for the child” or “respecting children’s right to be heard does not mean that we have to do everything they say (…), sometimes they do not realise that their decisions are harmful to their own integrity” (Administrative organism of rights protection, Tucumán, 2015). In this respect, the vague formula of the “child’s best interests” is a perfect tool to frame the act of listening, insofar as the child’s opinion will have an impact on the judicial or administrative decision only if it matches the child’s best interests. If they do not match, such opinion will only be obtained for complying with the formal procedure but will not be substantial enough to be a valid opinion that the judicial or administrative officer will weigh in the decision-making process. So, it is now far more customary for children to be heard at court, there are no open objections to it, and it is in fact regarded as a core value. However, when it comes to interpreting their statements and taking their opinions into account, the prevailing interpretative keys give priority to a protective interpretation that portrays children and adolescents as persons who are far from knowing what the best for them is and are thus placed on a morally inferior level, albeit their being “autonomous” and “capable” of participating and giving their opinion—as the language of rights suggests.

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Concluding Remarks Over the past two decades, the right of children to be heard has progressively materialised and has become an integral part of institutional practices in the judiciary. In fact, in the past children were rarely summoned to appear before a judge or a counsel at family court to be heard and to be given the opportunity to express their views in situations in which they are directly involved—such as who they will live with, how many times they will see their mother or father, what their surname will be, or whether or not they will be adopted. However, listening to them at least once during any judicial process is now a widely accepted procedure. As a consequence of the actions many children’s rights activists have taken since the 1990s, of the impact borne by the social and legal mobilisation promoting the acceptance of the CRC in Argentina, and of the resulting expansion of the language of rights that legitimised other forms of action and other meanings regarding childhood, listening to children has gradually been incorporated into family justice practices. It is undeniable that it is still a rather restricted practice, since it has been reduced to the “hearing of the 12th” and there is still a lack of active listening and a predominance of a clinical approach, as some activists claim. Nonetheless, it is also true that most judicial agents consider that listening to children during proceedings is of paramount importance and even unavoidable in some specific cases. Despite this clear consensus, when exploring the specific ways in which this listening is actually implemented, interviewees bring up a number of criteria concerning age, type of conflict, or number of previous summonses. Thus, although they claim that all children are always heard, when it comes to concrete practices, different criteria come up that are not always explicit but act as a justification for numerous restrictions. That said, these criteria—which essentially involve the child’s age and type of conflict—are not the only factors that bear an influence on how the child’s right to be heard is implemented. There are also different significant nodes and interpretative matrices that are interconnected and that, imbued with concepts about children and their needs and capacities, operate in a less transparent manner in guiding the practices of the institutional actors involved. So, rather than a change of one paradigm for another—the tutelary paradigm for the rights paradigm—or a dissemination of a neoliberal ideology completely replacing the existing values and sensitivities, it is now possible to identify, within the local processes

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of institutionalisation of the rights discourse, different conceptions of the individual coexisting in contradiction and tension and pervading the ways of interpreting children’s capacity and childhood agency. Accordingly, the ideal image of a rational, capable, and autonomous child in the specific contexts of interaction—typical of the neoliberal discourse—is intertwined with concepts of family authority, necessary intergenerational hierarchy, and ways of interpreting care and protection. This, far from dissolving the more liberal conception of rights, puts a strain on their scope, but at the same time allows for the reification of a particular notion of childhood. Hence, in spite of the transformations undergone by listening practices and the commitment of many judicial agents to the language of rights, the ways in which the right to child participation is materialised show some particular perceptions of childhood that undermine the potential of this right or give it certain specific connotations. Examples of this are the stances discussed above regarding the “contaminated discourse” and its counterpart: the “spontaneous discourse”. Indeed, these two ways of interpreting children’s words represent two modelled and antithetic concepts of childhood. The former is supported by and takes elements from the image of children who can be easily manipulated due to their malleable nature and to their lack of “judgement and reason” since they cannot distinguish between good and bad or between what is their own and other people’s property, children who can be “controlled” and whose “mind” can be filled, as if it were an empty vessel, with desires and wishes that are not their own. Therefore, supporters of this position believe that the best interpreters of what the child really wants are the psy professionals, who can decode, unveil, and understand what the child’s true desire is. The latter, on the contrary, addresses childhood as a place of authenticity, truth, and all that is genuine and pure. This vision seems to restore the idea of a child who is good by nature and free from external influences, who is able to easily speak the truth of what he/she feels and desires, while his/her natural spontaneity is a defence against adults’ manoeuvrings and intrigues. These views that traverse the assumption of re-victimisation, together with the concept of a weak, vulnerable, and unprotected child, pervade in various ways how children are thought of in the judiciary, and both permeate discourses and interpretations of what is best for children and guide the practices of the different actors. Based on these assumptions, rights gain local dimensions and, through these forms of interpreting

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childhood, the authority of specific agents to intervene on behalf of children and resolve the conflicts they are involved in is reconstructed. Along these lines, listening to children is currently a moral value that makes it possible to reorder judicial practice in accordance with a human-rights approach to children and it is also a way of reconstructing and relegitimising the legal and psy-field knowledge and the authority of the agents who exercise it in court. This knowledge defines children as “subjects of rights”, a definition that becomes an empty signifier and allows the persistence of a multiplicity of definitions of childhood (Llobet, 2014). As a result, it eliminates the parental authority or the children’s closest environment, in order to render their words crystalline and consistent with their “best interests”, which are in turn defined as such by the same re-legitimised authority. The judicial reform programmes promoted by neoliberalism pursued the modernisation and democratisation of proceedings and favoured a new vision of the governable subject. In turn, in Argentina, the right of children to be heard was one of the vehicles of a transformation that allowed modelling new subjectivities—of both the children and the agents in charge of watching over their rights—through innovative means, as well as reordering and updating deep-rooted perceptions about “the nature of childhood”, although already detached from the paradigm concerning minority, dependency, and disability. Following this line of thought, we can be well aware that the concepts of re-victimisation, contaminated and genuine discourse, caprice, fantasy, and malleability contribute to the construction of some of the ideas that shape our way of interpreting children and their voices. However, this does not mean we are unaware that such ideas are built on potentially real factors or that these perceptions are often based on the actual experiences of the agents who have to deal with children and adolescents on a daily basis. Yet the interpretative keys that shape our perception of children are often constructed by placing them in a position of pure otherness with respect to adults, a position that cuts them down as subjects that are not at all different and distinct. From this position, it is possible to think that only a psychologist can speak with them and grasp what the child is saying or wants to say beyond what is obvious and evident, or to believe that a child should not be influenced by his or her closest social networks, as if we adults could indeed develop our thoughts, desires, and intentions outside the social framework in which we are immersed. Moreover, it is also possible to fuel the notion of childhood genuineness and believe that the child, solely because

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of being a child, will always tell “the truth” and will neither have any interests or intentions nor will he/she be able to strategise and choose what to say and what to remain silent about. On the other hand, recognising how these perceptions operate does not mean disregarding any asymmetries and age-based differences or ignoring the fact that children and adults have different responsibilities and obligations in connection with the guarantee of rights. In short, reflecting on these concepts means reflecting on the ways in which meaning and values are effectively attributed to childhood and from which stances children’s voices are required and ultimately heard.

Notes 1. This circuit has been analysed extensively in recent years from different disciplinary perspectives. For its general characteristics, please consult the following: Daroqui and Guemureman (1999, 2001), Villalta (2010a, 2010b, 2012), Grinberg (2008), Graziano (2017), Lugones (2012), Barna (2015), Villalta and Llobet (2015), Llobet and Villalta (2019). 2. Argentina is a federal country, and its provinces have their own judicial powers and specific legislations on childhood and adolescence, as these matters are not delegated to the national State. Since 1990, when the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) came into force, several provinces have amended their laws on childhood, by adopting the rights stipulated therein in different ways. In turn, in 2005, after long and intense debates, the Law on Patronage of Minors—a typical example of minority and tutelage legislation—was revoked and superseded by National Law 26061 on Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Boys, Girls, and Adolescents, which expressly recognises the child’s right to be heard. These principles have also been incorporated into the new Civil and Commercial Code, in force since 2015, which has strengthened them by writing them into a single regulatory system which is in line with a human rights approach. 3. This instrument was ratified by Argentina in 1990 and incorporated in the National Constitution in 1994. 4. The “protection-of-person” measures (provided for in the Civil Procedural Code and later superseded by the new Childhood Law of 2005) were applied to a variety of situations: domestic violence, mistreatment and/or abuse cases, addictions of the children’s mother and/or father, adolescents’ runaways, complaints from schools or hospitals about children’s neglect condition, lack of healthcare coverage for medical treatment

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

(Villalta, 2010a). And these judicial procedures were denounced by children’s rights activists as a “judicialisation of poverty”. One of the actors involved in the civil family jurisdiction is the “public defender for minors” or “advisor for minors”, as per its former designation. This person is an officer who is responsible for representing the best interests of the minor or the incapable, and does so in a “promiscuous” manner, that is, even if the child does not want him/her to. This is a typical expression of the old notion of childhood linked to incapacity, since its purpose is to make up for the minor’s incapacity. For an analysis of the many ways in which the “child’s best interests” is used as a general formula, see Cardarello (2009), Leifsen (2012). Besides, at different institutions, participation by children often becomes prescriptive and is only taken into account if it meets institutional expectations (Llobet, 2014). Thus, in some childcare institutions, children’s complaints, their unwillingness to participate in certain activities, or even heir “runaways” from care facilities, are not construed as legitimate forms of expression or participation, but as detachment from treatment, reluctance, indifference, etc. (Ribeiro, 2016). It is also usual that children themselves say that they do not feel they are being listened to even if they are being asked for their opinions. The research was carried out through a collaboration agreement between the National Secretariat for Childhood, Adolescence and Family and the School of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires was conducted in: The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (capital of our country); La Plata (province of Buenos Aires); Comodoro Rivadavia (province of Chubut); San Miguel de Tucumán (province of Tucumán); Resistencia (province of Chaco); Mendoza (province of Mendoza); and Rosario (province of Santa Fe). These cities are spread among the different geographical regions of our country (Metropolitan region, Patagonia, Northwest region, Northeast region, Cuyo, and Central region, respectively) and they are either the provincial capital cities or the most populous ones. As a result of an intensive field survey, 119 interviews were conducted with different kinds of actors, and information from 102 court files was gathered about cases involving communication (visitation rights), personal care (custody), domestic violence, and the monitoring of the legality of exceptional measures for the protection of children’s rights (Villalta et al., 2015). It is interesting to point out that this hearing is generally entered in the court record in the minutes stating that the child was heard in accordance with section 12 of the CRC and section 27 of National Law 26061. However, unlike the case when adults appear at court hearings, there is generally no record of what the child has said at the hearing. This is

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interpreted by judicial agents as a form of “protection” or safeguard of the child’s privacy. 10. In relation to this fear, one respondent raised the following point: “there is often a lot of fear in giving credibility to children’s voice, and I always say that my responsibility is to listen and act, and if the child’s words are not true, it is me who has to bear the cost, not the child” (Administrative organism of protection rights, Rosario, 2015).

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Ribeiro, G. (1999). La condición de la transnacionalidad. Maguaré, 14, 74–113. Ribeiro, F. (2016). Os cabelos de Jennifer: por etnografias da participação de “crianças e adolescentes” em contextos da “proteção à infância”. Revista de Ciencias Sociais – Política and Trabalho, 1(43), 49–64. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press. Schuch, P. (2009). Práticas de justiça. Antropologia dos modos de governo da infância e juventude no contexto pós-ECA. UFRGS. Schuch, P. (2010). A “judicialização do amor”: sentidos e paradoxos de uma justiça “engajada”. In J. Ferreira & P. Schuch (Eds.), Direitos e ayuda humanitária. Perspectivas sobre familia, gênero e Saúde (pp. 151–181). Fiocruz. Sierra, M., & Chenaut, V. (2002). Los debates recientes y actuales en la antropología jurídica: las corrientes anglosajonas. In E. Krotz (Ed.), Antropología jurídica: perspectivas socioculturales en el estudio del derecho. Anthropos and UNAM. Sousa Santos, B. (2000). Globalizing institutions: Case studies in regulation and innovation. Ashgate. Szulc, A. (2019). Más allá de la agencia y las culturas infantiles. Reflexiones a partir de una investigación etnográfica con niños y niñas mapuche. RUNA, Archivo Para Las Ciencias Del Hombre, 40(1), 53–63. Szulc, A., & Cohn, C. (2012). Anthropology and childhood in South America: Perspectives from Brazil and Argentina. AnthropoChildren, 1. Recovered from http://popups.ulg.ac.be/AnthropoChildren/docannexe.php?id=930. Varela, J. (1986). Aproximación genealógica a la moderna percepción social de los niños. Revista De Educación, 281, 155–175. Vergara, A., Peña, M., Chávez, P., & Vergara, E. (2015). Los niños como sujetos sociales. El aporte de los Nuevos Estudios Sociales de la infancia y el Análisis Crítico del Discurso. Psicoperspectivas, 14(1), 55–65. Vianna, A. (2002). Quem deve guardar as crianças? Dimensões tutelares da gestão contemporânea da infancia. In A. Souza Lima (Ed.), Gestar e gerir. Estudos para uma antropologia da administração pública no Brasil. RelumeDumará. Villalta, C. (2010a). La administración de la infancia en debate. Entre tensiones y reconfiguraciones institucionales. Estudios en Antropología Social, 1(2), 81–99. Villalta, C. (Ed.). (2010b). Infancia, justicia y derechos humanos. Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Villalta, C. (2012). Entregas y secuestros. El rol del Estado en la apropiación de niños. Editorial Del Puerto. Villalta, C. (2013). Un campo de investigación: las técnicas de gestión y los dispositivos jurídico-burocráticos destinados a la infancia pobre en la Argentina. Civitas, 13(2), 245–268.

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Villalta, C., Herrera, M., Burgués, M., & Martínez, M. (2015). El derecho del niño a ser oído y la implementación del abogado del niño en la justicia de familia, Informe de investigación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Villalta, C., & Llobet, V. (2015). Resignificando la protección. Nuevas normativas y circuitos en el campo de las políticas y los dispositivos jurídicoburocráticos destinados a la infancia en Argentina. Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 13(1), 167–180.

CHAPTER 3

The Problems of Child Labour: International Organizations and Local Contexts Laura Frasco Zuker and María Eugenia Rausky

In Argentina—a country that follows the norms and recommendations of the International Labour Organization (ILO, OIT in Spanish)—, child labour is prohibited by law under the age of 16 and is defined as: “any work which is physically, mentally, socially, or morally prejudicial to the child, which affects his or her schooling and impedes play”.1 However, despite this prohibition and the fact that in recent years a series of policies aimed at strengthening the incomes of poor families and indirectly “taking children out of work” have been implemented, thousands of children continue to participate in various productive activities. Indeed, in the country, 10.0% of children between the ages of 5 and 15 undertake at least one productive activity, with a higher incidence in rural areas

L. Frasco Zuker Universidad Nacional de San Martín—Escuela de Humanidades, Buenos Aires, Argentina M. E. Rausky (B) Universidad de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_3

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(19.8%) and in the Northwest and Northeast Argentinian regions (13.6 and 13.1%, respectively).2 Recognizing that child labour has a significant presence in our country, this study analyses child participation in informal economic activities, and the meanings associated with them. We base our work on two field studies in Argentina with working children and their families and put them in dialogue with institutionalized views on the “problem” of child labour, developed by the ILO. We understand that this issue takes on special relevance starting in the 1990s, a period in which, on the one hand, there is a boom in the rhetoric of children’s rights and intense work on the part of international organizations aimed at promoting and guaranteeing their fulfilment—including the right not to work—on the other hand, a series of structural changes are promoted that lead to a shrinking of the State and a hardening of the population’s living conditions, which challenges the concrete possibilities of guaranteeing such rights. What notions of family and childhood reproduce the rhetoric of rights, in particular those relating to child labour and its prohibition? What possibilities does the discourse of rights—as formulated in international policies—have of becoming effective in contexts such as that of South America, where thousands of children work? In what way is the discourse of children’s right not to work articulated with the characteristics of the material conditions of existence in the contexts of our studies? Through our research, which was developed in Argentina, we seek to provide elements that allow us to guide the answers to these questions and thus contribute to the understanding of the complex intersection that occurs between the experiences3 of working children and their families, and the inscription of a global discourse of rights. Part of the answer to these tensions comes from the need to underline—like Van Daalen and Hanson (2019)—that the ILO as a central actor in the construction and legitimization of global discourses on working children,4 would need to engage with the ever-growing body of literature providing evidence about the detrimental and beneficial consequences of work for children’s well-being as well as about the impact of its own policy on children’s lives. In doing so, the ILO should actively collaborate with the research community, international development actors, as well as local governments and social movements to develop locally relevant evidence-based policies for dealing with the diversity of children’s work in the world’s fast changing formal and informal economies. This chapter also tries to make a contribution in that sense.

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Following this introduction, the chapter is organized in three sections. In section “Theoretical Methodological Approach and Argentinian Context” we present the theoretical and methodological approach, and briefly describe the Argentinian context. In section “The Construction of a Hegemonic Viewpoint: The Case of the ILO” we look at the main arguments constructed by the ILO related to child labour. In section “Two Studies on Children Who Work: Establishing Counterpoints” we look at two field studies in Argentina with working children and their families, focusing on how they understand child labour and its consequences. The aim in this section is to question certain assumptions which had become unquestionable by the ILO. Finally, the concluding discussion re-examines the opening questions.

Theoretical Methodological Approach and Argentinian Context Our reflections are based on studies developed between 2004 and 2015 in the context of a country undergoing a “post-neoliberal turn” (Pérez, 2014). The government of Nestor Kirchner (2003–2008) followed by Cristina Fernandez’s government (2008–2015) abandoned the neoliberal policies of structural adjustment typical of the 1990s which had resulted in widespread increases in unemployment and poverty.5 The new economic and social model sought to implement measures—as part of the so-called pink tide—to redistribute wealth, eradicate poverty, and reduce social inequalities (Pautassi, 2008). Starting in 2003 the economy was reactivated and salaries and consumption recovered, generating more job opportunities and resulting in a notable decrease in unemployment (Kessler, 2014). However, these substantial improvements did not reach every sector of the population, and poverty persists to this day in many homes. The families of our study lived part of their life through the devastating effects of neoliberal economic and political principles, and form part of the nucleus of structural poverty,6 characterized by the lack of stable employment and incomes below the poverty line.7 In these families the participation of children in work activities is very common. Child Labour has been a subject of interest to the social sciences as well as International Organizations for several decades. Social sciences, and particularly childhood studies—the approach that we follow—have tried to comprehend and characterize the heterogeneous world of children,

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including the economic activities undertaken by boys and girls, emphasizing the need to think about children as strategic actors who should form part of the research processes (Prout, 2001). Obviously, the aims of these two sets of actors frequently differ: while much of the research produced in the field of childhood studies and particularly those with a postcolonial approach,8 aiming for historical perspectives and the analysis of the apparently universal concepts of public policies in specific contexts, these studies—produced by ILO or UNICEF—frequently use decontextualized categories resulting in a prescriptive and moralizing perspective on child labour. A detailed analysis of studies from both childhood studies and International Organizations shows tensions between the international principles regulating child labour and the life experiences of boys and girls in Argentina.9 At the same time, there is little dialogue between the two positions,10 one being overly normative and the other risking relativism. For these reasons we consider that childhood studies have much to offer such organizations. As outlined above, we seek to discuss some of the underlying interpretations held by international programs aiming to eliminate child labour by looking at ethnographic studies with child workers in Argentina. Along with the general proposal of this book, we consider that looking at the specific processes in a South American context (in our case the context of Argentina) in no way diminishes a global analysis, but makes an important contribution to it since articulation between layers of analysis and comparative case studies can illustrate the tensions inherent between global agendas and particular contexts. This chapter attempts to establish a dialogue with a group of four global ideas that the ILO promotes in order to “eliminate child labour”: (1) the underlying notion of childhood from which is derived the idea that child workers lacks childhood; (2) the assumption that child workers will be subjected to exploitation; (3) conflicts with schooling such as absenteeism or dropping out of school; and (4) the proposition that child labour entails per se risks for children’s health. These four topics of the ILO discourse put in dialogue with our ethnographic approaches allow us to illuminate the tensions between universalizing discourses— that place the intervention on and protection of children at the centre of their care—while being implemented in specific contexts where such notions of protection and rights are forms of moral judgement on these children and their families. Although these issues have been widely studied in Argentina and other countries in the region (Villalta & Llobet, 2015),

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the object “child labour” has not been studied in depth and we try to make a contribution in this direction. Our perspective is based on the theoretical and methodological approaches of childhood studies, particularly on the constructivist view (James & Prout, 1990) that states the premise that childhood is not universal and that children are people with agency, able to construct and reflect on their everyday life. We believe that the view of the actors themselves is fundamental to understand the characteristics of any social phenomenon. The methodology of this work centres on a qualitative research (Verd & Lozares, 2016), which uses different techniques to collect and produce information: documental analysis (produced by the ILO since the mid 1990s); open and semi-structured interviews with child workers and their families; and participant observation in two cities of two very different provinces of Argentina: La Plata (Province of Buenos Aires) and Colonia Wanda (Province of Misiones).

The Construction of a Hegemonic Viewpoint: The Case of the ILO In this section we look at the main arguments constructed by the ILO related to child labour. We then concentrate on some of these and dialogue with our fieldwork research. We have chosen to focus attention on this international organization for several reasons. Firstly, it is the organization which is able to affect the design of social policies targeting child workers, since Argentina ratified agreements that were followed by the offer of technical assistance in order to accomplish the ILO’s goals. However, while it focused on the rights of workers and child workers in particular, it has imposed a hegemonic view of the phenomenon excluding the complex diversities of working children and their families. Secondly, Van Daalen and Hanson (2019), in a detailed analysis of policies implemented by the ILO on child labour over a period of 100 years (1919–2019), reveal that notable changes have recently taken place in the overall outlook of the organization’s policies. For decades the ILO maintained a dual approach to child labour: while establishing the long-term aim of abolition, this was combined with supporting the need to develop intermediate measures to improve and humanize the work conditions of children since no intervention program could operate in isolation from each specific socio-economic context. This dual approach was completely

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abandoned in the 90s in favour of a totally abolitionist position, in line with the general tendency to moralize political discourse on the rights of children, mobilizing different iconographies of victimization (Poretti et al., 2014). These changes show how different interpretations of the rights of children, which can conflict with local realities, have come into play. For this reason, we find it useful to look at the discourses of the organization over this period: from this moment on, according to Van Daalen and Hanson (2019), the ILO took on the arduous task of raising awareness of the problem of child labour. Since 1990, the ILO has maintained a position of total condemnation of the practice and increased its efforts on prevention and eradication leading to different legal instruments and programs such as the agreements on the “elimination of the worst forms of labour” and the “minimum age for admission into employment” (Rausky, 2009). The effect of these agreements has been extremely important, since Argentina is the Latin American country which raised the minimum age the highest, developing an “over compliance” to the norms (Fontana & Grugel, 2017).11 While the ILO stipulated fourteen years old as the minimum age, Argentina raised it to sixteen. In general, the organization considers that child labour goes against “decent work” (OIT, 2013). A “butterfly effect” is often referred to as the appropriate explanatory model, for the consequences of working at an early age affect future life stages. During childhood, working limits the development of abilities and a healthy life, reduces school attendance and the development of learning skills, and it represents a threat to physical, mental, and emotional development. During adolescence, it puts compulsory school attendance at risk as well as the transition between education and work. During youth and adulthood, having worked during childhood increases the probability of insertion in informal and precarious working environments. In later life it leads to decreased possibilities of access to social security and an increased dependency on the extended family (OIT, 2016). The prevalence of child labour is derived from various causes: poverty is seen as the main explanation (OIT, 2002, 2004), although other factors are sometimes added, based on the supposed behaviour of households. For example, if when facing the urgent need to cover basic necessities, the members of a household will turn to child labour as an immediate solution, rather than investing in education as a future—and preferable— solution. The family might also manage the distribution of the time of

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the children between school, work, and recreation in order to maximize present and future wellbeing. According to the organization, “the way in which households value the monetary and non-monetary contribution of schooling and work and the wellbeing of the child depends to a large degree on the cultural and social values of the society” (OIT, 2013, p. 18). In these diagnoses, the four recurrences mentioned above are presented in ILO documents and amount to a problem which has been called “a universal fiction of childhood and adulthood”. The problem is that this construction leads to a reification of the concept of childhood through historic practices which are culturally situated. For example, the idea that to be a child is to go to school, to play, not have responsibilities, not have to work, and so forth, omitting the diversity of experiences and values that contrast with the visions constructed in hegemonic countries (Rabello De Castro, 2002). We do not intend to enter into a discussion about universalism and cultural relativism here (Hall, 1992). Instead, we will look at the field of childhood studies which can show social and cultural differences without resorting to exoticism or romanticism.

Two Studies on Children Who Work: Establishing Counterpoints The aim of this section is to look at two studies on the experiences of child labour and take up again the four topics previously mentioned to compare with the results of our field research. Our work attempts to question certain assumptions which had become unquestionable, in a similar way to the studies of Aufseeser et al. (2018), Invernizzi (2013), Jijon (2019), Nieuwenhuys (2009), Liebel (2013), and Morrow and Boyden (2018). This body of work takes as its object of analysis the category of child labour within its social and cultural context. As outlined above, child labour in Argentina is prohibited by law under the age of 16 and is defined by state organizations aligned with the ILO as: “any work which is physically, mentally, socially, or morally prejudicial to the child, which affects his or her schooling and impedes play”. In the following studies we will see how these supposed deprivations are played out in everyday life. The first of the studies took place in the city of La Plata (the capital of the Province of Buenos Aires), situated in the Greater La Plata area (GLP). The main features of the socio-economic structure of GLP are

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a product of the significant weight of the public sector, business, and financial entities; and of the importance of the large industries in metalmechanics and oil. In this area, the socio-economic transformations mentioned above (the structural adjustments of the 1990s) produced significant changes in all economic activities, highlighting the increase in unemployment and job insecurity, and the development of a contradictory and uneven dynamic that deepened the heterogeneity and asymmetries between the economic sectors, social groups, and spaces in the region. This produced the coexistence of the establishment of transnational investments in the industry, commerce, and services sectors with high levels of unemployment; the expansion of the levels of poverty and indigence; the restructuring of productive and residential spaces, the increase in public investment in certain regional ventures, and the deterioration of equipment corresponding to public education and health benefits, among the most significant results (Adriani et al., 2011). Our study was carried out between 2004 and 2013 in an urban environment: the periphery of the city of La Plata in a neighbourhood characterized by structural poverty and a significant presence of child workers. Most of the children interviewed work together with their families in informal activities such as garbage picking, selling flowers, and/or small objects. We were interested in analysing practices and experiences of children performing economic tasks in low-income sectors, in particular to trace the way of life of children and closely related actors related to work; to visualize the role of children’s work within the reproduction strategies of the household. The second study was developed in a peripheral semi-urban area, in the northeastern Argentine Province of Misiones. The principle aim of this work was to look at experiences of children’s work across different generations in a sample of domestic units. The area where fieldwork was carried out, located in the Department of Iguazu, constitutes an epicentre of the forest industry. In recent decades, the increase in the demand for land for forest land use has generated processes of peri-urban occupations of rural migrant farmers who found in the extraction and sale of precious stones an alternative to subsist in the face of unemployment and territorial cornering. A previous study in the same place (Mastrangelo, 2006) already provided knowledge on the type of work undertaken by the household units: the mining and informal sale and commercialization of semiprecious stones. The work was carried out by children alongside their

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mothers and fathers who, in turn, had done the same work as children. The intentional selection of the sample responded to the aim of a diachronic study including the life courses of the families in which the experiences are situated. An ethnographic approach was used to research feelings, abilities, distress, and risks related to child labour from the perspective of the actors themselves. As Alonso (2003) pointed out, we assume that all interpretation, by virtue of being just that, neither reflects nor translates reality, but rather tries to discover in the most complete way possible the plot of meanings that reconstructs a reality in which the researcher finds meaning as an interpreter. Both studies respond to the need to investigate the phenomenon “close up” and “inside” (Magnani, 2002) to avoid assumptions based on preconceptions and prejudices. The aim was also to highlight the fact that the significance and the consequences of children’s work depend on the context in which they occur, therefore a “close up” insight into the network of social relations is necessary (Llobet, 2012). The shared focus of both investigations and the similarity of many of the results permits the comparison of experiences in the sense that “each case is not a case” (Fonseca, 1999b) but rather that the regularities found allow a sociological analysis. In this sense, analysing the results of two investigations located in distant geographies but around a common object of study has implied certain advantages in terms of similar approaches and findings that allow us to stress universalist approaches, as well as challenges and even limitations related to the socio-economic context of the families of girls and boys that make it difficult to compare work trajectories in urban and rural areas. First Topic: Childhood and Family The constructions on what it means to be a child, what a family is, and how it is organized that are elaborated by the ILO, maintain a notable distance both from the two fieldwork studies and from the ways in which social sciences have approached these categories. We know that childhoods differ (James & Prout, 1990; Sirota, 2001) according to the structure of the family as well as the ways in which internal arrangements are established, or how the domestic world is organized (Jelin, 2006). These are associated with the position which each person occupies within

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the social space (Bourdieu, 2007) and with other categories such as ethnic origin, gender, and age. As mentioned above, the ILO and the rhetoric on children’s rights used to appeal for the elimination of child labour is based on a model of universal childhood and family. The publication “Red card for child labour” sets out a condensed version of these ideas12 : Child labour means to assume work responsibilities belonging to adults, which generate situations of fear, stress, and frustration. Child labour dep rives children of the ability to enjoy their childhoods and to develop their potential in a safe environment where they feel cared for by adults. There are different kinds of child labour, but all have something in common: they are physically, mentally, affectively, and morally prejudicial for the child.

In another publication, the ILO warns that “children’s work not only forms a background which impedes healthy growth but also impedes the access to material and symbolic capacities, thereby constructing one of the determinants for social exclusion” (OIT, 1998, p. 7). Such assumptions crystalize a series of notions on the non-childhood of child workers and take for granted a problematic relation between adults—particularly parents—and children, presupposing the existence of a non-caring parenting. What pattern of norms are these diagnoses based on? It appears that childhood is understood as a special stage of life destined exclusively to education, play, and a lack of responsibility. In other words, this states the controversial idea of a “global childhood” (Rabello De Castro, 2019). What is established is a false dichotomy, whoever does not meet these normative standards is not a child and/or does not have a childhood. What concept of family is deployed? The adult could be a mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, sister, brother, and so forth, but the implication is that this adult, by allowing a child to work, is unable to guarantee the proper care of the child; in other words, they do not exercise their socially stipulated roles correctly. As a consequence, responsibility for the phenomenon of child labour is placed on the irresponsibility of the dysfunctional family.

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The two studies show that such diagnoses are vastly different from the senses of everyday experiences found in some contexts13 where child labour takes place. Firstly, it is essential to understand that the insertion of children into work is developed as a way to manage the division of labour inside of the domestic units. In our studies Sarti (2000) argues that the work carried out by children, in a similar way to that of adult men and women, is part of a moral commitment between the members of a family, generating a system of help and interchange within it. Parents provide shelter, home, and food, and children retribute by caring for others and taking on domestic chores. It is common in contexts of severe material deprivation that each member of the family, according to chronological age and gender, is assigned a series of responsibilities which implies economic and reproductive activities which could be domestic or outside the home. Are these the families which do not look after their children and who deprive them of a so-called proper childhood? We suggest that, rather than depriving the children, work is a way to satisfy their most basic needs, it is a way for children to manage their relationships, especially the relationship with their parents. It is also a way for adults to be with and look after their children, not leaving them alone, and a way to “prepare them for future work”. To look at the phenomenon in this way does not imply the construction of an idealized vision of the family, since we know that as well as relationships of cooperation there are relationships of hierarchy and conflict within the members of the family. The children are still “kids” but with more responsibilities than those prescribed by the universal vision of “childhood”. Looking at the ideas that adults and children interviewed have on childhood, they share elements with the universal vision: childhood is time of education, play, and leisure. But they differ in other elements: children are supposed to help with domestic tasks, to work outside home, to assume a part of the reproductive cost of the home (in some cases more intense work than others). To work does not mean that they stop being children, that they abandon play or school, but rather that everything co-exists as part of childhood experiences. To analyse the question in terms of deficits: “the child who works has no childhood” could in fact result in devaluing the identity of the child and deviating attention from the structural causes and origin of the problem

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(Pedraza, 2007). On this point we agree with Hetch (1998) who questions the idea of modern childhood, in which children should not work. For instance in the case he studied of street children in the city of Recife (Brazil), he found that in poor households children are valued for their material contribution to the survival of the home, highlighting in his analysis the inescapable belonging to class. These children think of helping their families as a mandate and not being able to help as a failure. Moreover, to encourage such children not to work could have repercussions in weakening their bonds with their families. Going back to the initial idea of this topic, a central issue arises from our empirical studies: this ideal of a childhood ‘entitled to special care and assistance’ set out in ILO documents is a conceptualization of childhood that arose in the specific historical and cultural circumstances of European countries. However, as Pupavac (2001) pointed out, such a vision of childhood free from labour and other “adult” responsibilities is a luxury that developing countries which have not experienced the economic development of Western societies are unable to universalize in their current circumstances. Due to economic and social necessity, children in developing countries take on “adult” roles, including work. The problem, as Barna states (), is not merely the institutionalization of the North Atlantic model of childhood as a parameter for the realities of the South, but the exclusion of the analysis of the historical processes of colonial and neo-colonial domination, which are determining factors in the configuration of the global inequalities. If we look at the dependent characteristic of Latin American economies and the low expansion of salaries we can understand that it doesn’t make sense to generalize this notion of childhood as a way of representing the kind of life of children of the third world. Even among the marginalized, farmers and indigenous people are in a precarious situation (Pedraza, 2007). Perhaps the extreme situation of this pretension of intervention on children is evidenced by the simultaneous appeal by the ILO to the countries of the South for the development of measures to eradicate child labour, at the same time that they were dealing with the consequences of the structural adjustment programs of the 1990s, which deepened poverty and social inequality. We will look deeper into this theme in the next section on child labour and exploitation.

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Second Topic: Child Exploitation The ILO, as well as the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (article 32) considers that a large part of child labour is exploitative. Several documents appeal for the need to strengthen and apply frames of national protection to protect children from economic exploitation (ILO). To be clear, it is not our intention to deny that child labour often takes place in situations of exploitation, as does adult work. Nevertheless, to make an absolute connection between participation in economic activities during childhood and exploitation is civilizable since it not only differs from many of the realities of the children’s activities, but also implies a condemnation to their parents as exploitative parents, a common trope in moral conservatism. We therefore consider two questions here. On the one hand, the idea of exploitation is easily transferred to the families of the children, resulting in stigmatizing and blaming the parents. In our fieldwork we were able to observe the subjective effects (guilt and shame) of these discourses, often motivated by insults received when the work is undertaken by the family in a public space, in full view. Interview narratives frequently allude to situations in which they were called “bums” and shouted at with phrases such as “you get to work, don’t send the kid!”. On the other hand, it displaces the real discussion, since in any case we must talk about the exploitation of children in all situations where economic relations of domination compromise the social reproduction of themselves and their families. When we look at the interpretations of the concept of exploitation related to child work, and particularly in the agreement 182 of the ILO [….] the moral judgment of what is considered tolerable for children in no way questions the present distribution of resources and global relations to provide knowledge on this theme. (Nieuwenhuys, 2003, p. 85)

In order to understand child labour and exploitation it is necessary to locate the discussion in the context of modern colonialism.14 The postcolonial condition of Latin America and the economic relations established with central countries saw an increase in precarious work activities, so that protected salaried work became the exception rather than the norm. It is useful to remember that it was these colonial relations which increased economic growth in Europe and the ability to almost completely eradicate child labour there.

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Since independence in the nineteenth century, the way that work has been organized in Latin America has been based on informal and unequal labour relations and with the participation of children, both in the economic reproduction of the domestic unit and in society […] The condition of children as over-exploited workers is widespread in economically and politically subaltern economies in the same way that informal work and precarious salaries are typical for adults […] The condition of the child as an economic agent reveals the subordinate economic relations which rule the system/world as well as the racism of labour relations which prevent workers in the Third World from establishing protected wage relations as the basic form of remuneration (Pedraza, 2007, p. 85). It is necessary to underline the historic and current causes of exploitation of child workers and their families. Because of the international division of labour which submits dependent countries to extensively informal and precarious forms of work, it became necessary for the whole family unit or household to work intensively in order to survive. The problem of children’s rights to be protected from economic exploitation—a guarantee generally interpreted as protection from work—is that it ignores that the experiences of children cannot be separated from the society conditions. This discourse re-conceptualizes the plight of children as the fault of the adult population. The existence of child labourers is condemned by proponents of children’s rights in terms of the moral and legal culpability of the societies concerned. Adults in the South are cast as child abusers because their children’s experiences violate the image of childhood held in the West (Pupavac, 2001). Third Topic: Conflict/Tension with Schooling Although the ILO recognizes that “not all tasks undertaken by children should be classified as child labour that must be eliminated”,15 one of the characteristics, among others, used to define child labour is whether or not it interferes with schooling. The ILO and UNICEF both differentiate between types of activities but say that many families “are obliged to resort to strategies of survival such as the incorporation of their children into work, displacing schooling from its position of priority” (Cutri et al., 2012, p. 353). Along these lines, there are many studies showing the ways in which “the co-existence of work and school undeniably affects scholarly performance and an ideal coexistence between them becomes a fantasy” (OIT,

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2007, p. 24). The presence or absence of child labour depends on factors such as “access to schools, the quality and cost, the availability of materials, and an adequate relation between teachers and pupils”. These factors are claimed to have a “fundamental impact” on child labour. The family of the child also appears as a key element to prevent or encourage child labour. This depends on: The value that education has in the home, access to schools, a good teacher/pupil relation and the child-family nucleus are fundamental in prevention. Parents need to be aware of the value of education as a way to generate future improved income. (Cutri et al., 2012, p. 353)

Firstly, our fieldwork shows that children who work do not necessarily dropout of school.16 In fact, we found that parents of the child workers recognize the importance of schooling in the education of their children as they see the school as an institution that can guarantee a “better future” for the children, one better than their own lives. In other words, not only do children undertake both activities, but there is a positive value attributed to schooling by the parents. In both of our case studies, all the children attend school, but school performance varies. Some of the children show “normal” development: the child’s age corresponds to the school grade/year, while others have repeated one or more grades, or have had long periods of absenteeism. What is interesting is that very few parents attribute these difficulties to the child’s work activities. The responsibility for weak performance, absenteeism, repeating a school year, or difficulties in accompanying the child with homework are attributed to other issues by the parents. For example, absenteeism is often associated with a lack of shoes or clothes, problems of the school institution (such as strikes, poorly trained teachers, schools that expel pupils), or personal psychological problems of the child such as the loss of a close member of the family. As mentioned above, the viewpoint of the parents is unanimous as regards the positive potential of formal schooling. The fact that their children attend school is looked upon as something necessary to acquire the credentials to access a “good job” or a “dignified job”. The expectations for their children are directly related to their own backgrounds, since they frequently received little or no education: they don’t want their children to repeat their own life stories; they want them “to be someone” and so they must have an education to live a better life than their parents.

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So, what is meant by “better”? If we look more closely at what is meant by “to be someone” in terms of levels of education and development to which they aspire for their children, it is interesting to see that the imagined horizon in most cases is seen as the completion of primary school and in a few cases the completion of secondary school. This is combined with the aspiration to develop some skill: building, mechanics, and hairdressing, among others. At the same time, the ultimate decision to continue schooling always appears to be in the hands of the child, but what is unquestionable is the obligation by the parents to complete primary schooling. To evaluate the virtues of education as a facilitator of better insertion into the world of work is something which transcends social class. What marks the difference is the expectations to be reached: these children live in a context where they are encouraged to reach an education level far lower than that required for incorporation into a work situation which is not precarious or informal. Looking at the concepts of childhood and family which permeate the ILO documents, in this case related to education, we can clearly see a counterpoint established through our empirical studies which gives rise to a sociological problem. We have seen that the families of child workers are considered to have a “lack of awareness” which results in the idea of negligence commonly attached to low-income families. Yet in the narratives of the children’s parents, awareness of the central role of the school and its positive value is extremely clear. We therefore want to underline the moral aspects of the ILO revealed by our counterpoint. According to Llobet (2015), these assertions show that the principles of children’s rights become a moral judgement on everyday life and child-rearing in low-income families. Another point of interest is about “access to schools”. In rural zones, institutions such as schools, health centres, and hospitals are often reported as being difficult to access and to access regularly by low-income families. However, in both of our studies this difficulty was not found, and distance was not considered a barrier to access. Neither was “access to low-cost schools” a problem, since in Argentina public education is available in almost every region and free of charge. In accordance with other fieldwork studies in the social sciences (Halperín, 2012; Liebel, 2016; Noceti, 2011; Padawer, 2010), we found no direct relation between child labour and school desertion, from the perspective of the actors interviewed. However, this does not mean that

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conflictive situations cannot be hidden or unknown, and we believe there should be more research into the role of the school in specific contexts and particularly the lack of education strategies directed to address the realities of these children. How do schools respond to the hegemonic idea that adults should work and children should be in school? (Padawer, 2010). Are schools guided by the idea that the families have sufficient resources and therefore the children do not need to or should not work? (Piotti, Andrada, Rins. In: Halperín, 2012). Formulating these questions allows us to continue rethinking the concept of childhood and show the various ways in which the pattern of Western childhood (Liebel, 2016) continues to be present in the implementation of different educational programs in schools. This pattern supposes that childhood is and must be, a “state of being protected and cared for which almost totally excludes any co-responsibility with others” (Liebel, 2016, p. 260) and at the same time devalues other forms of childhood which don’t fit in with these principles. In other words, according to Liebel what endangers the future of these children is not so much the fact that they work, but rather the existence of education systems which are incompatible with their way of life, which discriminate and exclude. We think it is important to emphasize the way in which certain ideas of childhood, model discourses, and practices, are not exempt from moral judgements about families, and if it is a question of popular sectors’ negative judgements. The school is portrayed as an “adequate place” for children while work is found to be “inappropriate”, especially in historically stigmatized places such as the street, which is considered dangerous and hostile. It becomes clear that the constructions on childhood and family outlined in the first topic are transversal to different aspects of child labour analysed by social sciences and which are applied in different programs. Among these is the relation between child labour and health, which we will discuss below. Fourth Topic: Child Labour and Risks to Health As outlined above, the ILO makes a distinction between activities which put a child’s health at risk and those which do not. However, child labour is generically associated with “damage to the health of children”, and “puts at risk their physical, affective, and moral development”. The studies which focus on the relation between child labour and health (Aparicio,

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2007; Orazi & Stonski, 2010; Silva, 2012, 2014) use the rhetoric of child rights to claim that if a child works, her right to health (among others) is infringed. The negative effects that work has on a child’s health are employed to point to the need to immediately eradicate the worst forms of child labour. The lack of systematic investigation into child labour and health is also attributed to the belief that “children don’t work or the work they do is not dangerous” (IPEC, 2011, p. 15). There is a problem here because not only is the existence or awareness of the phenomenon denied, but there is also no information on accidents, injuries, and sickness derived from work activities of children. We therefore question that, if there is consensus on the fact that there is still insufficient data on the relation between child labour and health—and thus the consequences of work on the health of these children are “ambiguous”17 (Posso, 2018) to say the least, what sustains the perspective that child labour damages the children’s health? Firstly, it calls for the universality of children’s growth and development “regardless of cultural patterns or social configuration” (IPEC, 2011, p. 13). From this supposed construction of a universal childhood, eminently defined by biological processes, it is claimed that the transition to biological maturity extends up to the final years of adolescence. And it is precisely at this stage of life when, following the ILO’s argument, psychological and behavioural characteristics are found that comprise risky behaviour, such as children working and working often without adult supervision (the latter being considered an “extra risk”).18 Damage, danger, and risk, are categories which have references to the most impoverished sectors of society as a common denominator, exactly as they are found in numerous studies on childhood and families of low income (Villalta, 2010). Once again, the family19 of the child emerges as the entity responsible for his or her situation, this time “naturalizing” the risks (Aparicio, 2007; Silva, 2012). But how is risk conceptualized in these studies? It is taken as an abstract category, typical of classical epidemiology. As Suárez et al. (2006) explains, although this is useful to elaborate a descriptive map of injuries and sickness for use in preventive policies, it in no way allows the analysis of the local construction of risks and the ways in which the subjects run risks within tolerable limits (Sy, 2009).

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In our research we found that, far from naturalizing the risks, both parents and children perceive them. For example, certain tasks are regulated based on this perception. Once more we can see a moral as well as a common-sense judgement on appropriate and inappropriate, dangerous, and/or risky behaviour, this time applied to health problems. For all the above reasons we believe that it is analytically inadequate to isolate the relation between child labour and health as if it were a unidirectional relation between one variable and another. In addition, our case studies show that problems associated with “vulnerable” children have much more to do with their conditions of life (precarious housing, inadequate food, exposure to chemicals) rather than the work activity itself.20 It is precisely the analysis of these variables which makes it possible to explain the difficulties many children face. In other words, to look exclusively at how work affects health means that important elements, which could be part of the problem, are hidden from view. The analysis of our case studies shows the persistence of the ideal of child-rearing which guarantees healthy children who are not exposed to the dangers of work. The explanation of Colangelo (2008) is very clear on this point: that a right idea of child-rearing should be understood as a historic process in which medical knowledge has discussed and discusses the legitimacy of their expertise with other types of knowledge. In these disputes, different concepts of childhood, the child’s body, and the relation between adults and children are brought into play.

Concluding Remarks Our research seeks to contribute to the understanding of the complex intersection that occurs between the daily experiences of working children and their families, and the inscription of a global discourse of rights (Pupavac, 2001). We believe that it is important for the construction of critical knowledge, to disarticulate a certain tendency towards essentialist thinking, which understands the right of children not to work, as an abstract and emancipatory ideal. We have questioned certain categories of an International Organization—the ILO—on child labour and the political appeal for its “eradication”. Specifically, we have identified a set of recurrences which we decided to group into four topics: (1) the notion of childhood and family from which derives the idea that children who work have no childhood; (2) the idea that exploitation is suffered by most child workers;

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(3) conflict/tension between child labour and schooling; and (4) the implied risks that child labour has on the children’s health. We compared these categories with two research projects focusing on revealing the experiences of child workers in their social context. Rhetoric on “children’s rights” and “workers’ rights” is constantly found in our topics and is used by the ILO as the principal argument for the need to eradicate child labour. This “discursive front” (Fonseca & Cardarello, 1999) is translated into concrete policies and specific contexts in which relations of power and discretional, arbitrary and classist practices penetrate social interventions on childhood (Villalta, 2010). In this frame, our questions are not restricted to an analysis of the discourses of the ILO, but on the problematic of central notions (such as childhood, family, work, education, and health) which are translated into policies such as the eradication of child work. Grouping the perspectives of the ILO into different topics has enabled a critical analysis of specific notions. At the same time, in spite of the specificity of each topic, there is a constant interpretative operation: the appeal to abstract, universal, and decontextualized ideas. The problem is that decontextualized models that invoke the rights of children—in our case the right not to work—not only reinforce mechanisms of exclusion, but also deny any perception of otherness. Through our ethnographic research we were able to establish counterpoints in each of the topics to show the various ways to be a child, to raise and look after children, to relate with schools and to regulate behaviour considered risky. This analytical exercise, which includes a critical revision of ILO publications, should in no way be considered a position which supports or justifies child labour. To understand certain practices does not imply approval or the lack of a moral position (Fonseca, 1999a). We recognize the violation of rights, but we sustain that the social inequality which causes this situation is related to socio-economic processes in which adults of low-income/impoverished sectors are also immersed. To approach the phenomenon in this way permits a focus on the struggle against social inequality rather than placing individual responsibility on the parents who are habitually blamed for their negligence. Once again, we must remember that the invocation of children’s rights—including children’s rights not to work—occurred in a context of the privatization of social policies and the dismantling of the welfare state in Argentina, so the contradictory nature of these discourses must be reviewed: it is the state

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with its policies that violates essential social and economic rights, while subscribing to ILO conventions and recommendations prohibiting child labour. On the question of how to confront the exploitation of child workers, Liebel and Saadi (2011) show the chasm between the position of the ILO and the realities of child workers. For them, these differences could be resolved politically by recognizing that the problem of child labour can only be overcome not by prohibition, but by abolishing the social and economic conditions on which human exploitation is based, regardless of age. According to Fonseca (1999a) due to the tension between arrogant totalitarianism (which tends to disqualify that which is different) and paternalistic complacency (which accepts differences as if they were the product of a natural order), there is a long way to go to achieve social justice. However, although there is no quick “solution”, there is a series of methodological principles which should be valued not only by social sciences, but also by international organizations and the State, which would help to confront this situation: (a) define and understand the differences; (b) situate our logic as one among many others; and (c) understand different perceptions as interrelated parts of a same cultural setting. We are convinced that this is the best way to understand the processes concerning childhood, from which interventions could be shaped according to different needs.

Notes 1. For the ILO, not all “child work” is considered “child labour”. Child labour is any kind of work done by children under the age of 16 or in activities that harm their “safety, health, and moral development”. In this definition, legal and moral categories overlap. Child labour is seen as work that is morally wrong, work that harms children or deprives them of their childhood. For more information see: https://www.ilo.org/buenosaires/ temas/trabajo-infantil/lang--es/index.htm. 2. Data from the report on the Survey of Activities of Children and Adolescents carried out between 2016 and 2017 in Argentina. 3. As Scott explained: “It is not the individuals who have the experience, but the subjects who are constituted through the experience. In this definition, experience then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the definitive evidence (because it has been seen or felt) that supports the

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

known, but rather what we seek to explain, what knowledge is produced about” (Scott, 2001, pp. 49–50). Underlining this does not lead to an unawareness that when developing policies and programmes related to child labour and children’s work, the ILO must find its place among a myriad of other stakeholders including entities engaged with economic development such as the World Bank or the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), children’s rights agencies and bodies such as the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) or the Committee on the Rights of the Child, as well as civil society organizations. Hence, the ILO as a transnational actor also needs to deal with the tension between its position as leader with regard to legal and technical questions in the field of child labour and the intimate connection of this field with larger developments related to human rights and global economic developments that lie beyond the control of any single actor (Van Daalen & Hanson, 2019). For example in 1995, it was estimated that 250,000 poor children were working, while in 2002, 2,000,000 children were working (Feldman, 1997). The concept of Unsatisfied Basic Needs allows the identification of structural poverty and represents an alternative to the identification of poverty simply as an insufficiency of income. It allows the identification of absolute deprivation and shows poverty as the result of an accumulated lack of essential needs. Not only income is considered, but whether the subject has access to food and other essentials. The “basic food basket” is widened to include goods and services such as clothes, education, health, transport, and so forth, to obtain the value of the “total basic basket”. The incidence of poverty is analysed by looking at the proportion of households that fall below the “total basic basket”. Destitution is calculated by the proportion which does not reach the “basic food basket”. For more information, see: https://www.indec.gob.ar/indec/web/Nivel4-Tema-4-46-152. A characteristic of postcolonial studies and the potential to study child labour can be seen for example in Liebel (2019), Nieuwenhuys (2013), and Schibotto (2015). Numerous research based on case studies of child workers challenge the interpretations of the ILO on child labour. These studies were developed in Latin America in countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, and Paraguay, and are widely read through a specific journal: Revista Internacional NAT´S desde los Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes Trabajadores, published in Peru. In Argentina however, studies on child labour often tend to adopt an approach with excessive biaglobally circulating scripts on child labour towards ILO norms such as Aparicio et al. (2007), Cutri et al. (2012), Silva (2012), neglecting the need to explore the specific reasons and social

3

10.

11.

12.

13.

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conditions to explain how children are incorporated into the world of work. For example Liebel and Saadi (2011) suggest there is a “lack of scientific reflection on the different conditions of work and the complexity of the work experiences of the children, as well as the meanings for them and the effects on them. In the latest ILO report there is not one reference to the numerous research studies on this topic, nor any discussion on them. The approach is therefore not only restricted to the negative aspects of child labour, but also excludes statistics and many activities which are vital (….) neglecting any kind of empathy for the needs or expectations of the children” (Liebel & Saadi, 2011, p. 114). In the same way, in the latest World Conference on the Sustained Elimination of Child Labour (Okyere, 2017) highlights the persistent indifference of the ILO to children and adolescents who work. The children were not invited to the conference, which meant that policymakers missed an important opportunity to relate with them and possibly formulate more realistic programs of intervention. The very legitimacy of the ILO is questioned, since the voices of those who are at the receiving end of their decisions are excluded. Myers (2017) makes another important point: the need to separate children from labour is rooted in specific cultural ideas which are more often contrary to those developed by social sciences. The general prohibition from work based on age frequently goes against certain child-rearing practices, which can generate negative consequences. The ILO continues to ignore these questions, refusing even to ask “but why?” The author suggests some answers, including “organizational failure” where the principal aims are displaced and where concerns for self-perpetuation of the organization are considered more important than the aims themselves. (New ideas may be unpopular, and they are not prepared to pay the price of incorporating new ideas or even placing them on the table.) Fontana and Gruegel (2017) analyse two cases: Bolivia and Argentina as examples of states which responded in terms of rights and agreements on child labour. The authors show how diverse social policies can derive from different interpretations. Bolivia responded with a “deviated compliance”, raising the working age to 10 years, while Argentina responded with an “over compliance” raising the age to above that stipulated by the ILO. See: “Tarjeta roja para el trabajo infantil”: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/ groups/public/–-americas/–-ro-lima/–-ilo-buenos_aires/documents/ genericdocument/wcms_472758.pdf. Emphasis is made on “some” because child labour is as heterogeneous as adult labour: formal/informal; precarious/non-precarious, rural/urban, etc. The wide variety of work leads to a diversity of implications. Placing the discussion here also leads us to think about the challenges left by post-neoliberal agendas, which could not reverse the dependent

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15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

character of our economies. Traditional studies on Argentina’s economic history of the last two decades tend to emphasize two transcendental facts. First, the role of the convertibility program and its crisis. Second, the change in the economic model that followed that crisis. In this passage— from neoliberalism to neodevelopmentism or post-neoliberalism—the structural character of the change in economic dynamics and public policies is usually pointed out. But these approaches often forget the peripheral capitalist character of the economy and its state. They neglect that the development of society is founded on the contradictions of peripheral and dependent capitalism. These contradictions—which start from the class relation and its particularities—are key to properly understanding the conditions in which society is produced and reproduced and from which it can be radically transformed. However, an inadequate characterization of the dynamics of society leads to an analysis of the (economic and political) crisis of convertibility as a product of the failure of the neoliberal strategy and to neodevelopmentism as its positive overcoming, that is, as a break without continuity. On the contrary, we need to analyse the development, the crisis, and the overcoming of convertibility as a product of the success of the capitalist restructuring strategy of Argentine society (Feliz, 2011, p. 72). http://www.ilo.org/ipec/facts/lang--es/index.htm. We believe that the complexity involved in education inequality and the characteristics and challenges for education in sectors living in poverty deserves detailed attention and exceeds the scope of this study. For Argentina a detailed diagnosis can be found in Duschatzky (1999), Redondo (2004, 2016), Tiramonti (2008), among others. This information does not apply to children who do dangerous work and are more likely to present health problems (Posso, 2018). Moreover it is argued that this exposure to risk can result in accidents or illnesses which are more “costly” to society if suffered by children rather than adults. Whenever child labour takes place in the context of family relations it is considered a contribution to the domestic unit. In the case of child labour in factories, the responsibility would lie with the factory owners (Neither of our field studies found children working in factories which is why analysis of literature on that specific form is not included). We do not deny in any way that certain forms of work named by the ILO as the “worst forms of work” can have a direct effect on children’s health. We refer only to those directly observed in our fieldwork.

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Castro (Eds.), A questão de gênero e trabalho infantil na pequena mineração sul–americana Brasil, Perú, Argentina, Bolívia. Cetem-CNPQ. Morrow, V., & Boyden, J. (2018). Responding to children’s work: Evidence from the Young Lives study in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, summative report. Oxford University Press. Myers, W. (2017). Extraña disfunción burocrática en el trabajo infantil. Open democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/sam-oky ere/time-to-take-working-children-seriously. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2003). Las peores formas del “trabajo infantil” y lo peor para los niños trabajadores. El tema del trabajo infantil, explotación y la cuestión del valor. NATS Revista Internacional desde los niños y adolescentes trabajadores, VI (10): 77–88. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2009). From child labour to working children’s movements. In J. Qvortrup, W. Corsaro, & M. S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 289–300). Palgrave Macmillan. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2013). Theorizing childhood(s): Why we need postcolonial perspectives. Childhood, 20(1), 3–8. Noceti, M. (2011). Trabajo infantil rural y explotación laboral infantil rural: Aportes antropológicos a la diferenciación de conceptos para el diseño de políticas de protección de derechos del niño en el sudoeste bonaerense. Papeles De Trabajo, 22, 58–73. OIT (ILO). (1998). Trabajo Infantil en los países del MERCOSUR: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Paraguay y Uruguay. OIT (ILO). OIT (ILO). (2002). Un futuro sin trabajo infantil. OIT (ILO). OIT (ILO). (2004). Invertir en todos los niños. Estudio económico de los costos y beneficios de erradicar el trabajo infantil. OIT (ILO). OIT (ILO). (2007). El trabajo infantil en la Argentina. Análisis y desafíos para la política pública. Ministerio de Trabajo, Empleo y Seguridad Social. OIT (ILO). OIT (ILO). (2013). Informe mundial sobre el trabajo infantil. OIT (ILO). OIT (ILO). (2016). América Latina y El Caribe: Hacia la primera generación libre de trabajo infantil. OIT (ILO). Okyere, S. (2017). Es hora de tomar en serio a los niños que trabajan. Open democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-traffickingand-slavery/time-to-take-working-children. Orazi, V., & Stonski, T. (2010). Trabajo Infantil: una problemática social y compleja. PRONAP 10, Modulo 4. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Pediatría, pp. 68–104 Padawer, A. (2010). Tiempo de estudiar, tiempo de trabajar: La conceptualización de la infancia y la participación de los niños en la vida productiva como experiencia formativa. Horizontes Antropológicos, 16(34), 349–375.

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Pautassi, L. (2008). La articulación entre políticas públicas y derechos, vínculos difusos. In X. Erazo, V. Abramovich, & J. Orbe (Eds.), Políticas públicas para un estado social de derechos (Vol. II, pp. 89–116). Fundación Henry Dunant América Latina and Editorial LOM. Pedraza, Z. (2007). El trabajo infantil en clave colonial: Consideraciones histórico-antropológicas. Nómadas, 26, 80–90. Pérez, J. (2014). El tercer momento rousseauniano de América Latina. Posneoliberalismo y desigualdades sociales (Working Paper Series 72). Desigualdades. Poretti, M., Hanson, K., Darbellay, F., & Berchtold, A. (2014). The rise and fall of icons of “stolen childhood” since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Childhood, 21(1), 22–38. Posso, A. (2018). The health consequences of hazardous and non-hazardous child labour. Review of Development Economics, 23, 1–21. Prout, A. (2001). Representing children: Reflections on the children 5–16 programme. Children and Society, 15(3): 193–201. Pupavac, V. (2001). Misanthropy without borders: The international children’s rights regime. Disasters, 25(2), 358–372. Rabello De Castro, L. (2002). A infância e seus destinos no contemporaneo. Psicologìa em Revista, 8(11): 47–58. Rabello De Castro, L. (2019). Why global? children and childhood from a decolonial perspective. Childhood, 27 (1), 48–62. Rausky, M. (2009). ¿Infancia sin trabajo o infancia trabajadora? Perspectivas sobre el trabajo infantil. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 7 (2), 681–704. Redondo, P. (2004). Escuelas y pobreza: Entre el desasosiego y la obstinación. Paidós. Redondo, P. (2016). La escuela con los pies en el aire: Hacer escuela, entre la desigualdad y la emancipación. In Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación: Memoria Académica. http:// www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/tesis/te.1279/te.1279.pdf Sarti, C. (2000). O trabalho de crianças e jovens como experiência simbólica. Communication presented at III Congreso Latinoamericano de Sociología del Trabajo. Buenos Aires. Schibotto, G. (2015). Saber Colonial, Giro Decolonial e Infancias Múltiples de América Latina. NATS Revista Internacional Desde Los Niños y Adolescentes Trabajadores XIX, 25, 51–68. Scott, J. (2001). Experiencia. La ventana, 13, 42–73. Silva, M. (2012). Trabajo infantil y salud: balance y desafíos. In M. Macri & C. Uhart (Eds.), Trabajos infantiles e infancias. Investigaciones en territorio (Argentina, 2005–2010) (pp. 205–232). La Crujía. Silva, M. (2014). Infancia y trabajo infantil en la historia argentina. Clivajes, 1, 1–21.

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Sirota, R. (2001). Emergencia de uma sociologia da infancia: Evolucao du objeto e do olhar. Cadernos De Pesquisa, 112, 7–31. Suárez, R., Beltrán, E. M., & Sánchez, T. (2006). El sentido del riesgo desde la antropología médica. consonancias y disonancias con la salud pública en dos enfermedades transmisibles. Antípoda, 3, 123–154. Sy, A. (2009). Una revisión de los estudios en torno a enfermedades gastrointestinales: En busca de nuevas alternativas para el análisis de los procesos de salud-enfermedad. Salud Colectiva, 5(1), 49–62. Tiramonti, G. (2008). Una aproximación a la dinámica de la fragmentación del sistema educativo argentino. Especificaciones teóricas y empíricas. In G. Tiramonti & N. Montes (Eds.), La escuela media en debate. Manantial. Van Daalen, E., & Hanson, K. (2019). Los cambios de la OIT en la política de trabajo infantil: Regulación y abolición. Política De Desarrollo Internacional, 11, 133–150. Verd, J., & Lozares, C. (2016). Introducción a la investigación cualitativa. Fases, métodos y técnicas. Síntesis. Villalta, C. (2010). Infancia, Justicia y derechos humanos. Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Villalta, C., & Llobet, V. (2015). Resignificando la protección. Nuevas normativas y circuitos en el campo de las políticas y los dispositivos jurídicoburocráticos destinados a la infancia en Argentina. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 13, 167–180.

CHAPTER 4

Early Childhood and Neoliberalism in Colombia: True Discussions, Government Rationality, and Conducting Behaviour Juan Carlos Amador

In this chapter, we view early childhood in Colombia as a field that establishes discourses and practices that prescribe what children are from zero to six years old. Additionally, we also discuss early childhood as a social space in dispute that includes institutional interventions, which shape subjectivities for productivity and social arrangements consistent with the neoliberal capitalist world. Further, it is also assumed as a social control device that legitimizes a particular rationality of government and certain ways of conducting behaviours (Foucault, 2007; Rose, 2011). This is done through standardized care models that reduce rights to services, and that promote inequality and exclusion in children and their families, as well as from the State, the social class, ethnicity, and territory.

J. C. Amador (B) Facultad de Ciencias Y Educación, Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Bogotá, Colombia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_4

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This double condition of early childhood (field and device) allows us to understand how the policies of care to this group of society substantially modify the meanings around citizenship and the public; these are reduced to the provision of services to poor beneficiaries. To respond to this approach, the chapter consist of five parts: the introduction, a look at children through childhood studies, the emergence of early childhood from a discursive horizon, the rationality of government and conduct of behaviour in Early Childhood policies, and conclusions. Since the 1990s, Latin America and the Caribbean has been one of the regions of the planet most affected by the neoliberal reforms. Since the guidelines of the Washington Consensus, the countries that make up this region, which in turn have gone through complex colonial experiences, have had to assume new social, economic, and political conditions led by several multilateral organizations. This situation caused harmful effects on these societies, especially in regard to human rights, work, health, education, and social welfare. In the case of Colombia, the new guidelines introduced the State into strategic matters for global capital, such as fiscal discipline, redefinition of public spending, tax reforms, liberalization of the financial sector, privatization, and market deregulation (Mejía, 2014). These measures were part of a development model that benefited powerful sectors and made precarious the lives of workers, farmers, and indigenous people (Escobar, 2005). The paradox of this scenario is that, while these measures took place, some sectors of civil society promoted initiatives in favour of human rights, equality, and inclusion, which, after a popular movement called “The seventh ballot”,1 made the approval of the Political Constitution of Colombia possible in the year 1991. In this way, the new constitutional order declared Colombia as a Social State of Law (a state based on human rights), acknowledged the multicultural nature of the nation, and established legal tools for citizens to defend their rights, such as the so-called guardianship action.2 In this context, the “Social Mobilization for Children”3 initiative emerged based on the creation of a working group made up of the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF), the Administrative Department of Social Welfare (DABS), the International Center for Education and Development (CINDE), Save the Children, and UNICEF. These organizations, working in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), had three purposes: to introduce a change in the social conception of childhood; to recognize children as subjects of rights; and

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to make the society and the State visible as guarantors and responsible for the fulfilment of these rights. Specifically, with regard to childhood policies, from then on Colombian society would face three contradictions. The first occurs around the implementation of neoliberal reforms based on privatization, state reduction, and public–private partnerships, along with the incorporation of the discourse of children’s rights through multiple discursive strategies managed by local and international organizations. Second, the maintenance of minority status was contradictory as well: the implementation of the Code of Minors between 1989 and 2006 allowed children and adolescents to be prosecuted in an “irregular situation”,4 while the CRC establishes the imputability of people under fourteen years old. Third, although in Colombia three compulsory preschool decrees were running in the General Education Law (Law 115 of 1994), aimed at children aged three to six, the State maintained assistance and precarious models of care through FAMI Homes (Family, Women, and Children) and Community Homes, administered by the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF).5 Later, and after postponing the ratification of the CRC for several years, the government approved the Childhood and Adolescence Code in 2006 (Law 1098), which established “non-negotiable” premises around the rights of children such as comprehensive protection (article 7) and the best interests of children and adolescents (article 8). Likewise, according to the guidelines of the international movement known as “Education for all”, originated in the World Education Conferences for All in Jomtien (1990), the World Forum of Education in Dakar (2000), and the World Education Symposium Parvularia in Santiago de Chile (2000), this law established the right to integral development in early childhood, understood as a process of empowerment of children from zero to six years old that depends on emotional environments and decent material conditions to carry out their lives. The law also pointed out that initial education, which is the basis for ensuring this type of development, constitutes an unenforceable right. The above-mentioned events opened the way to configure the field of early childhood in Colombia. By 2007, the government signed Conpes 109 (National Council for Economic and Social Policy), in which it assumed that children aged zero to six should reach certain competences and promised to allocate resources for this age group, particularly in the areas of health, nutrition, and initial education. Then, with the

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Operational Guide for the provision of the comprehensive early childhood care service (MEN, 2009), the Ministry of National Education implemented three modalities of care. These are: a family environment, which sought to provide care; nutrition and initial education for children under five years old under the exclusive care of their families; a community environment, which sought to provide care for children under five who are traditionally assisted by community mothers; and an institutional environment, which offered specialized institutional care eight hours a day with expert teachers in early childhood education. Later, towards 2011, in the first government of President Juan Manuel Santos, the Early Childhood Intersectoral Commission (CIPI, 2011) was formed through Decree 4875, and the “Zero to Always” strategy was declared, making significant advances in the design of public policy. Finally, in the National Development Plan 2014–2018, the national government undertook the goal of making initial education a fundamental part of the human capital formation system, as well as providing for its mandatory implementation throughout the national territory. This is how, by 2016, comprehensive early childhood care was declared a State policy. As we have seen in the previous route, a kind of discursive abstraction of early childhood is found in Colombia; this translates into a complex network of institutional interventions (Llobet, 2014) that brings within new forms of childhood governance since birth (Amador, 2012). Issues such as the upbringing, socialization, and education of young children no longer depend exclusively on parents, but also on the State and other social agents. Contrastively, this situation shows how, from the growing production of a field of early childhood configured by discourses and practices that intend to prescribe what they are and how children from zero to six should be, the adult-centric society puts into play a discussion over the meanings that are involved in policies of representation on rights, development, well-being, and progress. These policies of representation seek to produce not only certain subjectivities, but also social systems consistent with the neoliberal capitalist world. In this context, the present work intends to show the contradictions between the discourses of early childhood rights with the market economy and the new forms of capital concentration, through the precariousness of the average citizen and the outsourcing of care to the rights of the child; and at the same time the way in which human dignity overlaps with a rationality of government that assumes the child as an object of control and investment, within the framework of the government of populations

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(Foucault, 2007). To this end, three aspects will be addressed in the chapter below: a look at children through the lens of Childhood Studies; the emergence of early childhood and the contradiction of the discourses that configure it as a true statement; and early childhood as a device of governmentality in capitalist societies.

A Look at Children from the Social Studies Perspective Before considering what the field of early childhood in contemporary capitalist societies comprises, it is necessary to make a preliminary distinction between childhood and children. According to the Social Studies of Children (ESI), childhood is a social construction, social fact, and/or social production. For Alanen (1994), James and Prout (1997) and Qvortrup (1994), childhood becomes socially objective and becomes a social category in dispute, based on discourses, prescriptions, and knowledge about children, which have been produced, reproduced, and transformed during the last four centuries.6 Thus, those statements about children who are being legitimated progressively, within the framework of certain power relations in society, have also been subject to transformation through variations produced in the social order, knowledge systems, cultural repertoires, and value systems. Continuing with the perspectives of the ESI, we can affirm that children are social actors that carry their own experiences, knowledge, needs, and interests. According to Corsaro (2011), children apprehend the discourses of society and are strategically accommodated within social patterns based on stereotypes and dominant roles. By participating in the cultural routines of their social environment, these people appropriate and reinterpret both cultural practices and codes. This process makes it possible for them to live experiences, especially among peers, which are usually intersected by discourses and representations of institutional fields such as family, religion, education, politics, and the media. This preeminence of the experiences built between peers allows the existence of children’s cultures. However, children also produce and transform culture with adults in an intergenerational way.7 However, the interrelation between these two categories is complex; taking into account that the social production of childhood can influence the reality of children, but their experiences in turn can transform the real discourses that constitute childhood. In this interdependent relationship,

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it is also important to understand the place of these two aspects of social reality in the public and private dimensions of life. In this regard, James et al. (1998) affirmed that childhood is a social and historical institution that acquires legitimacy from the progressive appropriation of meanings and material processes around children, which involve aspects such as power relations, gender, and cultural variability. In assuming childhood as a social institution, James et al. (1998) ratified the public nature of this, given that it is a social production that is permanently processed by knowledge, media, political discourses, and public policy, among other institutional fields. However, James and Prout (1997) gave relevance to a more private and everyday dimension of childhood, which is evident in the interactions and socialization processes that occur in the family and among peers. Apparently, this public–private phenomenon relates to the conformation of children’s identities. For the above-mentioned reason, they conclude that childhood is a kind of abstract notion, different from children, who are to be understood as historical subjects that inhabit the social space of childhood in a particular way. These considerations have allowed us to formulate three interpretative approaches to childhood research: structural, constructionist, and relational (Gaitán, 2006). The authors who propose the first approach assume that childhood is a social group in permanent conflict and negotiation with other social groups (Qvortrup, 1992). For this reason, children, who are vastly different from each other, occupy a specific space in the social structure; attending to the social, political, and economic conditions in which they live. On the other hand, the structural approach assumes childhood as a social group with its own temporality, which is determined by being part of a shared demographic cohort. This location as an age group is usually associated with statements such as “the minors”, “the incapable”, and “the vulnerable”, a situation that legitimizes forms of subordination from the adult authority (Rodríguez, 2007). The constructionist approach, meanwhile, involves two meanings. The first one explains the social production of childhood as processed through social discourses, which have certain conditions of production, circulation, and reception, and are usually framed in relationships of knowledgepower (Jenks, 1982). The second meaning is about childhood as a variable in social analysis; it cannot be studied apart from other variables such as gender, class, or ethnicity. In accordance with these criteria, this approach states that children are social agents who participate in the

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construction of their own lives, as well as the lives of those with whom they share in society (James & Prout, 1997). Finally, the relational approach, as the name implies, aims to identify links between the active and productive character of children with aspects of the structure that condition their lives. In this regard, Mayall (2002) proposed that the analysis of children as social agents requires understanding how they are not alien to the conditions in which a certain order of social class, gender, or ethnicity is produced and reproduced. Likewise, the approach recognizes that, although children produce, reproduce, and transform culture (Corsaro, 2011), it is essential to recognize their place in the social division of work and in the power relations of which they are subject as a generation or age group (Gaitán, 2006). Summing up the discussed topics, this paper intends to analyse the configuration of the field of early childhood in Colombia according to the relational approach. Following the same route, it is important to note that this way of producing knowledge about the social reality of children, allows for an observation of the interdependencies between macrosocial and microsocial aspects, as well as an analysis of the positions that certain social agents occupy in the social space that constitutes the field of early childhood in Colombia since the incorporation of neoliberal reforms in social policy. This requires problematizing the discourses, social practices, interactions, and oppositions of those who intervene in the field, among other elements.

Early childhood Emergency: Discursive Horizon In tune with the ESI, it is important to say that early childhood is also a social construction. It is a set of social discourses that emerged in the last decade of the last century, which refer to the initial moment of life experienced by human beings, specifically between the ages of zero to six. This moment of life is the starting point for people to reach development, happiness, and sociability throughout their existence.8 As was already mentioned, the most influential discourses on the existence of early childhood, as well as the assurance of children’s rights through parenting, nutrition, health, education, and their participation in family, community, and institutional settings, are those that constitute the “Education for all” movement. Part of the discursive device of this international movement provided the ideological orientations for the governments of the region, including

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the governments of Colombia between 2007 and 2015, to produce norms, public policies, and institutional interventions leading to prescribe what early childhood is and should be, what the responsibilities of parents, family, society, and institutions are in the fulfilment of children’s rights, and how state and private initiatives in this regard have positive effects on social equity. This discursive device has had three sources of inspiration: rights, development, and investment.

The Discourse of Early Childhood Rights The discourse on the rights of early childhood originated from the orientations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Its basis is the doctrine of integral protection, as well as the prevailing nature of the rights of these people. Comprehensive protection includes a set of actions, policies, plans, and programs the State guides, with the participation of the family and society, to ensure that all children enjoy effectively and without discrimination the rights to survival, development, and participation. These institutional actions must also contemplate the special situations of children whose rights are violated due to different circumstances. The discourse on the rights of early childhood has three principles: equality or non-discrimination; the child’s best interest; and effectiveness and absolute priority. The first refers to the universality of children’s rights and social policies that seek to overcome the social, economic, and cultural conditions that generate discrimination and, consequently, inequality. The “best interest” of the child refers to the preferential nature of the rights of children concerning their interpretation and social practice. This principle places limits on the discretion of governments in social investment, since the rights of children are a priority over the rights of other populations and groups. Finally, the principle of effectiveness and absolute priority raises the adoption of measures, both administrative, legislative, and of other origins, conducive to the effectiveness (enjoyment and real enjoyment) of the human rights of children. According to the above, most scientific, normative, political, and media discourses on early childhood are protected by the rights of the child. Specifically, in Colombia it is usually stated that early childhood-aged children are holders of the rights recognized in international treaties, in the Political Constitution, and in the Childhood and Adolescence Code. Frequently, these rights, which include health and nutrition care, a

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complete vaccination schedule, protection against physical hazards, and initial education (CIPI, 2011), are unenforceable. Hence, the way to realize the rights of early childhood-aged children is through so-called comprehensive care, understood as the set of actions carried out by the responsible actors to guarantee the right to full development of children from zero to six years old and jointly ensure integral protection.

The Discourse of Child Development The discourse of development has a long tradition in the framework of theories of child development. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, these theories were based on explanations related to the ages of life, the psychological and biological structuring of the individual, the regulation of behaviours, and the monitoring of a series of stages in which maturation and the performance of the beings are integrated. The contributions of Freud (2011), Piaget (1994), and Erikson (2009), from different points of view, coincided in assuming the child as an individual in transit, an entity in process that, insofar as it adequately transits through the first cycles of life, will be able to function properly in adult life according to the predominant social values. Freud (2011) assumed that children should be treated differently from adults in order to achieve lasting behavioural traits. In this way, if the adult had suffered some kind of alteration during his psychosexual development, for example, in the phases he called oral or anal, Freud stated that these could only be resolved by reliving childhood experiences by means of psychotherapy. Moreover, Piaget (1994) affirmed that during the first years of life children undergo different processes of mental transformation through a set of procedurally different phases. For this reason, the ways children perform in the world indicate whether their mental processes are aligned with a specific period of development. Finally, Erikson (2009) stated that the identity of people develops from their levels of interaction with the environment. These interactions include a set of processes that make possible the development of personality, based on certain exchanges and transactions with peers and adults. Although the theoretical frameworks on childhood development have changed, the political, normative, and scientific discourses that seek to legitimize the statement of early childhood often use terms such as “integral development”, “adequate stimulation”, “potentiality”, and “ promise

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to the future”. These kinds of speeches promote the idea of development based on promoting interrelationships between sensory, expressive, emotional, bodily, and cognitive processes in children aged zero to six years. According to this, there is little that can be done to enhance development after seven years of life. In this case, in neurosciences, research studies such as Mustard (2003) argued that from gestation until before the age of five, more than 90 percent of the neuronal connections of the human brain are established. Additionally, this process determines mental operations related to learning, concentration, problem solving, and decision making. These being fundamental to life in society, we can justify the need to enhance development through the actions of parents, educators, and caregivers. As an example, UNICEF declares that during the first years of life, and in particular, from pregnancy to three years, children need nutrition, protection, and stimulation for their brain to develop properly. Recent progress in the field of neuroscience brings new data on brain development during this stage of life. Thanks to this, we know that, in the early years, babies’ brains form new connections at an amazing speed, according to the Center for the Child in Development at Harvard University, more than one million every second, a pace that is never repeated (taken from https://www.unicef.org/es/desarrollo-de-laprimera-infancia).

The Investment Discourse The discourse of investment in early childhood is about the knowledge of the economy. This discourse claims that if certain resources are invested in children of these ages, as the basis of the human capital of a country, the return of such investment can be achieved up to three times in less than three decades. A good part of the discourses about early childhood are based on the works of Heckman (s.p), Nobel Prize in Economics, who stated that investment in children during the first years has positive effects for a country: investing in educational resources and in resources that promote the development of disadvantaged families, to provide equitable access to human development in the first years of life ... ensures that we will have more capable, productive and valuable citizens that will bring benefits to our society. (p. 4)

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To this, the World Bank (cited by Heckman, 2004) added that societies benefit from the success achieved by children who achieve adequate development, since they can increase their productivity in the future. Further, for this body, investing in early childhood reduces the cost of treating psychosocial problems such as crime, and other harmful behaviours, such as the use of alcohol and drugs. Finally, the supranational entity ensures that these measures reduce the possibility of the child becoming a social and public health budget burden. In this regard, economic theories such as those of Ludwing and Sawhill (2006), within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals,9 suggested that early childhood investment has positive effects since it not only addresses health, nutrition, education, and housing needs, but also can progressively promote conditions of social equity and equal opportunities, especially in poor countries. Young (2003), who stated that the opportunities a child is given during the first years of life do make a difference, corroborates this hypothesis. For this reason, they assign a place of privilege to Early Childhood Development programs and the need for a sustained political effort for the expansion and sustainability of investments directed at children in the zero to six-year range, especially those in conditions of vulnerability. Taking into account the highlighted ideas, the three types of discourses on early childhood have been introduced by international organizations since the end of the last century. These statements have been progressively constituted in discourses that integrate the knowledge-power relationship, given that it is a seemingly irrefutable argumentative horizon that has a series of implications for the institutionalization of children, the organization of the State in integral care and the definition of fiscal responsibilities to attend plans, projects, and programs that involve the public and private sectors. First of all, the discursive strategies that explain what early childhood is and why it requires preferential and differential attention introduce the rights of the child as the first discourse. In other words, the association of early childhood with children’s rights makes possible the consensus of society around its priority in the social, political, and economic agenda. Second, the arguments related to integral development and the possibilities of stimulating sufficient neuronal connections in the first years of life of the human being, as a guarantee of a successful future, constitute a real discourse based on scientific knowledge; this justifies the importance of state intervention through the institutionalization of children and their families. Finally, the discourse of the neoclassical

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approach in economics raises the ideal of investment in early childhood as a politically correct purpose, and it constitutes a discursive strategy aimed at configuring subjectivities for productivity. The World Bank states this with total clarity when it states that investment in early childhood would reduce costs to society to attend to abnormal and undesirable subjects. This discursive chain is used in guiding documents of early childhood public policy in Colombia: In many parts of the world, governments and their partners are providing children with adequate nutrition, protection and stimulation, a measure that generates benefits. However, it is time to do something else. We must accelerate the pace of progress and transform our knowledge about early childhood development into investments and interventions that support families, communities, and countries. The time has come to act because we are losing the potential of 43% of children in middle-income and lowincome countries; something we cannot afford ... The cost of investing in early childhood development is surprisingly affordable since many of the interventions on early childhood can be integrated into existing services. As an example, with an average annual investment of $ 0.50 per person, programs for families with young children can be incorporated into current health and nutrition services. (UNICEF Colombia, 2017)

The previous statements also confirm the discursive series rights—development—investment. In this case, UNICEF Colombia stated that it is not only about guaranteeing basic rights, but that it is necessary to produce knowledge about early childhood to enhance the development of children from zero to six years of age. With these elements, the international organization closes the discursive series admitting that using this potential to expand the country’s productivity in the future is a good idea. Thus, this set of prescriptions opens the way for the State to introduce institutional interventions that justify the achievement of these objectives. As an example, interventions related to public spending control are introduced to implement early childhood care programs, targeting social spending, providing services to poor children and families, outsourcing (privatization) of care services to children and families, and the technification and standardization of programs ignoring territorial and cultural particularities.

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Rationality of Government and Conduct of Behaviour in Early Childhood Policy So far, the emergence of early childhood can also be understood as a device that allows the establishing of a certain rationality of government, as well as strategies that legitimize a certain social order through the conduct of behaviours. Part of these elements were raised by Foucault (2007) based on the concept of governmentality, understood as a way of government that seeks, through the organization of certain institutional technologies, the direction of the behaviours of the individuals that constitute society. Foucault (2007) defined the device as a network of discourses, knowledge, teleology, codes, and administrative measures, among other aspects which introduce conditions for the emergence or disappearance of certain practices. These considerations make it possible to affirm that the field of early childhood is not only intended to be a propaganda flag of whatever the current government may be in favour of poor families and children, but also constitutes a government technology that performs functions of social control and production of subjectivities. For Rose (2011), government technologies are legitimizing mechanisms of the social order that are made up of two modelling planes of social reality: the rationality of government and the conduct of behaviour. The rationality of government includes a set of knowledge, stories, and techniques that seek to model the ways of thinking of people in society, as well as introduce procedures to achieve certain purposes.10 In the case of early childhood in Colombia, it can be affirmed that the rationality of government introduces terms, norms, procedures, and value judgments that seek to produce certain experiences in people, especially children, families, State officials, academics, members of NGOs, and media managers. These experiences make it possible for individuals to relate to others by experiencing different models of individuation based on strategies that try to make them part of collective projects. For this purpose, the State employs mechanisms that integrate individuality and the collective based on the validation of sign regimes shared in the public through certain vocabularies and procedures. Finally, Rose (2011) argued that the strategies of incorporation of the individual into the social space do not originate in the ideal of normality, but in the stigma of abnormality. Therefore, models of subjectivity are usually related to the unrejected and the non-stigmatized.

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According to these approaches, the field of early childhood in Colombia is an instrument of effective governmentality that relies on a particular rationality of government and a special way of conducting behaviour, based on four arguments. First, despite the promises about the care of early childhood-aged children, without distinction of social class, ethnicity, disability, or territory, it is clear that the purposes of comprehensive care regarding coverage have been breached. According to the diagnosis of the first government of President Santos, which was a reference for the incorporation of the topic of early childhood into the National Development Plan 2014–2018, in the period 2011–2014 only 977,000 children were treated. Afterwards, on the enactment of the law that turned this issue into state policy in 2016, the government said it would serve 1,500,000 children. Taking into account the demographic data of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), in Colombia there are about 4,900,000 children in their early childhood; therefore, the following questions arise: What happened to the State’s care for the 3,800,000 children missing in the four-year period of 2011–2014? If the State policy states that early childhood care is mandatory, why is it that before the announcement of this policy in 2016, the government committed itself only to the care of 1,500,000 children in the 2014–2018 period? Secondly, some early childhood care models implemented by the State favour inequality between families and children. Particularly, through the cost–benefit logic, the reduction of public spending, and the outsourcing of services, the State promotes unequal initial education through different forms of care, such as homes attended by community mothers, community childcare managed by private Compensation Funds, some public schools that offer preschool education, and Child Development Centres (CDI) run by private companies and NGOs. While some children attend Child Development Centres (CDI), community childcare (for example, in Bogotá), or preschools with great infrastructure and interdisciplinary care (for example, the schools of the “Good Start” program in Medellín), other children must attend community homes, which, unfortunately, offer precarious infrastructure, unbalanced food, and educational staff without sufficient preparation for their work. Third, the neoliberal governments of the last ten years have been complicit in a very problematic informality in terms of teacher training for the development of initial education. In addition to the precarious employment of public sector teachers and the inhuman conditions of

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hiring early childhood teachers, the State has promoted a massive offer of training in initial technical education. This simplifies the educational practice and disseminates the idea that any person, through a basic course of pedagogy, first aid, or childcare, can take on the responsibility for providing early childhood education. Low-quality private institutions that found excellent business in this area offer these training courses. On the other hand, a public entity called the National Learning Service (SENA), with some recognition for more than fifty years for its technical training work, also dedicated itself to offering massive courses in initial education. This panorama helped to increase the goals of “human talent” training coverage promised by the government. Finally, if Colombian governments have been incorporating a comprehensive and intersectional policy of early childhood care for about twelve years, converted since 2016 into a State policy, why is it that, according to data from the National Family Welfare System (SNBF), 19.2 children from zero to five years of age die for every thousand born? Why is it that, out of a thousand born per year, 39.68 children die in the department of La Guajira and 51.91 in the department of Chocó? What is the relationship between early childhood care in Colombia and the situation of some populations historically abandoned by the State, such as the departments of Chocó and La Guajira? What is the relationship between the situation of early childhood-aged children in these departments of Colombia and their indigenous and Afro-descendant ethnic status? As we can see, the previous data seem to confirm that the rationality of government, as far as the field of early childhood is concerned, responds to the idea of offering care services, using old and new care schemes for children up to the age of six and their families. On the other hand, it is a type of rationality that generates inequality in the name of the rights of the child, not only in terms of the type of educational centres analysed, but also in regard to a range of services that may vary in their better or worse conditions of attention, according to social class, ethnicity, gender, and/or territory. In the previous tour, it is evident that the indigenous and Afro-descendant children of some places in Colombia are those who live with worse health, nutrition, and education conditions. That is why the mortality rate in some territories of Colombia is significantly higher than in the main cities. Finally, comprehensive early childhood care is an example of how neoliberalism, as a form of governmentality, also conducts population behaviours, specifically in regard to the idea that rights can be reduced

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to an offer of services that benefit some people who are poor or have not had opportunities in society. According to Giddens (1984), the discussed condition is a kind of biographical inadequacy in which the individual presumes that he is to blame for his situation and does not question the structural conditions that have generated this problem. In addition, the policy substantially modifies the meanings of citizenship and the public. According to Serrano (2005), citizenship is no longer assumed as a project of society in which people are able to transform their reality and build other possibilities for the future, but as a way of individualizing the provision of services to beneficiaries. Likewise, the public ends up reduced to the creation of a social market, energized by the logic of the private market, given that the emphasis of social policy is on “the modernization of lifestyles and living conditions, in the framework of liberalization and equalization of opportunities” (Salinas & Teitelboim, 2005, cited by Otálvaro et al., 2016).

Concluding Remarks To conclude this chapter, we have two general considerations. First, based on the above-mentioned facts, there will be some explanatory approaches on the field of early childhood in Colombia. Additionally, it is important to restate that early childhood is understood as a social control device as well as a field that establishes new forms of government for children, and positions discourses and practices that prescribe what children are from zero to six years old and how they should be. This configures subjectivities for productivity and social arrangements in line with the neoliberal capitalist world. As we can see, the field of early childhood, which also functions as a device of governmentality, substantially modifies the meanings around citizenship and the public. In relation to the first type of conclusions, the previously shown route on the emergence of early childhood in Colombia demonstrates the configuration of a field constituted by discourses and practices that legitimize a social order in which children aged zero to six are subject to prescription and intervention. The conceptualizations on the field in Bourdieu (2010), Foucault (2002), and Bernstein (cited by Díaz, 1995), although different in their purposes, agreed in using this notion as a kind of spatial metaphor that allows discourses to be identified within specific social spaces, practices, positions, oppositions, rules, and conflicts,

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processed by social agents with diverse interests. According to Bourdieu (2010), the objectification of the field allows us to understand how disputes over meaning coexist with disputes over power, a situation that occurs in certain fields from the convergence of relations between positions, which are located in the power distribution structure, according to the possession or production of specific forms of capital.11 Following the same line, the field of early childhood contains three fundamental characteristics. First, from a discursive point of view, it is a field that in the last decade and a half has included scientific knowledge, especially in neurosciences and economics, prescriptions of international organizations, and guidelines of national and local entities. Although these operate as true discourses, they also constitute a discursive abstraction (Llobet, 2014) that justifies social and institutional interventions, which legitimize technical measures, oriented by the social market (Serrano, 2005). As explained in the development of the chapter, the sequence of subjects of rights—integral development—investment in early childhood is a discursive order that, in the name of the rights of the child and the integral development of childhood, justifies the incorporation of standardized and parameterized interventions. Obviously, this situation ignores the territorial and ethnic-cultural particularities of children and their families in a highly diverse and multicultural country. Third, the field also has other social agents, other discourses, and other practices that, from different positions, resist these ways of incorporating social policies of a neoliberal nature, in the name of children’s rights. In this work there was no reference to these discourses and practices; however, for future studies, it is recommended to make visible experiences of parenting, socialization, and education of children from zero to six years old, together with their families and communities, which build other relational ontologies (Escobar, 2015), from self-education, geopedagogy, humanized upbringing, popular knowledge, and ancestral practices (Mejía, 2014). The previous configurative aspects of the field also allow us to conclude that the standardization evidenced in the discourses and practices that prescribe what early childhood is and should be, as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in social policy, contradict the ways in which identity is constructed in children, their families, and communities (Colangelo, 2005). The identities in the social construction of childhood do not arise because of the existence of a pure and universal essence in children, nor as a product of institutional interventions that tend to shape

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their subjectivity through parametrized procedures. Thus, identities are relational and tense processes that seek to reaffirm a “we”, based on the participation of the child in the social world, in the cultural practices of their community, and in the exchange of symbolic references of an intraand intergenerational nature. In relation to the second type of conclusions, it is necessary to point out that early childhood also has social control device functions. It is a mechanism that introduces forms of government of children and populations through the rationality of government and the conduct of behaviours (Rose, 2011). In the chapter, some demographic data show that the governments of Colombia, which have introduced programs on behalf of children’s rights over the past ten years, at the same time implement unequal and exclusive models of care, according to social class, ethnicity, and territory. It is a government rationale that simplifies the rights of children and their families to the provision of care services, using old and new early childhood care schemes. Likewise, with regard to the conduct of behaviours, comprehensive early childhood care, managed by the neoliberal technocracy, introduces discourses and practices that seek to make welfare services a benefit for the poor. In addition to becoming a mechanism that simplifies human rights, in the context of a Social State of Law such as Colombia, it is a way of establishing in the social order the imaginary of biographical inadequacy (Giddens, 1984), which holds the individual responsible for structural disadvantage. Finally, it is a way of conducting behaviours that simplify the meanings of citizenship and the public. In the text, citizenship is no longer assumed as a project of society in which people are able of transform their reality and build other possibilities for the future, but as a way of individualizing the provision of services to beneficiaries. Likewise, the public ends up reduced to the creation of a social market, energized by the logic of the private market, given that the emphasis of social policy is on “the modernization of lifestyles and living conditions, in the framework of liberalization and equalization of opportunities” (Salinas & Teitelboim, 2005, cited by Otálvaro, et al., 2016). To conclude, it is important to mention that the previous reflection is framed within the social studies of childhood (ESI), which, in the Latin American scenario, raises the need to analyse the social production of children, as well as the conditions in which children build their worlds of life, about social, political, and cultural transitionalities. In the midst of this complex panorama of transitions and transitionalities, it is necessary to

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analyse how childhood has occurred and how it is occurring, understood as a fact and social phenomenon, within the framework of these continuities and societal transformations. In the same way, it is essential to interpret the permanence and variability of children’s experiences located in moments of stability and uncertainty in the social world. In sum, the ESI assumes childhood as a kind of privileged analyser of historical evolution (Carli, 2011), in the midst of cycles of profound social, political, economic, and cultural changes. This scope implies, in turn, that researchers build theoretical and methodological resources to interpret how childhood (as a social product) has been remembered, represented, examined, intervened, or valued at different times, attending discursive frames of a prescriptive, scientific nature, economic, and political.

Notes 1. The “seventh ballot” was a movement led by university students who demanded the change of the political constitution, through the formation of a constituent assembly. 2. The right of protection for fundamental rights is a legal mechanism whose purpose is the protection of the fundamental constitutional rights enshrined in the Political Constitution, when these are violated or threatened by the action or omission of any public authority. 3. By UNICEF, social mobilization is assumed as a process that integrates allied entities in the national and local spheres whose purpose is to boost levels of awareness on a social issue and demand the achievement of a specific objective. 4. According to the Code of Minors, offenders and abandoned children are in an “irregular situation”. For this reason, the State must apply prevention and protection measures. 5. These are traditional homes that serve girls and boys from zero to five years old, whether they are in the community family home, group community home, multiple community home, business multiple community home, and social childcare. 6. According to the historian Philippe Ariès (1987), as of the fourteenth century a new representation in society around the existence and ways of life of these individuals gradually emerged in the European world. This discovery was made possible not only by the presence of a kind of unusual form of rationality of society, but also especially by the emergence of a shared feeling towards children. According to Ariès (1987), this process of objectification, as well as sensitivity of the adult world, which would

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

have important effects since early modernity, was associated with happiness and was concretized through the care given by the nurses and motherly love. In this regard, it is important to take into account Margaret Mead’s (1997) approaches to post figurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative cultures. However, it can be noted that authors such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Piaget, and Montessori (cited by Gadotti, 2003), among others, had already explained the existence of young children, stages of development, and age ranges. These ways of classifying children according to age, according to some of these authors, require interventions and differential processes. These challenges are related to the goals derived from the Sustainable Development Goals, and assumed by our country, related to the eradication of poverty (SDG 1), zero hunger (SDG 2), health and well-being (SDG 3), quality education (SDG 4), and inequality reduction (SDG 10). Rose (2011) highlights virility, femininity, honour, civility, discipline, distinction, fulfilment, among other ideals of modernity. According to Bourdieu (2010), capitals (cultural, social, and symbolic) are acquired from the trajectory of agents in the field and the application of their intrinsic rules. The use of these capitals not only makes it possible for agents to occupy a better place in the field, but for producing habitus, that is, a system of predispositions and expectations that is introduced into the subjective system based on social practices.

References Alanen, L. (1994). Gender and generation: feminism and the “child question”. In J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta y‚ & H. Wintersberger‚ (Eds.), Childhood matters: Social theory, practice and politics (pp. 27–41). Avebury-European Centre Vienna. Amador, J. C. (2012). Condición infantil contemporánea: Hacia una epistemología de las infancias. Revista Pedagogía y Saberes, 37, 73–87. Ariès, P. (1987). El niño y la vida familiar en el antiguo régimen. Madrid: Taurus. Bourdieu, P. (2010) El sentido práctico. México, D. F. Siglo XXI. Carli, S. (2011). La memoria de la infancia. Estudios sobre historia, cultura y sociedad. Paidós. Colangelo, A. (2005). La mirada antropológica sobre la infancia. Reflexiones y perspectivas de abordaje. Serie Encuentros y Seminarios. Recovered from: www. me.gov.ar/curriform/publica/oei_20031128/ponencia_colangelo.pdf.

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Comisión Intersectorial de atención a la Primera Infancia (CIPI) (2011) Estrategia De cero a siempre (presentación). Bogotá: CIPI. Erikson, E. (2009) Infancia y sociedad. Paidós. Congreso de la República de Colombia. (1994, February 8). Ley 115 de Febrero 8 de 1994 (Law 115). Congreso de la República de Colombia. (2006). Ley 1098 de 2006 (Law 1098). Corsaro, W. (2011). The sociology of childhood. Sage. Departamento Nacional de Planeación, Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, Ministerio de Educación Nacional and Ministerio de Protección Social. (2007). Política Pública Nacional de Primera Infancia “Colombia Por La Primera Infancia”. Documento CONPES Social 109. Recovered from: https://www.mineducacion.gov.co/1759/articles-177832_ archivo_pdf_Conpes_109.pdf. Díaz, M. (1995). Aproximaciones al campo intelectual de la educación. In J. Larrosa (Ed.), Escuela, poder y subjetivación. Madrid: La Piqueta, pp.156–182. Erikson, E. (2009) Infancia y sociedad. Paidós. Escobar, A. (2005). Más allá del tercer mundo. Globalización y diferencia. ICAHN, Universidad del Cauca. Escobar, A. (2015). Sentipensar con la Tierra: Las Luchas Territoriales y la Dimensión Ontológica de las Epistemologías del Sur. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana, 11(1), 11–32. Foucault, M. (2002). La arqueología del saber. Siglo XXI Foucault, M. (2007). Nacimiento de la biopolítica. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Freud, S. (2011). Psicopatología de la vida cotidiana. Alianza. Gadotti, M. (2003). Historia de las ideas pedagógicas. Siglo XXI. Gaitán, L. (2006). La nueva sociología de la infancia. Aportaciones de una mirada distinta. Política y Sociedad, 43(1), 9–26. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press. Heckman, J. (2004). Reflexiones sobre importancia de invertir en la primera infancia. Recovered from: www. heckmanequation.org. James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). Constructing and reconstructing childhood. In Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. Falmer Press. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Polity Press. Jenks, C. (1982). The sociology of childhood: Essential readings. Gregg Revivals. Llobet, V. (2014). La producción de la categoría “niño-sujeto-de-derechos” y el discurso psi en las políticas sociales en Argentina. Una reflexión sobre el proceso de transición institucional. In V. Llobet (Ed.), Pensar la infancia desde América Latina. Un estado de la cuestión (pp. 209–235). CLACSO. Ludwing, J., & Sawhill, I. (2006). Succes by ten: Intervening early, often and effectively in education of young children. The Brookings Institution.

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Mustard, J. F. (2003). Desarrollo infantil inicial: Salud, aprendizaje y comportamiento. In ICBF; Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, Save the Children UK, UNICEF and CINDE (Eds.), Primera Infancia y Desarrollo. El desafío de la Década. Cargrapships. Mayall, B. (2002). Towards a sociology for childhood. Thinking from children’s lives. Open University Press and McGraw-Hill Education. Mead, M. (1997). Cultura y compromiso. El mensaje a la nueva generación. Granica. Mejía, M. (2014). Educaciones y pedagogías críticas desde el sur. Cartografías de la educación popular. Magisterio. MEN. (2009). Guía operativa para la prestación del servicio de atención integral a la primera infancia. MEN. Memorias del Simposio Mundial de Educación Parvularia. (2000). https://rie oei.org/historico/documentos/rie22a07.htm. Otálvaro, J., Peñaranda, F., Bastidas, M., Torres, N., & Trujillo, J. (2016). Reformas neoliberales y sus implicaciones en un programa de apoyo a la crianza: El caso de los hogares comunitarios Familia, Mujer e Infancia en Colombia. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 14(1), 645–658. Piaget, J. (1994). Psicología del niño. Morata. Qvortrup, J. (1992). El niño como sujeto y objeto: Ideas sobre el programa de infancia en el Centro Europeo de Viena. Infancia y Sociedad, 15, 169–186. Qvortrup, J. (1994). Formas de acercarse a las vidas y actividades de los niños. Seminario Europeo en Investigación y políticas de infancia en Europa en los años noventa (pp. 47–63). Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales. Rodríguez, I. (2007). Para una sociología de la infancia: Aspectos teóricos y metodológicos. CIS. Rose, N. (2011). Identidad, genealogía, historia. In S. Hall, & P. Dugay, (Eds.), Cuestiones de identidad cultural. Buenos Aires and Madrid: Amorrortu editores. Serrano, C. (2005). La política social en la globalización. Programas de protección en América Latina. Cepal. UNESCO. (1990). Declaración mundial sobre educación para todos. Jomtien: Unesco. https://www.humanium.org/es/declaracion-mundial-sobre-educac ionpara-todos-satisfaccion-de-las-necesidades-basicas-de-aprendizaje/. UNESCO. (2000). Foro Mundial sobre Educación. Dakar: Unesco. https://une sdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000121117_spa. UNICEF. (2017). La primera infancia importa para cada niño. https://www. unicef.org/peru/sites/unicef.org.peru/files/2019-01/La_primera_infancia_i mporta_para_cada_nino_UNICEF.pdf.

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Young, M. (2003). Aprendizaje temprano, ganancia futura. Human Development Network World Bank. Communication presented at Foro Primera Infancia y Desarrollo: el Desafío de la Década, Bogotá.

PART II

South American Schools: The Inner and Outer Courtyards of the Educational Systems in Neoliberalised Contexts

CHAPTER 5

The Pedagogical Bond in the Managerial Organization of Chilean Schools Patricia Guerrero Morales

The sociohistorical context of this article is the educational neoliberal laboratory that was begun under the Chilean dictatorship in the 1980s. This educational neoliberal organization was perfected, and has been maintained to the present day, as a highly demanding system of accountability (UNESCO, 2017). It was started by separating schools from the state/federal government, and associating them to localities/city halls, and from there a semi-voucher funding system was developed (Mizala & Romaguera, 2000). In the present reality, parents—as if in a dream of Milton Friedman—have to “vote with their feet”, making a rational choice by being informed consumers of their children’s schools. In order to make choices, parents need to have data about the quality of teaching. To account for and manage quality, a managerial system was developed in which schools are organized like companies (Guerrero & Gaulejac, 2017). In 2017, UNESCO studies showed that the Chilean system, based

P. Guerrero Morales (B) Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_5

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on its indicators, showed no evidence of improvement (UNESCO, 2017). Furthermore, our research shows that there have only been only costs, not gains, especially in terms of the exploitation of human relationships. This chapter focuses on one of the aspects of this school transformation: the teacher-student bond and the sense of identification/recognition between them. Teachers expect students to perform well in class and to be able to show quality results. However, children feel that they are at fault because they are not living up to the model of an ideal student as envisioned by the “managerial” school which is obsessed with success (Dujarier, 2008; Giust-Despraires, 2005a, 2005b; Guerrero & Cuevas, 2017; Guerrero et al., 2019). Teachers feel they do not have the necessary resources and blame the students and their families for the lack of positive results. As their needs are not heard, many children turn to violence as a means of communication. Some children get depressed and others simply drop out of school, while other children and their families become “demanding” clients. Through over ten years of investigation, it has been found that there are different types of bonding, such as: the bonding linked to the concept of “care” where learning is not important; a negative bonding with students that do not comply with rules, which creates expulsion fantasies; a close bonding, which implies the parentalization of good students; and the distant bonding with the students that teachers refer to as “furniture” (who have good behaviour but do not produce good results). We will discuss the four-year process of an experience of resistance to these bonds by a progressive city hall administration that created a new organizational (and resource) system in which head teachers have as their main task the development of an affective connection with students that allows for learning. This research is conducted through a clinical perspective in which what matters is the subjective experience of the managerial system in schools (Gaulejac & Guerrero, 2017). This perspective considers research as an intervention, as subjects reflect on their personal situation and experience. This way of working provides the keys that allow for the transformation of social practices. This investigation interacts with childhood studies by showing how neoliberal policies in Chile create a demanding and competitive working environment in schools. Teachers find it hard to meet the demands of this environment, especially when working in socially, spatially, or culturally segregated schools. This, in turn, influences the construction of the

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pedagogical bond in a way that marginalizes and subordinates children. This failure of the “model of excellence” creates for teachers a fantasy of a “normal” and “ideal” child, one who can meet the demand for success of the managerial school, but who, in reality, does not exist in the classroom. In this study we see how this idea of “childhood normality”, investigated by childhood studies (Qvortrup et al., 2009), is constructed by teachers as a psychological defence mechanism whereby they transfer responsibility to the child in the face of a neoliberal system of work organization in which they face constant failure and judgement. Teachers experience structural difficulties in trying to build a bond through which they can listen to children, so that they can become agents of change (Qvortrup et al., 2009; Vergara et al., 2015). The objective of this chapter is to show that the managerial system of accountability frames the connection and the sense of recognition/identification between teachers and students as a negative bond. We show that this way of framing accountability is incompatible with the children’s rights and citizenship approach. Managerial-oriented policies in education promote a bond that is instrumental to the logic of human capital, in which being “part of society” is equal to being productive and a consumer.

Chile: A Neoliberal Laboratory in Education During the 1980s, Pinochet’s civil-military dictatorship carried out the first neoliberal reforms in the educational system, which began building a subsidizing State, moving the focus away from children’s right to education. Four key reforms, which completely changed the face of Chilean education, were carried out. These reforms, which will be detailed below, were protected by the new constitution, which had recently been approved through a non-transparent process. The first reform focused on the municipalization of schools, which moved them from being part of the federal government to being part of local governments. This implied a change in budget distribution: from a centralized and equitable one for all schools, to one depending on the income of each locality. The consequences regarding the day-to-day of the schools were varied, but mainly involved processes of educational segregation, the effects of which remain in the present day (Bonal et al., 2016; Cox & Lemaitre, 1999).

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The second reform gave families the right to decide which school their child would attend, by constitutionally decreeing freedom of choice. Thus, parents apply to schools, but what really happens is that schools with the highest evaluations select children and families. This policy is accompanied by a change from a baseline subsidy for all schools to a system of subsidy by demand, or vouchers. This means that each student is assigned a voucher or bonus that the State transfers to the school. Therefore, financing comes to depend on enrolment, instead of being equal in all schools (Bonilla, 1995; Sapelli & Torche, 2002). The fourth reform involved the creation of a system for the objective measurement of schools’ results, with the goal of providing parents with the information needed to make a decision on their children’s education. A national standardized test was created for all schools, the results of which were to be made public (Gallego, 2002; Mizala & Romaguera, 2000). Fourth, as occurred with other services that were previously mainly State-run (such as pensions, healthcare, water, and electricity), the possibility for private investment in schools that receive State funding was implemented. This was done through the creation of subsidized private schools, which in addition to receiving financing from the State, charge fees to the families attending. This money can be used to improve the institutions or be given directly to the entity that owns the school. With this change, three educational realities are created: private schools, subsidized private schools, and municipal schools. Between 1981 and 2015, private schools went from accounting for 15–60% of Chilean schools (Castillo et al., 2011). During the 90s, with the arrival of democracy and the centre-left, changes in the way of managing schools began to be made. During the first ten years, we saw a process that sought to balance the attention paid to different schools. The focus was placed on public schools, which had lower enrolment levels, and had seen a great deterioration during the dictatorship. The first important change was the improvement of infrastructure in all schools in poor municipalities that for 10 years had only received allocations per student, and had not seen investments in their improvement. The salaries of teachers who had lost their status as State teachers also somewhat improved during this time (Cox, 2001; Larrañaga, 2004). Despite these improvements, from 2000 to 2015 public administrators continued with the logic of the dictatorship, making some changes

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that aimed to “humanize” the educational system, but never attacking the four key reforms of the 80s. These reforms fit in with the goal-oriented management and the strive for high quality, which appeared as a way to modernize the State in developing countries. Chile, in this sense, is a pioneer (Contreras & Corbalán, 2010; Elacqua et al., 2007; Gana, 2012). Along with the discourse of “equal opportunities”, offering “quality learning for all children” and equity, the voucher system is continued, and school competition grows. In 2008, a law was passed substantially increasing school budgets, with an additional bonus for students with learning difficulties and in vulnerable situations. A State agency was also created for the purposes of overseeing distribution of the educational budget and providing teachers with training opportunities (Raczinsky & Muñoz, 2009). In this scenario, the idea of working through individual projects and improving management is strengthened through the business models implemented in the education sector, which are based on the theory of “effectiveness” of schools and management paradigms that focus on achieving “total quality”. Competition at all levels of the school is exacerbated, through a system of accountability with high consequences for failure. Schools are expected to expand their goals every year in search of excellence (Ortíz, 2012). School choice for parents is promoted, rewarding the schools that achieve the best results. The system for measuring school results is perfected, with the national standardized test, SIMCE (Spanish acronym for Education Quality Measurement System), accounting for 67% of the indicators, and the other 23% corresponding to the quality of management and psychosocial indicators, such as school life and healthy lifestyle of the school community. In addition, a teacher evaluation system is proposed, that includes a process of collection of proof of an individual’s work, which is estimated to require around 300 hours of preparation (Núñez, 2007). Schools that do not comply will be closed and merged with others in the same position. Teachers that do not comply with the evaluations or who do not reach the required results will be fired. In 2016, during Michelle Bachelet’s government, the so-called “inclusion act” was passed, forcing private schools to become non-profit institutions to maintain State support, ending for-profit education. Schools were also prevented from selecting their students, with the introduction of an online application system. Also during Bachelet’s government, the law of de-municipalization of schools was passed, creating local education

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programmes run by the federal State. By 2030, all public education will be centralized again. To synthesize neoliberalism in Chilean education, we emphasize the following points: 1. The main right in question is the family’s right to freedom of choice and not the child’s right to an education; 2. The voucher system forces schools into a business-client relationship with parents, and makes students a number that must be maintained; 3. The system of high accountability forces schools to place their focus on preparing students for the SIMCE above all else; 4. The publication of SIMCE results and the creation of school rankings, and the decisions made based on these, encourage competition, not collaboration; 5. The financial uncertainty of schools who only have 30% of their budget consistently provided by the municipality when 70% of their expenses are fixed; 6. The constant teacher evaluations overwork teachers, as well as generate feelings of distrust in their work; 7. The segregation of good students into good schools, and other students—who are excluded from good schools—into other (generally state run) schools.

The Teacher-Student Bond in a Neoliberal Context Within the Chilean neoliberal context, we have seen the construction of a form of organization of work that damages the teacher-student bond. In this chapter, the teacher-student bond is understood through psychoanalysis with a social and Latin American perspective (Pichon-Rivière, 1985). For psychoanalysis, the bond implies an asymmetrical relationship, within the context of a space where the teacher holds authority, and has the function of facilitating learning (Barreiro, 2009). The bond is first and foremost a relationship between teachers and students that must be constructed by gestures and dynamics of interpersonal recognition. It means weaving a relationship of trust, in which students feel a real interest in their lives, their situation, and their learning coming from the teacher, and therefore feel recognized. It is an encounter between unstable subjectivities that fluctuate between many emotional

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states. The bond is a process, and it is not normally taught in pedagogy schools, being left to rely on chance and the emotional capabilities of individual teachers and students. The structural characteristics of Chilean neoliberal education do not allow for a teacher-student bond that encourages children to have agency in their own education. This tension between the structure and children’s agency (Qvortrup et al., 2009, Vergara et al., 2018) is mediated by the relationship the adult world has with childhood. As childhood studies scholars point out, progress has been made in Chile towards giving children a voice and power in their schools. This has been achieved through school activities such as children’s parliament, radio activities, participation in school councils (Vergara et al., 2015) as well as through innovative active educational methodologies (Peña-Ochoa & Bonhomme, 2018). The problem we have identified is that these activities do not seem to work towards what the neoliberal organization of work has established as the primary task of schools: obtaining good results and awards of excellence. The child who thrives in these activities is not the one that is needed in the classroom. Teachers who encourage a political position of children, as childhood studies scholars propose that they do (Vergara et al., 2015; Qvortrup et al., 2009), are not valued within their educational communities, since this political position is not necessarily associated with improved academic results. On top of this, we can identify as an issue the stereotypical childhood imagery built by the evolutionary psychology of teacher education in Chile (Qvortrup et al., 2009). The expectation is that of a happy child, with a heterosexual two-parent household, who has expectations of university studies (Guerrero, 2019). In segregated schools, the expectation is for children to be aware that schooling provides the tools to “get out of poverty”. The good poor child must be still and quiet, and respond to a teacher who was trained in a different time and for a different society. It becomes important for children to fit into the model of the “good poor child” that many of the interviewed teachers were during their own childhoods, which responds to the segregation of the teaching profession in Chile (Guerrero & Cuevas, 2017), where 80% of teachers are first-generation university graduates. How the bond is constructed depends on the history of both children and teachers concerning authority. Therefore, teachers and students should review their previous experiences in this area to build a new relationship by taking into account what they have learned with other adults

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(teachers, family members) and applying it to the particularities of the school setting. Teachers, given that they have more power in the relationship, have the obligation to be mindful of their own history and emotions, because the nature of their role is that they impart their own subjectivity on the student (Barreiro, 2009). They should review their own educational experiences to avoid consciously or unconsciously repeating their experiences, both positive and negative. In addition to the above, this relationship is created within a certain social context. The organization of schoolwork frames the bond; the culture of the school gives teachers both explicit and implicit guidelines to interact with students. In sum, the bond is an encounter between two people framed within an institution; it is directly affected by public policy and how its requirements are embodied in schools. Therefore, we can state that neoliberal policy influences the bond. If families are clients, children have a different relationship with their teachers than if they are beneficiaries of a right to education acquired by living in a certain territory. Transforming students and their families into clients perverts the relationship of recognition between teachers and students. The teacher becomes the provider of a service, seeking recognition from students and their families to retain their place at the school. Molinier (2008) points out that students do not have the function of recognizing and evaluating the work of the teacher. The pedagogical relationship implies that the student will question the teacher’s authority, since processes of subjective growth involve challenging the established order, with the adult’s task being to dialogue and negotiate limits. Therefore, positioning the student as a client who must be pleased prevents a relationship of tension, negotiation, and the creation of agreed-upon limits and rules. The exercising of a teacher’s authority is a complex task. To be an authority, a teacher must be supported by the recognition of their peers, who make judgements about the quality of their work (your work is good and adequate) and by their superiors, who make a judgement on the utility of their work (your work meets the goals of the organization) (Dejours, 2009). With an evaluation from the adults in their work, teachers can frame child or adolescent subjectivity, representing an authority that is collective, constructed, and agreed upon among all adults. Many of the decisions of the adults of the school will not be popular among children and adolescents, but the teacher who is

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supported by their peers and authorities can set that limit, because they do not need the approval of their students. The problem with bonds in the neoliberal school is that teachers are evaluated through a business model. Neoliberal management believes that production will have an increase year after year thanks to the worker’s effort. Thus, the judgement of utility is always fragile because it is not always possible to obtain results of excellence, less so in standardized tests that depend on a whole generation being evaluated. So, there is not always a favourable judgement of utility. On the other hand, the business performance evaluation system is individualized and does not favour the construction of educational communities because colleagues are competing among each other. The peer cooperation necessary to build a bond with students has no space in this type of work organization. Given the non-existence of pedagogical communities of teachers, the bond with students is overloaded and teachers have difficulties in identifying with students (Giust-Desprairies, 2003). The neoliberal school has not been built for real children, but rather for an ideal child. Thus, the student who fails is a “difficult child”, a conflict that prevents the production of results. The teacher aims to be seen by this real student, strives to attract the student’s attention, but the children do not respond. When a teacher fails to attract the attention of the students, he or she blames them for their poor performance and unconsciously begins to reject them, viewing them as part of another culture. Children and their families appear as an obstacle and the teacher-student bond is blurred. The real student shows teachers that they fail to accomplish the work of excellence that neoliberalism imposes on them and makes them become annoyed with the student rather than with the managerial work organization system.

The Clinical Approach for the Study of the Teacher-Student Bond To study the bond, we work from the approach of “work clinics”. Our psychoanalytic perspective on the bond needed a tradition that linked psychoanalysis with other social theories (Zabala et al., 2017). We were interested in addressing the teacher-student bond through teachers who are in a situation of ongoing failure, in schools deemed as insufficient, incapable, and vulnerable, among other stigmatizing labels. In general,

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these are schools that report poor performance in quality measurement. We wanted to investigate the representation of the teacher-student bond in the situation of teaching in a vulnerable context. This approach considers work in a way that allows us to investigate the conflict and not what is said. First, work clinics think about the workplace experience based on the limits and conflicts that the work imposes. Here, failure appears as an imminent possibility, as an unpleasant affective experience that provokes the resolution of the situation through analysis and thinking. Second, they base themselves on subjective experience and implication to consider the problems associated with work. Third, the subject is always with others and/or in relation to others even when their activity may seem solitary. This real or symbolic relationship is because the worker is always exposed to the recognition of their work by their peers, their users, and their bosses (Barus-Michel, 2004; Dejours, 2009; Lhuilier, 2006). The relevant thing about this encounter is that it inevitably affects the outcome of the task, as it favours or hinders cooperative work (Clot & Lhuillier, 2010; Dejours, 2009; Gaulejac & Guerrero, 2017). This approach questions the concept of the “individual career”, so typical of neoliberal ideology. Work clinics incorporate notions such as social imaginary, recognition, cooperation, group, and institution (Zabala et al., 2017). Fourth, all the clinics mentioned to analyse the ways in which subjects build “expertise” at work. Here the research converges with research oriented to the stories of the profession, professional identities, and guidance manuals that allow us to realize that workers are involved with their work (Clot & Lhuiller, 2010; Guerrero, 2008; Lhuillier, 2006; Zabala et al., 2017). Finally, clinics aim to generate collective reflective processes. For the above, all the theoretical tools are offered to the organization, always accompanied by a report created by those in charge of the intervention along with the participants. It is expected that workers are able to build and coordinate their own actions.

A Work Clinic Research Project Specifically, to write this chapter we resort to the data arising from two investigations carried out under the approach of clinical sociology covering the years 2008–2017.1 We worked with nine case studies throughout Chile of schools that serve vulnerable populations. The case

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study methodology was used to reach the schools and then clinical sociology work was used for the production and analysis of the data. As this is a critical case study (Assoun, 2017), we ventured to use these different methodological research devices. For data collection, a theoretical approach of characterization of each of the organizations was carried out, of the main problems, that each of the estates has, and then the methods of information production were used. Research and involvement seminars and comprehensive interviews of clinical sociology were conducted. To hold “research and involvement seminars” with teachers, we built teacher training courses. Specifically, 30 one-hour-long workshops were held between 2010 and 2015, each consisting of four phases. In the first part, one’s own history with the student–teacher bond is addressed, through a strategy that contemplates making a drawing of the ideal child, the real child, and the child that one was, to see the discomfort around identification with the student (Guerrero & Cuevas, 2017). A second part comprehends the use of the “Organidrama” (Gastal de Castro & Guerrero, 2013), a technique in which the conflicts around relationships within the school itself are analysed. The third part analyses how individual and social suffering are related to public policy because they are statutory prescriptions that reach schools. Here we review theoretical information and experiences from other countries. After confirming this data, we checked which aspects of their relationship with children can change and which cannot change. Returning to the experience in this manner should allow each teacher, thanks to exchanges, criticism, and questions, to discover the unknown aspects of their own routine practice in order to construct deeper representations of the situations with which they are confronted (Guerrero, 2019). Research is not only conducted by the scholar, but also by the group as it works with the concepts and uses them for the elaboration of their own discomforts and sufferings. The devices are creative because through drawing, theatrical experiences, and literary exercises, the subjects contact their emotions, and we can then enunciate speech from another perspective. There is a lot of play and sense of humour in this work. Participation in seminars is always voluntary. We always have to negotiate with the principals to have an alternative workroom for teachers who do not want to participate. We have never used this room. These seminars are observed by an assistant who transcribes her own impressions and also reports on the session.

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Comprehensive interviews were also conducted between 2008 and 2015, each lasting between one and two hours. They were recorded (audio only) with the participant’s consent and transcribed by the researcher. We will examine three teachers who had a negative bond with their students, taken from the forty-seven interviews and the twenty research and participation seminars conducted. The function of the case in psychoanalysis is to illustrate the processes that are presented in the general analysis of the material, allowing for their further investigation (Assoun, 2017). We decided to conduct a clinical analysis (Giust-Desprairies, 2005a) of the information, contemplating the following stages: a descriptivethematic analysis of the collected material with a focus on emotion (documents and interviews); an analysis of the conditions in which the interviews were produced, particularly the psychological, organizational, and cultural context of each of the interviewees; an analysis of the statements of the interviewees (to whom they speak both symbolically and literally); and an analysis of the involvement of the researchers themselves, contemplating the emotions brought up in them when listening to the stories.

Results The main result we obtained with respect to the teacher-student bond is that the managerial organization of work that has been the standard in Chilean education for the past fifteen years puts teachers in a paradoxical situation in relation to their work, and particularly to the bonds they establish with children. Professionals must teach, include, and support students, and retain enrolment at the same time that they must be fast, efficient, orderly, and effective in their work. For school principals, what matters most is the result of the annual standardized test, because the school’s place in the district ranking and the characterization of its performance depend on it. Four years in the “insufficient” category means closing. Given the segregation generated by market education, the lowest performing schools have the students with the most difficult situations, classified as vulnerable, and those with disabilities. Schools with poor performance hire teachers with poor assessments and a culture of discrimination is built, in which everybody feels that they fall short of the ideal.

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Then, parents blame bad teachers and principals for their children’s poor performance, principals blame guardians and teachers, and teachers blame students, their families, and the neighbourhood. Thus, the pedagogical bond is damaged, because in the teachers’ view, the student does not allow them to do their jobs well, prevents them from succeeding, and prevents them from displaying the skills they learned in training for “ideal” schools. Students resent their teachers’ frustration and respond with anger, annoyance, and reluctance in the face of their own education. Students are responsible for the gap between assigned work and actual work. We will show three cases of teachers who had problems in building relationships with their students, and attempt to explain how the managerial organization of education in the neoliberal system is responsible for these situations.

Marta: A Teacher from Another Era Marta is a woman who should have already retired, but due to her commitment to the institution and the low retirement pensions teachers receive, is still at the school. To explain her choice of profession, she resorts to a characterization of the 60s, an era she calls “the glorious years of education”. She explains that she chose her profession at a time when becoming a teacher represented a collective objective, a political commitment, held a social meaning, and the important role of improving community life. She compares herself to today’s children, whose basic needs are met, and who show an interest in brands, fashion, and technology, signs of social integration. She explains that when she was growing up, “illicit” activities (drug trafficking, crime) did not have social value with the lower classes. Effort and sacrifice were rewarded and valued, because social respect was not necessarily related to money. She notes that ostentation begins with the influence of the United States under the dictatorship, during the 1980s, when people began consuming American cultural products. Marta explains that until the 90s she worked in extremely precarious conditions, in buses made up to be classrooms, in the cold, but that at that time everything “made sense”, unlike now, as she feels that she has no place, and that the relationship she has with the children has been damaged. Marta explains that it is at the beginning of the 90s, with the educational reforms brought by the new democracy, that schools begin to

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function as businesses. During the dictatorship, poverty and repression in poorer sectors affected her, and she felt a responsibility to save the students from misery and violence. Children viewed their teachers as heroes, and were grateful to them. What surprises Marta is that her students express to her, in various ways, that the honest life she has lived, her work, and her profession have no value. Students value junk food in abundance, travel, fashion and name brand clothes, access to technology: a life with adrenaline. Children want to lead lives very different from hers, they mostly want to be footballers, drug dealers, models, television stars. For Marta, working with these children should be her “vocation”. She strives to love them, takes care of them, teaches them lovingly, but she does not bond with them like she did in the first years of her career and during the dictatorship. At the Research and Involvement Seminar organized at her school, she talks about those early years with excitement and nostalgia. She does not understand why she cannot have the same relationship with “today’s children”. Even when she says she is not very motivated, Marta cares a lot about her classes. She is very attentive to the children, she teaches employing current news so that children can reflect on the society in which they live. She makes efforts for her students to question the “easy life”, this life is shown on television, the dream life of consumer society. It is there that she includes her own teaching subjectivity and that her “vocation” acquires its meaning. I really like the students’ participation because I try to think about the context in which they live, in which we all live, because I live near the school. to think about values such as honesty and loyalty. On a daily basis children hear on television that “someone left with someone else’s money, and ‘this other guy took the money that was meant for I don’t know what’”. So, the issue needs to receive some attention, especially for those children who just want to make their own money, enjoy its immediate benefits and feel some adrenaline.

She says education is the only way to help individuals reflect on their life. When the teacher cannot convince students to choose a good path, he/she is at fault. This activity only has a small space in her day because she is being evaluated exclusively for her performance in curriculum coverage and student training for the standardized test. Marta tells us that she has worked in this semi-private school since the 1970s, after being removed from public school for political reasons.

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The progressive priests welcomed and protected her because she lived in the community and had a strong sense of empathy with the student body. However, during the last ten years, instead of support, she has felt pressure to improve results due to the consulting of an organization with the perspective of effective schools. She explains that the advising entity has made teachers feel disposable, that they are employees whose work must, first and foremost, serve the school’s objective of efficiency. If they cannot comply (especially the older ones) they will be replaced by other (younger) teachers. The vocation is presented differently. She is asked to have a deep commitment, not with the profession, not with the students, but with the company, that is, with the school’s educational project and success. Marta feels that she is in the middle of a paradox that she cannot explain: she feels threatened and mistreated, even though her working conditions are better. She feels discomfort in her work environment. Marta seeks recognition from her superiors for her efforts, cooperation with her co-workers, and gratitude from the students. She feels forsaken by students and undervalued by her bosses, who only recognize teachers who produce good results on standardized tests. With her methodologies, Marta neither trains test-takers, nor convinces her students to lead a more dignified life. She is not managing to perform in the managerial school which is inserted in a neoliberal society that stimulates consumption. When Marta thinks about her students, she recalls the bond she created when she decided to become a teacher. Her decision was partly due to her own teacher in a small town in the South of the country, a woman who “showed no pain and was generous with her students”. She followed her example of vocation and sacrifice, different from the personal realization or fulfilment that the managerial school goes towards. She talks about her teacher as follows: I loved her so much, I admired her, I liked to see her small well- groomed nails. Over time, I developed affection for this person and for what she did. Terribly enthusiastic, terribly sacrificial, she lived in the city and did not hesitate to walk 8 to 10 kilometres to get to the school. All on foot, rain or shine. And that motivated me to do what she did. I feel that I have always tried to follow the example of Mrs. Mercedes. I loved her, I loved her in a way that my students do not know how to love today.

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Marta and Mrs. Mercedes are far from the figure of the teacher in search of success. What is difficult for Marta is that she is trying to build bonds of gratitude, but the children do not react the way she did to Mrs. Mercedes sixty years ago. She is in a company, with a form of work organization where the relationship with students is instrumental. She is a machine; children must deliver products and get results.

Marco Antonio and Denisse: Teachers in Conflict with the Real Child These are two teachers who, thanks to their studies, have been able to earn a better salary than their parents and leave the working-class neighbourhoods where they were born. They remain in contact with disadvantaged sectors, because of their work and their families of origin, although they move to more affluent sectors. However, they speak about students as being from a rude social class, different from their original class: “other poor”, “from another working class”, “without values”, “more squalid”, “vulgar”. Marco Antonio points out in the interview: I come from the working class, but the real working class, people who worked, not like the people in this neighbourhood, who are marginal, make no effort, have no love for work, they are not real workers like we had before. These are the parents of the children I have in the classroom.

Marco Antonio was an educational consultant for the Ministry without a permanent contract. One step away from retirement, he decided to change jobs due to the increase in teachers’ salaries in disadvantaged sectors. He arrived at the school to reconnect with the meaning of teaching. But in the interviews, he says that these disadvantaged children killed his vocation. He explains that these children are like cats, like monkeys, they are not just human beings who are difficult to teach. He is angry, depressed, and tired, waiting for his retirement. Marco Antonio invites us to his class where he teaches the front row only, with difficulty. He has no energy, he looks at us saying: “You see, there is nothing to do”. The children listen to our conversation. They laugh and try to hide their smiles. They know they are being mischievous by not paying attention to the class. We look at the children that Marco

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Antonio cannot teach and that makes him suffer. They are six and seven years old. Denisse does not express it directly, as Marco Antonio does. In this teacher, this contempt is made apparent in the Research and Implication Seminar, when she embodies a student, daughter of drug dealers, with discipline problems at school. She reproduces the gestures of girls from disadvantaged sectors, moves her body in a threatening display towards teachers, hits her friends, dresses sensually, and does not look others in the eyes. She does not pay attention to the class and chews gum in defiance of authority. The scene is chilling for everyone, there is silence and applause when it ends. We ask about her experience. She says that she is exhausted, that it took a lot of work to represent the student. She explains that she is nauseous and disgusted. She should have also sworn, but she did not dare to in this situation. We asked from where these feelings may come. She says: “I am poor, I come from a poor family, but I am not vulgar”. Language, ways of holding oneself, clothes, the teacher’s apron, are means of distinction for Denisse. She has built a boundary between her image as a teacher of poor origin and her lower-class students. She talks about her family, which has always been honourable, not like the family of the girl she represented. She herself was not like the student and is far from that type of poverty. She explains that maintaining a bond in these circumstances is very difficult, you cannot deal with vulgarity, you cannot deal with these children. She chooses the children that can be saved, she cannot help everyone, because they have no will to improve and change like she did as a child and teenager. Children prefer the easy path of drug trafficking and theft. Denisse tells us that she only teaches to the front row of the classroom. She chooses six or seven students out of the thirty she has so that they can leave the neighbourhood. She explains that they are children who could choose the same path she did and whose future is going to university. These children are her protégées in and out of the classroom, she invites them to her home on vacation and bonds with their families. She knows their birthdays. In the case of Marco Antonio and Denisse, there is a profound break between “what I live” and “what I would like to live”. Marco Antonio is deeply disgusted in his classroom and Denisse creates a classroom only for the students she wants and seems to ignore the others. Their students’

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material conditions are much better than those they had in their childhood, which makes them think that they are ungrateful for the new Chilean society. They have shoes, school supplies, technology, a situation vastly different from the poverty these teachers had to live with when they were children. Marco Antonio and Denisse break the bond with their students. A year later, Marco Antonio goes on medical leave because of a heart attack. In the stories told by his colleagues, the children tried to kill Marco Antonio. Denisse leaves the school for a private one or two years later. As we see in these cases, the neoliberal narrative enters the lives of teachers. The school’s managerial vision identifies pedagogy as a technique with no social context. Anyone who follows a teaching methodology can succeed. There is no space to elaborate the transformation of education, the massive and segregated Chilean school that is at the base of child behaviour. There is also no space for the context to enter the school. On the other hand, there is no space to elaborate on the unconscious aspects that come into play when the teacher teaches in the same social class that they come from. For the pedagogical technology of school success, the teacher is devoid of gender and social class. Teachers must wear an apron that hides their bodies. On the other hand, Friedman’s neoliberal notion of “voting with the feet” trusts families to choose their school and the child’s future. The family is the unit responsible for educating and transforming the child. The child without a family has no future and no community that can collaborate. In addition, in the neoliberal logic, the logic of benchmarking is required. This is at the base of effective schools, and it implies going to the successful ones to get their recipes and tips, because “we all can if we want to”. The functionalism at the base indicates that we depend on our wills, that it is enough to just repeat the procedures that were effective for others. In the case of Denisse and Marco Antonio, they believe that they are an example for children, they are benchmarking because they were effective, and it is a matter of effort. With this way of viewing school success, we do not have room for error and failure. Neoliberalism does not allow for pain, unconscious elements, or affective harm to children and teachers. On the other hand, nobody asked them about the context of that school, there is no measurement

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that accounts for the bullets that children hear because of drug activity in the neighbourhood, that mentions that the student is a teenage mother who had a child with a man who is in jail, just to have a place in the world. For the neoliberal logic, suffering is a problem and not a fact from which to start in disadvantaged school contexts. Students must meet the ideal, have a certain emotional and cognitive maturity; teachers must be able to create a perfect class following a series of tools and practices they learned at university to achieve the performance goals demanded by public policy. In order for teachers with the histories of Marta, Denisse, and Marco Antonio to remain in public schools and to connect with their students, we need them to have a space to elaborate on their own histories as students, to know and value their students’ reality, and to contextualize the curriculum within the community’s reality. But the most important thing is that learning is not measurable in the same way as in the capital city’s upper district. You cannot ask for an exclusive commitment to the “company” and to results because you take the subject, the child and humanity out of the relationship. It is even worse to threaten to close that school due to lack of performance on exams. When the school and its principal are blamed for not complying with the indicators, the school begins to blame its teachers, and from there, good teachers like Denisse and Marco Antonio become angry at their students. Students, meanwhile, feel at fault and act on that feeling. Thus, the fruitful bond and proper management of authority that allows growth and learning becomes impossible in the school that is sick from the managerial system.

Concluding Remarks The work we presented here is part of the clinical approach that makes an effort to articulate work organization with the psychological experience. This means that human relationships in the context of work are not actions solely between people, but rather respond to individual histories that are framed in a work organization within a social model. It is about reviewing the psychological experience of the social. In this sense, reviewing the stories of the teachers’ relationships with their students allows us to imagine the subjective situation of childhood in the classroom. These are children blamed for their lack of performance and for the characteristics of their families. Following the logic of the managerial organization, we might think that teachers need training to

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better treat children or to improve their socio-emotional skills. It is important to note that the teachers we portrayed do not suffer from depression or emotional exhaustion that needs to be cured so that they treat their students better. Students do not need an education in school life, in study habits, or training for the SIMCE test. We do not need all these things that schools have done during the last ten years, with a null or limited effect, to improve this weak educational bond. What we need is a form of work organization in the school that responds to another project of society, in which a positive relationship can be established between teachers and students. The first thing needed is to change the educational social project towards one that puts children at the centre of public policy, ensuring the right to education. Chile has opted to constitutionally grant freedom of education and of choice, privileging families over children. Without this legislative turn, the managerial organization of educational work cannot be changed. Stipulating that children are subjects of rights allows us to be attentive to their needs and creates the idea that the school should provide the protection that everyone needs. Stories like those of the teachers we heard have no place in a situation where education is a right, such as when Marta was a child or when Denisse and Marco Antonio studied. In terms of financing, if the focus is not the child, the voucher is dismantled. Each territory should ensure a school or educational project that allows for the care of their children with fair funding. Thus, the territory becomes important and children are seen within a valid culture and as a legitimate other. Schools do not compete over who gets the bestperforming children and who gets relieved of those who do not perform so well. All children are seen as a contribution to community life, to the extent that there are resources to care for them and to provide them with a culturally relevant education. Thus, students are not in debt, as they are in a managerial pedagogical project focused on performance. The way this translates into the classroom is by destroying the idea of a hegemonic normality that makes teachers, like Denisse, privilege certain students over others, opening up to new ways of teaching and learning that integrate the different bodies. In order for teachers to embrace diversity and question the idea of normalcy in the classroom, the educational system needs to be focused on teacher autonomy and peer collaboration. The current system is focused on the control of teaching and over-supervision. Teacher training is decided by management and municipalities without the possibility of

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monitoring. We must build a system of supervision based on trust in each other and the feeling that we are all responsible for the care of children. On the other hand, it is necessary to ensure the care of the teacher and their profession by improving their working conditions, lowering the number of students per classroom (currently forty-five on average), providing appropriate infrastructure conditions, especially air conditioning, for classrooms, and providing supplies for teaching and learning. In addition, we must generate a work organization that accounts for time for class planning and continuous learning and training. In order for families to contribute to this new education, their knowledge needs to be integrated into the classroom. Children can bring their family, neighbourhood, and community history into the classroom to use within the context of the curriculum. Also, community leaders and organizations can have a place in schools, teaching, or taking care of the space. Thus, the family ceases to be a client who expects a service, and becomes part of the educational community. Teachers’ judgements towards children decrease when they get to know their parents and family members. Professionals who are part of the school’s psychosocial care system can help work with families, especially those in need. Finally, we must build a new concept of “good education” that eradicates the notion of quality, because it sends us back to the business notion that is measured under fixed standards designed for an ideal child who, in reality, only exists in some private schools in Chile. We can think of an education relevant to children, one that encourages them to feel good in the school because they learn, work with others, eat properly, are stimulated by various types of activities, and interact with students of different generations. A non-sexist and plurinational education, breaking with the racism and sexism typical of colonized countries. After these modifications, we can also give teachers a space to work on their own personal history, so as to not project their own life on the children they care for. Socio-emotional support can be provided for children who are experiencing a difficult family situation, whose expression at school can be aggressive or reluctant. This is the last phase of the necessary intervention. Because, as a graffiti piece on a pharmacy read during the Chilean protests of 2019, “It was not depression, it was capitalism”. The issue is not that teachers or children must go to a specialist to get treatment for their personal problems, it is that the managerial school organization does not allow for healthy relationships; and without healthy, humane relationships, no learning is possible.

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Note 1. The doctoral thesis was funded by Conicyt and the other interviews by internal funds of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

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CHAPTER 6

Life Courses of Out-of-School Adolescents. Neoliberalism, Vulnerabilities and Violation of the Right to Education in Peru Robin Cavagnoud

In recent decades in Peru, there has been significant progress in boys’ and girls’ access to primary school, with rates increasing throughout the twentieth century until they reached almost universal coverage at the primary level. According to the National Household Survey (Encuesta Nacional de Hogares, ENAHO) of the National Institute of Statistics (Nacional de Estadística e Informática, INEI), total attendance in children ages six to eleven was 99.2% in 2018, and the completion rate for primary school in young people ages fifteen to nineteen was 98.3% nationwide.1 Compared to these results, secondary education nationwide presents notorious deficiencies; a significant proportion of adolescents continues to leave the school system early. They therefore do not complete secondary school and do not gain the minimum educational capital or skills required to

R. Cavagnoud (B) Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_6

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leave behind precarious conditions during active life. Besides repeating grades and falling behind the age-appropriate grade level, which precede dropping out, there is a low level of learning of basic school material. All of these represent obstacles to the development of adolescents’ cognitive and intellectual potential. Educational difficulties accumulate and end with the adolescents dropping out, which has a highly unequal impact on opportunities for longterm welfare, especially for the most vulnerable populations. According to the same ENAHO survey, while the cumulative dropout rate from basic education for thirteen to nineteen years old was 9.3% nationwide in 2018, net secondary school attendance rate for twelve to sixteen was 85.4%, and the total secondary school completion rate for seventeen to nineteen (the expected age) did not exceed 78.6%, with a slight difference between the sexes (80.4% for female adolescents and 77% for male adolescents), but with a significant difference between areas of residence (83.9% in urban areas and 60.2% in rural areas). 2 Adolescents of indigenous origin (determined as those having an indigenous language as their mother tongue) are more likely not to finish secondary school (64.5%); the same is true of the population living in poverty (62.5%) and extreme poverty (43.6%). In addition to these indicators, Peru has undergone a process of neoliberalization since the mid-1990s, which is reflected in the education sector by the increasing privatization of the school system and differentiated access between children and adolescents from the middle/upper class and those from lower-income sectors 3. The expansion of the free-market system and the State’s retreat from the education sector and from the means necessary to ensure a quality education create inequalities in access to and conditions for teaching. The effect of this phenomenon is that families in the country are divided between those who have sufficient resources to finance a private education for their children (50% of children in Lima are enrolled in non-public schools, according to the 2016 School Census) and those whose only option is to send their children to public schools. The latter system tends to be associated with precariousness, lower quality and a “low-rate” education, while educational services offered by the private sector are characterized exclusively by their efficiency and quality (Calónico & Ñopo, 2007). The emergence of this divide between the two educational systems and between families who use them reflects a tangible form of social inequality that affects low-income children and adolescents. The public school system does not have all of the institutional

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devices that would enable it to retain students who accumulate factors of individual and family vulnerability and are at risk of dropping out. The purpose of this chapter is to explore, based on data gathered from adolescents who have left school, the degree to which the expansion of neoliberalism, and the weaknesses of the public school system that it begets, exacerbate the forms of vulnerability that characterize their daily lives and help explain why they leave school before completing their education. This exercise shows how the political, social and institutional characteristics related to the expansion of neoliberalism in the education sector tend to configure life paths outside of the school system. This is an empirical analysis that seeks to explain how the privatization of education and the lack of investment in the public education sector affect the school careers of adolescents in Peru. Their leaving school also marginalizes their education as a fundamental human right recognized by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but not guaranteed as such by the Peruvian State in the neoliberal context, because it is considered a service and, in many cases, a business. This project will analyse the way in which the course that these adolescents’ lives take raises questions about notions of the individual and autonomy, promoted and instituted especially by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) of 1989, but out of step with the principle of the right to education enshrined in that very treaty.

School Dropout in a Context of Fragmented Private Education School dropout, understood as the exiting or exclusion of an adolescent from the school system before completing secondary education, has high individual and collective costs (Espíndola & León, 2002, p. 41). While at the individual level the phenomenon increases the likelihood of remaining in a situation of poverty, one of its greatest consequences is the intergenerational reproduction of social inequalities and its negative impact on social integration, which makes it difficult to strengthen and deepen democracy (Woods, 2002). Meanwhile, the fact that women are completing more years of study helps reduce wage gaps between the sexes and is conducive to greater (although relative) equality in gender relations. Alcázar and Valdivia (2005) explain that, in addition to low income, family disintegration and the precariousness of emotional relationships within the household are decisive factors in adolescent school dropout.

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Pariguana (2011) analyses adolescent labour and school dropout as part of a process of simultaneous decision-making, showing a positive relationship between household income and the probability that an adolescent attends school and does not work. Pariguana shows that adolescents from rural areas are in a more precarious schooling situation and are more likely to leave school to work because they have accumulated a series of unfavourable determinants, such as parents with a lower level of education, lower family income and a mother tongue other than Spanish. Other studies address reasons for adolescent school dropout in rural Andean areas: the loss of motivation for school, the search for work outside the home, repeating grades, the perception of the quality of education, or becoming a teenage mother (Alcázar, 2008), and the lack of opportunities and distancing from school because of economic limitations, especially for male adolescents (Lavado & Gallegos, 2005). Meanwhile, it was found that in Lima and Callao there is no determinism in the fact of an adolescent dropping out of school (Cavagnoud, 2011a, 2011b). Poverty, precariousness and work do not necessarily lead to school dropout, because at the same socio-economic level, some leave school and others do not. It is therefore a complex phenomenon that can only be explained by an unfavourable relationship between family dynamics, single parenthood, sibling structure and the degree of precariousness related to survival (Cavagnoud, 2012). If the literature makes it possible to identify the main individual, family and social factors that explain school dropout, no study offers a biographical approach that helps reveal the combination of types of vulnerability that are present throughout the history of adolescents who drop out of school and which considers the institutional context related to the organization of the educational system. For that reason, this article is based on a life course perspective, after Elder et al. (2004), which considers five key principles: life-span development, the insertion of lives in historical time, the principle of timing, linked lives, and individual agency. A life course is defined as a sequence of eventsparticularly family, school, professional, residential and sexual/reproductive—each of which represents a “longterm model of stability or change” (Sapin et al., 2007, p. 32) in the spaces which socialize individuals day by day (family, school, work, etc.). The evolution of these events, their interaction and superimposition in a given social, institutional and political context, structure the dynamics of individuals’ life courses. This chapter offers an analysis of biographical data related to adolescents’ life courses, with an emphasis on the historical time

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in which they develop, which corresponds with the period of expansion of neoliberalism and the increasing privatization of the educational system in the country through the division between families who can enrol their children in the private system and those who lack the means to do so. According to the dominant neoliberal way of thought, this is “a transformation of the social rights of State responsibility into rights of individual responsibility” (Molinero, 2009, p. 29), which can be satisfied, in the area of education, by the private sector’s supply, the quality of which can be accessible to families with sufficient economic resources. The predominance of the market mindset, combined with the State’s lack of commitment, creates a binary configuration that divides Peruvians between first-class citizens with access to private education and second-class citizens, who have no option but the public school system (Coraggio, 1997). The latter system suffers from a “profound loss of prestige” because of the poor results obtained by Peruvian students in comparative measurements of learning by means of the PISA test (Guadalupe et al., 2017, p. 48). Private education has also demonstrated increasing fragmentation in Peru in the past two decades, with diversified options adapted to the economic resources of families from different social classes. In Lima especially, where socio-economic levels are heterogeneous, there is an offer ranging from schools targeting elites and established and emerging middle classes to low-cost schools aimed at relatively lowincome families. The latter has shown the greatest growth in popular sectors of the capital, where about 40% of students in peripheral districts attend non-public schools, where quality and student performance tend to be lower than in the public sector (Cuenca, 2013). This stratification of the private sector, along with the flexibilization and liberalization of education, results in a lack of regulation, organization, oversight and establishment of minimum standards by the State, and in the institutionalization of a process of privatization “by default” (Balarín, 2016). From this standpoint, the offer of private education can constitute a factor that leads adolescents to decide to abandon the public system, as they have an alternative within reach because of the availability of low-cost private schools in urban areas of the country. The relevance and viability of this hypothesis will be tested by examining different adolescent life courses that have led the subjects to a situation outside of the school system.

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A Methodology Based on Analysis of Biographical Data The chapter proposes an original methodology based on the qualitative dimension of population studies, with the goal of revealing and analysing the diversity of associations of factors that determine adolescent school dropout in secondary education in Peru. Besides an approach focusing on poverty, the article offers a comprehensive analysis that includes the individual and family history of each adolescent and their life context, to understand their dropping out of the educational system. The findings presented stem from a non-probabilistic sample of thirtyfour adolescents and young adults ages twelve to twenty-three, who in 2016 had dropped out of school or had not completed secondary education. The study collected life stories, following a distribution by quota among departments and cultural contexts (coast, highlands, Amazon), areas of residence (urban and rural) and sexes (male and female). The study was conducted in the provinces of Lima and Callao (fourteen cases), as well as urban and rural areas of the departments of Ayacucho (eight cases) and Ucayali (twelve cases), which show high cumulative dropout rates in basic education among thirteen to nineteen years old (9.2%, 5.4% and 17.9%, respectively) in 2018. The biographical approach made it possible to identify the series of trajectories that marked the adolescents’ lives and modified their personal paths. The data from this study was analysed with the help of the Ageven form, a tool that makes it possible to locate and relate trajectories that occur throughout an individual’s lifespan and which cause the person’s life story to evolve to the point of the situation observed on the day of the interview (Cavagnoud et al., 2019). The unit of time t in this matrix is expressed in years from the birth of the ego until the moment of the study. Significant events along its course are recorded in the thematic row corresponding to one of the areas of socialization—family, school, work, peers, etc.—marking a change or the starting point of a prolonged situation in the person’s life. This tool has the advantage of emphasizing a dynamic approach to studying the relationship and coincidence of factors that determine adolescent school dropout, based on sequences of family, educational, work-related, social and other events in their lives. The presentation of the results is organized around key biographical events, identified with the adolescents in their life stories, which help explain their leaving school. Two configurations are examined in greater

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depth: school dropout as the consequence of a biographical rupture with a “before” and “after” in the adolescent’s life course (configuration A), and school dropout stemming from a process that develops over time and reflects a deterioration in the relationship between the adolescent and the school (configuration B). In both configurations, the findings are placed in the context of the privatization of education in the country, reflected in persistent deficiencies in public education, on the one hand, and a supply of low-cost private schools, on the other.

School Dropout as a Consequence of a Biographical Rupture (Configuration A) The occurrence of a family event and the inability to continue studying various adolescents face a serious family event, such as the death of a parent or a health problem, that disrupts the domestic balance in the household and exacerbates the fragility of their situation. The family lacks solutions for moving forward and ensuring stability in the adolescents’ lives. In this case, the deceased or sick relative was, before the incident, one of the main income providers for the household. The adverse event changes the balance of responsibilities within the family, with the relative’s death or illness transforming the organization of daily life and giving new roles to adolescents. Liugi (age sixteen, Pucallpa): Last year [when I was fifteen], I lost [the year] so that my father could travel [for my mother’s medical treatments]. I had to take care of my siblings and didn’t go to school, that’s why I lost the year. (…) I didn’t have the desire to study, when I saw my mother, who suffered a lot. Especially because my mother travelled with my father and I had to take care of my younger siblings. I had to be with them, to comfort them. They also felt sad.

Besides psychological suffering caused by the illness and eventual death of a relative, there is a decisive combination of the domestic problem with a lack of support from the adolescents’ extended families (grandparents, aunts and uncles, godparents, etc.), because of distance or the absence of mutual exchanges within the kinship system. In the context of weak social services for children and adolescents, the lack of support is also seen in the institutional and educational environment, which shows no ability to

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address this type of situation in which adolescents can no longer assume their school responsibilities. Whether the family has a two-parent or single-parent structure is not a decisive factor in school dropout, unlike sibling structure, in the case that there is a large number of siblings and the individual is the oldest (or almost the oldest) in the sibling group. Added to that is a situation of socio-economic vulnerability reflected in a lack of sufficient resources from working adults in the family to ensure a sufficient level of well-being for their children and avoid the need for the children to work. In this situation, the family makes a series of adjustments to face the adverse event and reorganizes itself at the cost of the oldest siblings’ school attendance and, conversely, in favour of continued school attendance for younger siblings. This search for temporary solutions coincides with a lack of kinship support networks and an absence of social assistance policies for adolescents at risk of dropping out of school. This demonstrates the scant support for adolescents amid the breakdown in their family trajectory and the involuntary situation of being unable to continue their studies. They are isolated from possibilities of support through the extended family, as well as from programmes or mechanisms implemented by public agencies or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in their area of residence. This observation is even more relevant in light of the positive examples of interaction between adolescents at risk of leaving school (or outside of the school system) and a social organization that identifies cases in order to offer a solution. Laura (age twelve, Ayacucho): I am just now starting, at mid-year. My mother went to Lima when my father was sick, and they weren’t able to enrol me. That’s when the women from the NGO World Vision helped us. They talked with my mother, with my principal, to help us with enrolment. (…) My parents didn’t have money, and they were away. (…) My promoter came to my house and asked me if I was studying. We told her no. They came to my house (...), they helped with money, they gave us notebooks, butcher paper, pencils, pens, paint.

In this type of situation, family problems impede school attendance for reasons related to time, concentration and redefinition of domestic responsibilities. The decision to leave school responds to an immediate need stemming from a difficulty experienced by the adolescent’s family,

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and appears in these circumstances to be the best way to have time to care for younger siblings or generate income by working full or part time. This serves as a palliative for the children’s basic needs, particularly when the parents have to travel for medical care to a city where there is access to adequate services. Nevertheless, the need for work is not recurrent in the face of the event affecting the family. In the adolescents’ stories, we see a loss of interest in school and strong opposition to duties related to school attendance, on the grounds that school offers weak prospects for future welfare and opportunities.

Labour Migration as Detrimental to School Attendance Some regions of Peru show socio-economic and productive characteristics that make them attractive to young people who would rather become involved in an economic activity than continue attending school. The department of Ayacucho is a particular case, especially the Valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers (VRAEM in Spanish), where the coca leaf harvest is economically attractive for many adolescents from the department, who opt for an economic activity over secondary education. This phenomenon is also seen in other regions of Peru where jobs with the prospect for significant income compete with the uncertain long-term benefits of the public school system. In this case, adolescents voluntarily distance themselves from school obligations and prioritize insertion into the informal (and sometimes illicit) labour market by migrating from their place of origin to the location of economic activity. These decisions by adolescents correspond not only to a desire to generate income but also to a strategy for getting ahead in life and applying work habits that they have developed, in most cases, since childhood. Henrique (age nineteen, Pucallpa): [When I was little,] I always helped my parents with activities in the field, I carried things, I gathered the crops, etc. (…) When I was in my fourth year of secondary school, I left school to work. I went to Trujillo with my brother and a neighbour. There was a job opportunity, and the three of us went to work in the asparagus industry.

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Opportunities that arise because of economic growth create poles of attraction for the active population of all ages, including groups of adolescents who are still in school. Responding to opportunities in the labour market they choose labour migration, therefore distancing themselves from the school system where they do not perceive medium to long-term benefits. Henrique (age nineteen, Pucallpa): When I hadn’t yet finished secondary school, I went to Lima. I was there for a year; I was eighteen then. I went to work in the house of a friend who had come to Pucallpa. I worked in the Real Club of Lima. First, I worked as a kitchen assistant in a Chinese restaurant. Then I moved on to other things, to the buffet and to mixing drinks and customer service. [...] Then I came back here to study in an informal school [low-cost private school], but I found myself in an unexpected family situation and I had to invest in that.

The economic limitations experienced in the family tend to be connected with this type of decision about labour migration to generate more income, contribute to the household or be economically independent. The decision to migrate depends on factors rooted in the adolescent’s social origins and general discontent with the time devoted to school. This is a biographical rupture desired by the adolescent and driven by their personal and family interests. There is a preference for financial earnings over the possible long-term benefits offered by the, still uncertain, completion of secondary schooling. Work offers immediate possibilities for well-being that they do not foresee having if they remain in the public or private school system. The benefits offered by full-time labour opportunities, far from the adolescent’s place of origin, contribute to an immediate alleviation of the socio-economic vulnerabilities they have experienced since childhood.

Teenage Pregnancy and Lack of Support in the School System For many female adolescents, leaving school is related to pregnancy, it being a sudden event that they cannot manage because of a lack of support in the family for them assuming simultaneously the responsibilities of both education and motherhood. In many cases, female adolescents

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are at risk of leaving school, and pregnancy becomes the key factor that explains school dropout. Mirabel (age eighteen, Lima): My girlfriends told me ‘let’s go, let’s go’ [leave school] and that ended up influencing everything. My mother didn’t know; she always asked the tutor, she always asked the aide if I had gone to classes, because my mother is known here, but my mother doesn’t have a strong character. My uncle got angry with me; he has always commanded respect in my house. He beat me (…) And later I got pregnant. I left with girlfriends, before I got pregnant. I had already left, but I still went to classes, but when I got pregnant, I dropped out altogether.

Before they get pregnant, female adolescents, along with their mothers and sisters, tend to take charge of household chores, organizing their time around these activities and their school responsibilities, often with little time available to do homework. The family atmosphere is also often characterized by fighting between the parents and intolerance towards their children. In some cases, the adolescents say they have been hit for talking back or disobeying their parents and/or step-parents. The reasons for this are related to anxiety about household subsistence and alcoholism in the family because of accumulated frustration. Melina (age eighteen, Ayacucho): In those days, in my family, it was all violence and I was no longer interested in studying. (…) My father and mother argued a lot and didn’t pay attention to me … until I met a guy, my son’s father, and I latched onto him. I felt good with him, and here in my house I felt bad. I wanted to leave home. Nothing else mattered to me. I just wanted to go away with my boyfriend, until I had my son.

Between domestic responsibilities, school attendance and difficulties at home, adolescents seek a way to escape, if only momentarily. In this context, they meet a partner with whom they find a refuge from their problems, and they feel comfortable with that person. They receive the understanding, patience and eventually the love that they do not find at home, and the support that they had hoped to receive from their teachers at school. To spend as much time as possible with their partner they may attend school less regularly, and their academic performance tends to

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suffer. In these situations, where there is also a lack of organized opportunities at school to learn more about contraceptive methods, pregnancy occurs. This event is the breaking point that leads to school dropout. During pregnancy, adolescent women prefer not to go to school because they are tired, ashamed and afraid of being stigmatized and rejected by their classmates and teachers. After giving birth, adolescent women do not return to school because they do not have support in caring for the newborn, because their parents work full time and they need to engage in an economic activity to support the child. This marks a decisive distancing from educational concerns and the opportunity to resume their studies. After pregnancy, they may try to resume their education at a low-cost private school, but for economic reasons they give up and start working to support their children. Support from the family and the school is decisive in determining whether or not it is possible to return to school. Support from parents and the school could create the conditions necessary for resuming education through arrangements that allow the adolescent to care for the newborn, cover expenses and ensure the continuity of studies at the same time.

School Dropout as a Result of a Process of Distancing from the School (Configuration B) Deterioration of the family atmosphere and an imbalance between family and school. The life course of many adolescents who leave school is related to a gradual deterioration of relations between the family and the school. Unlike life courses corresponding to configuration A, which are characterized by a key event that causes a rupture from continued schooling, this type of case is one of distancing and discontinuities between the adolescents and the school. The sequence of adverse events that are part of this distancing is initially related to a deterioration in the family atmosphere that takes place throughout the person’s childhood. Eliana (age eleven, Ayacucho): My father has become very bad. I remember that one day my father locked us in the room and he punched me and I wet myself. My father didn’t love me at all. (…) The only thing I remember about Cañete is when my father abused my mother. One day, my father grabbed a stick and had money in his hands, but he didn’t give it to us. He said he didn’t have any and that they hadn’t paid him. My mom fought with my dad and we all cried.

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Domestic violence, both psychological and physical, and a lack of resources tend to characterize these family dynamics. It is clear that the deterioration of the family atmosphere through forms of relational vulnerability creates an unpleasant and tense environment at home that is difficult for adolescents of both sexes to tolerate. The families of adolescents are generally two-parent households during the individual’s childhood, which contributes to the recurrence of forms of violence, later becoming single-parent households. This family reconfiguration during adolescence tends to exacerbate difficulties at home, particularly when there are many siblings. In this context of instability and insecurity, school does not provide conditions conducive to it becoming a place of sufficient emotional refuge and does not alleviate the problems young people encounter at home. A fortiori, it may be a place where the unpleasantness experienced by adolescents is exacerbated, causing frustration and depression. Eliana (age eleven, Ayacucho): [When I was nine years old], my parents had already separated and my father wanted to take me away with my two other brothers. My mother said things couldn’t stay that way and filed an official complaint, for domestic violence and because he never paid child support. (…) I didn’t want to go with him. (…) We couldn’t stand it anymore, and we went to live beyond Ayacucho. (…) My father knows that we are here, and he still wants to take us. I don’t like that, and because of that I don’t remember what I study. There was also violence in my school, where we were all girls. I didn’t do anything and they called me names and I didn’t like that. They insulted me. My mother couldn’t do anything because she is illiterate. (…) I didn’t like that school. It was a public school, but because you had to pay for certain things there, like photocopies, I started working so that we would have something to eat at home, and later we started a juice business.

If going from a two-parent to a one-parent household decreases exposure to violence for mothers and their children, it also leads to greater exposure to economic pressures when fathers refuse to provide support for their children’s everyday expenses. This example shows how young people resort to work to address this decrease in household income and ensure financial stability in a single-parent household. It also shows how adolescents lose interest in and the ability to concentrate on their studies, underscoring their gradual distancing from school obligations and the school’s lack of attention to detecting these problematic situations and

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contributing to a solution in coordination with the family. The unpleasantness related to discrimination by classmates at school reinforces this process of distancing from the school universe. Ana (age fourteen, Lima): They stole my daypack [that the Proniño program had given me] … Later, when I told my mother I wanted to start studying again, she said no, because there wasn’t enough money to buy school supplies … I wanted to study, but my mother didn’t want me to, for economic reasons, because my brothers were studying. My father wanted me to, but there wasn’t enough money.

This testimonial highlights the accumulation of factors of vulnerability that make it difficult for adolescents to pay attention and to meet the needs and obligations related to school attendance. Unlike the types described above, this is a process of deterioration of the family atmosphere, of support from adult members of the household and of everyday living conditions, which begins in childhood and reflects a discontent that results first in a gradual distancing and finally in definitively leaving school. Psychological and physical violence from parents are similar when a mother establishes a new relationship with a man who refuses to support her children from a previous relationship, especially with school expenses. Taking a new partner may lead to conflict that ends with an adolescent being thrown out of the home and forced into complete autonomy during adolescence. The hostile atmosphere created by the family reconfiguration implies a distancing from school obligations, which conflict with the possibility or becoming autonomous through income from an economic activity. The deterioration of the family atmosphere is accompanied by a feeling of depression in adolescents. Family problems that begin in childhood erode any balance in the relationship between the family and the school, leading adolescents into occupations far from the accumulation of educational capital. David (age twelve, Pucallpa): I feel bad because the kids at school make fun of me. They call me ‘fatso,’ and that hurts a lot. And I couldn’t tell anyone about this until now. (…) The problem is that I have left [primary] school without knowing how to read and write, and my parents were practically in favour of my dropping out because that way I could take care of my little sister. They didn’t have time to go to the meetings scheduled at school because they work all day.

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My mom told me not to go out of shame, because I’m the biggest of all the kids in the class.

Unhappiness experienced in the family is also felt at school and leads to a general feeling of rejection. Therefore the decision to leave school is not voluntary and is experienced as a transgression by the adolescents; they know that theirs is not a “normal” situation compared to other adolescents of the same age. With this group of adolescents, the public school system shows profound deficiencies in its ability to attend to and intervene in cases of students who are at risk of leaving school. Because of a lack of oversight mechanisms, the adolescents feel abandoned by the school and opt for a lifestyle outside of it, sometimes with the idea of returning to classes at a low-cost private school if their family situation permits in the future.

Grade Repetition, Being Older Than the Grade Level and Discouragement with School Another course is characterized by a chain of forms of vulnerability related to the accumulation of years of falling behind in school (adolescents being older than their grade level) because of repeating multiple grades, being in class with adolescents who are younger and younger, the mismatch between education and work, stigmatization and, more generally, loss of enthusiasm for school. Weak support from parents and full-time involvement in an economic activity are key factors in this process, which mainly affects males, particularly because of the social acceptability of them having greater autonomy beginning in adolescence. In this course, a tension is established between school and work, with the latter eventually gaining greater importance in the adolescents’ daily lives due to the fact that it gives them a certain degree of individual independence. Claudio (age twenty, three grade repetitions, Pucallpa): My classmates thought badly of me in school because they were all fifteen and I was almost twenty. (…) I wasn’t in a good situation for studying, because I also didn’t have money to buy notebooks, pens, paper, etc. And I didn’t see the possibility of continuing and I preferred to work to have an income. I didn’t have the opportunity to be that way. My classmates told me to stay because the teacher was going to help me, but in the end, I didn’t have my father’s support. He didn’t care much about school.

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The type of life course that includes grade repetitions, being older than one’s grade level and discouragement with or loss of enthusiasm for school is characterized by late entry into secondary school, tiredness and a lack of interest in studies because of the work that adolescents do outside of school hours. The feeling of shame related to being behind in school is another factor that leads adolescents to leave school altogether. The lack of incentive at home, regarding the lack of importance and meaning attributed to school, along with economic need and the age gap between the adolescents and their classmates, are factors that explain school dropout. Grade repetitions, in this case, go hand in hand with the need to participate full time in an economic activity and the stigmatization of school at home, it being considered a space unimportant for the adolescent’s future. A partner’s pregnancy can be an additional motive, because of responsibilities towards the future son or daughter and the need to work. This type of trajectory emphasizes the school’s inability to attract and retain students who fall behind and whose short-term interest in work is not compatible with the education available to them (or when they must pay for it by resorting to services offered by the market). Socialization with peers and dispersion of interests outside of the school routine low school performance and loss of motivation regarding the possibility of completing secondary school are key elements towards leaving school in these trajectories. School creates a feeling of discouragement in the adolescents, who no longer believe that finishing their secondary school studies has any meaning for their lives. They also perceive that the quality of the school and their teachers is inadequate. Other classmates feel similar discouragement; they identify with one another, develop close bonds of friendship and begin to skip classes. The avoidance of classes occurs in the context of a peer group with complicity, and a sense that school no longer represents a space of socialization sufficient for sharing experiences and finding opportunities for enjoyment. They meet peers who have also lost motivation for attending school, with whom they engage in activities outside of school hours, such as going for walks, using the internet, going to parties, consuming alcohol, etc. This affects their school performance, and among themselves they reaffirm one another and reinforce attitudes about school’s defects and lack of importance.

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Jordan (age twenty-two, Ayacucho): I met my friends, and instead of going to school, we went out and walked around. I learned about drinking, parties, girls, and let myself get carried away by all of that. … I lied to my mother and father. My parents found out and said, ‘You’re going, whether you want to or not.’ I told them to enrol me somewhere else. They enrolled me in Discovery [a low-cost private school] and I attended classes there, but just for a few months.

One of the most common activities in which adolescents engage when they skip school is the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Over time, they become addicted, which has an impact on their academic performance. Although parents consider education to be important for their children, their workload and lack of available time do not allow them to closely follow their children’s performance inside and outside of school. Truancy becomes a constant behaviour, academic performance declines, and the adolescents soon realize that they run the risk of losing the school year. Teachers also tend to stigmatize such students because of their absences and attitudes related to the consumption of alcoholic beverages, sidelining them from the school. Besides being disengaged with school, the adolescents see that their friends and acquaintances have left school to work and have new clothes and cash available to spend on various things, including alcohol. They see them as a “counter model” for a form of success that is within their reach. Farid (age fifteen, Ayacucho): Most of my peers repeated and many of them no longer study; they work on buses as fare collectors and they are doing well. They are better off than when they were in school. […] Other friends I know study in private schools on Saturday and Sunday, and the other days of the week, from Monday through Friday, they work. They are also doing well. And they do it well. They make good money.

A family situation characterized by the parents’ limited ability to provide an environment conducive to studying and exercise control over their children creates a desire for independence, especially in male adolescents, who take on responsibilities such as contributing economically to the

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household. In this context, irregular school attendance may go unnoticed by their parents. The adolescents leave school and begin working full time. They meet a partner with whom they have sexual relations, and eventually she becomes pregnant. This impedes their return to school because work becomes their main means of subsistence and they must care for their new family. Some try to resume classes at a private school, but they leave because of economic problems or lack of support from their family and/or from the teachers at these schools. In these cases, the adolescents indicate that their academic performance was low and that the school’s teachers and staff did not give them the impetus for overcoming their difficulties. This led them to feel daily frustration in class; they did not feel motivated to attend school, and they opted for another type of activity.

Concluding Remarks School Dropout as a Multi-Factor Phenomenon The empirical findings presented show that school dropout is a phenomenon that can only be explained by a varied combination of factors involving the adolescents and their social universe. Neither the family nor the school represents an environment that offers sufficient protection and welfare to impede the adolescents’ decision to withdraw from the educational system. Their life courses point to an explanatory model for this problem based on two configurations. In configuration A, school dropout responds to a sudden and unexpected event (death of a relative, pregnancy, migration, illness) that the adolescents cannot overcome, especially considering the overall degree of vulnerability in their family. In this case, leaving school is “suffered” by the adolescents and responds to factors that are outside of the school, but are associated with the inadequacies of the educational system for retaining students who face serious family situations. In configuration B, school dropout is a long and extended process. Besides the context of poverty, leaving school is explained by the progressive combination of several factors and appears to be voluntary, responding to an unfavourable conjunction of a school that pushes them out and a lack of support from the family. This weakening of their pursuit of an education ends when a tension develops between the need to work

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and school attendance, and school ends up being discarded as the dominant space in the adolescents’ daily life in favour of involvement in a full-time economic activity. In this case, the school lacks the ability to integrate, and tends to segregate students according to their performance. A recurring characteristic in both configurations is the acceptance of school dropout by the family and community—that is, the normalization of the adolescents’ decision to be outside of the school system and of their choice to work instead of accumulating educational capital. The family easily accepts this legitimization of work in the organization of everyday life and the adolescent’s choice to leave school, which no longer constitutes a path of access to the right to education. To the extent that school no longer represents an environment that is institutionalized and characterized by a degree of prestige, work ends up covering most of the adolescents’ expectations and prospects for social mobility. If in their life stories they make partial mention of institutional factors that led them to leave school, we can see these as underlying factors in the school dropout process that weaken their right to an education, as exercised by remaining in the school system. Out-of-School Adolescence in the Face of the Privatization of the School System and the Right to Education Adolescents who have dropped out of school reflect an educational reality whose representations and practices are in opposition to the paradigm of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which establishes the fundamental nature of the right to education. Its ratification in 1989 and its adoption in Peru in the early 1990s coincided with the process of privatization of education in the country and the increasing difficulty of instituting quality public education that is within the reach of all school-age children and adolescents. The situation of out-of-school adolescents, emphasized in this text, reflects a constructivist dimension of childhood (James & Prout, 1997) and illustrates heterogeneity in the experience and way of being a child/adolescent. These aspects are related to their degree of autonomy with regard to the family, members of their environment, decisionmaking and ways of participating in work, distanced from the status of an adolescent attending school and being accompanied by adults within the framework of an instituted formal education.

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This manifestation of the “plurality of childhood” (Jenks, 1996) coincides with structures related to these adolescents’ social and family origin, history, and social class, and the dominant context of vulnerabilities and of privatization of the right to access a quality education. Their position on the margins of the school system represents an evolution towards a status of an autonomous child/adolescent, both in line and out of step with the principles of the UNCRC, which formalizes an individuation of rights and a form of emancipation of children and adolescents. This dissonance between the meaning of the experience of adolescent autonomy outside of the school context and their designation as subjects of rights, particularly the right to education, is translated by a stigmatizing discourse that does not take into account the system of values and norms that structures their daily life to ensure their subsistence, based on the various biographical ruptures that have upset their lives. The UNCRC recognizes childhood as a specific stage of human development and represents the synthesis of a new paradigm of interpretation of childhood that has gained ground internationally, in which the right to education must be achieved “on the basis of equal opportunity” (Article 28). Nevertheless, the privatization of education and the weakening of the public supply of education, which adolescents who are out of school witness, shows the complexity and, undoubtedly, the contradictions of an era in which on the one hand, there is dissemination of a “culture of rights” to bring about “cultural change” (CEPAL, 1998), and on the other, the congruent expansion of neoliberalism that causes a desubstantialization and violation of the right to education for all children and adolescents. The life courses studied in this text show that “equal opportunity” is, for now, an intention in words only, and that the implementation of the UNCRC in Latin America since the 1990s is, once more, similar to “the circulation of a text without its context” (Pilotti, 2001).

Notes 1. Data available on the “Statistics of educational quality” website (ESCALE in Spanish) of the Ministry of Education through the link http://escale. minedu.gob.pe/ueetendencias2016. 2. Data available on the “Statistics of educational quality” website (ESCALE in Spanish) of the Ministry of Education through the link http://escale. minedu.gob.pe/ueetendencias2016.

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3. In 1996, the Peruvian State approved the Promotion of Investment in Education Law (Legislative Decree 882), which gave rise, with the goal of “modernization of the educational system”, to an expansion of supply and coverage through private investment, responding to demand from parents with the economic resources to send their children to private schools (Wu et al., 2001).

References Alcázar, L. (2008). Asistencia y deserción en escuelas secundarias rurales del Perú. In M. Benavides (Ed.), Análisis de programas, procesos y resultados educativos en el Perú: contribuciones empíricas para el debate (pp. 41–81). GRADE. Alcázar, L. & Valdivia, N. (2005). Análisis de la deserción escolar en el Perú: evidencias a partir de encuestas y técnicas cualitativas. GRADE. Balarin, M. (2016). La privatización por defecto y el surgimiento de las escuelas privadas de bajo costo en el Perú. ¿Cuáles son sus consecuencias? Revista de la Asociación Española de Sociología de la Educación, 9(2), 181–196. Calónico, S. & Ñopo, H. (2007). Retornos a la educación privada en el Perú. Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Cavagnoud, R. (2011a). Entre la escuela y la supervivencia. Trabajo adolescente y dinámicas familiares en Lima. Fundación Telefónica, IEP, IFEA. Cavagnoud, R. (2011b). Les adolescents travailleurs de Lima face à la déscolarisation: La nécessit´e d’une approche par les parcours biographiques. Cahiers De Recherche Sur L’éducation Et Les Savoirs, 10, 165–180. Cavagnoud, R. (2012). L’enfance entre école et travail au Pérou. Enquête sur des adolescents à Lima. Karthala. Cavagnoud, R., Baillet, J. & Cosio Zavala, M. E. (2019). Vers un usage renouvelé de la fiche Ageven dans l’analyse qualitative des biographies. Cahiers québecois de démographie, 48(1), 27–51. CEPAL. (1998). Panorama social de América Latina. CEPAL. Coraggio, J.L. (1997) Las propuestas del Banco Mundial para la educación: ¿sentido oculto o problemas de concepción? In J. L. Coraggio & R. M. Torres (Eds.), La educación según el Banco Mundial (pp. 8–56). Miño y DávilaCEM. Cuenca, R. (2013). La escuela pública en Lima Metropolitana. ¿Una institución en extinción? Revista Peruana De Investigación Educativa, 5, 73–98. Elder, G. H., Johnson, M. K. & Crosnoe, R. (2004). The emergence and development of life course theory. In J. T. Mortiner, M. J. Sanahan (Eds.), Handbook of the Life Course (pp. 3–22). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Springer.

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Espíndola, E., & León, A. (2002). La deserción escolar en América latina: Un tema prioritario para la agenda regional. Revista Iberoamericana De Educación, 30, 39–62. Guadalupe, C., León, J., Rodríguez, J. & Vargas, S. (2017). Estado de la educación en el Perú. Análisis y perspectivas de la educación básica. FORGE, GRADE. James, A., & Prout, A. (1997). Constructing and Reconstruting Childhood. Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood. Routledge. Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood. Routledge. Lavado, P., Gallegos, J. (2005). La dinámica de la deserción escolar en el Perú: un enfoque usando modelos de duración. Informe Final de Proyecto CIES. Molinero, V. (2009). El derecho a la educación en el Perú en tiempos neoliberales. EducAción XVIII, 35, 23–40. Pariguana, M. (2011). Trabajo adolescente y deserción escolar en el Perú. GRADE. Pilotti, F. (2001). Globalización y convención sobre los derechos del niño: el contexto del texto. CEPAL. Sapin, M., Spini, D., & Widmer, É. (2007). Les parcours de vie de l’adolescence au grand âge. Presse polytechnique et universitaire romande. Woods, G. E. (2002). Reducing the Dropout Rates. Laboratorio Educacional/Regional, School Improvement Research Series (SIRS). Wu, K. B. et al. (2001). Perú—Educación una encrucijada: retos y oportunidades para el siglo XXI. World Bank.

CHAPTER 7

Participation Rights in Brazilian Schools: Towards the Politicization of Intergenerational Relationships? Lucia Rabello de Castro and Renata Tavares

In Brazil, participation rights were not explicitly formulated in the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA) promulgated in 1990. However, the ECA proposed the legal positioning of the child as a subject of rights and the importance of taking into consideration children’s voices. This new scenario brought about a significant change in the normative ground of intergenerational relationships and presented new challenges to be faced. In schools, mounting tensions and conflicts in teacher-student relationships revealed the impasses following the assumption of children as a subject of voice and rights and their liberalization from the constraints of a taken for granted authority figure. For teachers, this situation added more strain to an already unsustainable intergenerational pact (Paime, 2009;

L. Rabello de Castro (B) · R. Tavares Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_7

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Pereira, 2009) given the serious deterioration of the state educational system in Brazil. Since the 90s, governmental policies aimed at democratizing the state educational system were carried out in order to include millions of children who were not attending school. However, public investment in education has not managed to expand the system while also focusing on its quality. The alarming social inequalities in Brazil have long impacted the distribution of educational rights, to the effect of reserving for the poor a state educational system of bad quality. Teachers’ salaries have greatly decreased, debasing the social prestige of those who take up the professional responsibilities of educating the socially and economically disadvantaged. In Brazilian state schools, teacher-student relationships have been the object of deep concern, as mounting problems such as non-attendance, violence, apathy, and failure to learn have become commonplace (Aquino, 1996; Burgos, 2014; Oliveira, 2016). In this complex and challenging context, children’s and youth’s participation rights have become a crux in intergenerational relationships, since for worn-out and very dissatisfied teachers these right demands are seen as overburdening their already rather strenuous situation. However, the younger generation feels much more is needed in terms of reciprocity and justice in the daily life of schools (de Castro et al., 2010). Thus, students and teachers seem to be at a crossroads where a growing antagonism between them does not favour the search for solutions to and reappraisals of their difficulties. Further, lately, teachers have been the targets of a great many governmental bills and decisions which have worsened their working conditions, salaries, and professional autonomy. Their dissatisfaction relates also, and maybe mainly, to the very low social prestige of the profession and the degraded working conditions, aspects which have a negative impact on their relationships with students and morale. It seems then that students and teachers are pushed into a deadlock which drives both sides into the belief that they are opponents. The present research study is concerned with analysing how student dissatisfaction with educational state services leads to what here is conceptualized as “the politicisation of intergenerational relationships” (de Castro, 2018; de Castro & Nascimento, 2013), a process whereby specific generational demands are publicly put forward as a field of political antagonisms is gradually constructed and becomes more visible. Stepping away from the tutelage of the elders and therefore attempting to remove themselves from a subordinate role in the matters that affect them, students

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are able to advance a discourse, which expresses their collective and singular point of view on those educational prerogatives that they believe themselves to be entitled to. Concurrently, as they identify and address their opponents in the public domain as a social category, they build up legitimacy for their claims (while learning to do so). The empirical data of this research is based on ethnographic observation and interviews with secondary school students who have occupied state schools during 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. The analysis aims to highlight what is at stake in state education from the students’ points of view; how they evaluate what the present adult society in Brazil owes to the poor youth; what their demands are regarding education, and who they must antagonize in order to focus their efforts to have their demands addressed. In light of the empirical evidence provided, this paper discusses how, in countries like Brazil, facing the enormous challenges of an unfulfilled democracy, intergenerational relationships become politicized. This refers to how the educational process itself and the taken for granted position of adults, as the most experienced and the sole agents deciding upon educational matters, are problematized by the youth of the lower classes, who question the conception and nature of the education they receive and the unfulfilled responsibilities of the older generation.

Setting Up the Scenario for Youth’s Participation Rights in the Context of Brazilian Economic and Social Development The establishment of children’s participation rights in international legislature late in the 1990s created momentum for a myriad of national and local initiatives with regard to a more inclusive position of children in societies. In Brazil, the Child, and the Adolescent Statute (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente, ECA, Brazil, 1998) was promulgated in 1990 following the new dispositions set by the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the Citizen Constitution. This was a moment of intense social and political participation after a violent 20 years’ long military dictatorship which silenced, imprisoned, tortured, and killed whatever political opposition emerged. Deep expectations concerning the re-establishment of political and civil liberties mobilized the country’s energies towards the approval of new constitutional rights for minority social categories such as children and indigenous people. The participation of social movements

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was decisive concerning changes in the legal text for the inclusion of public policies on behalf of longstanding outcast and marginalized groups. Noteworthy in this context was the role of the National Movement of Street Boys and Girls (Movimento Nacional de Meninos e Meninas de Rua) which actively participated in the discussion of adolescents’ rights (Pinheiro, 2006). The 1988 Brazilian Constitution also brought forward a most significant turning point in the social imaginary of the Brazilian republic: a radical shift in the normative ground of adult–child relationships came with claims for a universal treatment of children, whatever their social origin, which was now legally warranted. So far, the Brazilian society had based its relationships between adults and children on far from republican values. On the one hand, there was a childhood made up of those children born to be future citizens and whose childhood was necessarily a time of preparation secured by a zealous parenthood. On the other hand, there were children who, albeit not yet adults on account of their age, were visible only as a “social problem” (de Castro & Kominsky, 2010), either abandoned, poor, destitute, or practising illicit actions on the streets of big cities. To the former, the category of child applied, whereas to the latter, the category of “minor” characterized not only their exclusion from the condition of “priceless children” (Zelizer, 2005) but also their destiny as outcasts whose chances of social inclusion in society were low. The former pertained to the middle and high social-economic strata, whites in colour; the latter to the great majority of marginalized and poor social groups, Black and coloured children descending from the enslaved Negro population. With the 1988 Constitution, a novel understanding was established whereby all children were considered subjects of rights, worthy of protection, care, and dignity. As Libardi (2016) has shown, during our republican era along the twentieth century, the social imaginary of childhood was circumscribed to those children who were childlike and whose families resembled the good, honourable, and hard-working folk of their middle-class counterparts. The majority of other children, the minors, constituted a social group which did not benefit from participation and protection rights in their relationships with adults and society in general. The constitutional dispositions of 1988 set these children free from the chains of prejudice and segregation and secured for them educational rights, among others. The political atmosphere promised fairer and more egalitarian relationships between older and younger generations.

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Notwithstanding the political and social advances brought by the 1988 Constitution, straining economic conditions along the decade of the 1990s were to greatly affect people’s expectations for a fairer and more participative society. High inflation rates, currency devaluation as high as 30% per month, and an enormous external debt positioned the country as a target for neoliberal measures of economic control by international funding institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. This meant that governments, especially in the Global South, had to face huge and disastrous adjustments of their economies on account of their dependency on external capital: cutting public investment in areas such as infrastructure, but also in education and health. Besides that, market liberalization and rule established the advent of the globalization project which redefined development among nations as “trade”, not aid. McMichael quotes Ruggiero, Director-General of WTO, to illustrate the fate of the South in this newly globalized economy: What is abundantly clear is that the North has used the plight of developing countries to strengthen its dominance and its influence over the development paths of the South.... While adjustment is pressed on them, countries in the North with massive payments imbalances are immune from any pressure to adjust and are free to follow policies that deepen the South’s difficulties. The most powerful countries in the North have become a de facto board of management for the world economy, protecting their interests and imposing their will on the South. The governments of the South are then left to face the wrath, even the violence, of their own people, whose standards of living are being depressed for the sake of preserving the present patterns of operation of the world economy. (quoted in McMichael, 2017, p. 125)

In the 1990s, under the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a new bill concerning basic education was approved (LDB/Brazil/1996). The educational reform had in mind the preparation of a national working force in a globalizing economy, where the school system should exert a key role in the institutional logic of the market (Saviani, 2008). On the one hand, the enormous social and educational inequalities required urgent measures to universalize school attendance. On the other hand, in the backdrop of such an investment, the issue of Brazilian development in the globalized economic scenery was at stake, which warranted the preparation of a labour force to allow for the attainment of such a national goal. From 1991 to 1998 basic education in Brazil—in terms of

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the number of children enrolled in the educational system—was expanded from twenty-nine million to thirty-five million children, a rise of 21% which shows the greater access of children to educational rights. This latter figure accounted for 95% of Brazilian children between seven and fourteen years who were enrolled in the system in 1998 (Durham, 1999). However, as Durham herself acknowledges, despite advances in the democratization of schooling, the educational system has continued to show serious drawbacks, such as very high school dropout rates, very poor teacher qualification and, above all, very low levels of pupils’ educational attainment. For socially disadvantaged families, education bears the promise of social mobility, as educational qualification is recognized as a necessary requirement for better-paid jobs (Guimarães, 2006). State schools continue to differ a lot from private ones in the quality of education offered (Peregrino, 2005), which is resented by worse-off children who see that their chances in the job market are comparably much lower (Savegnago & de Castro, forthcoming). However, there has been an increase in the access to higher education, as Neves and Martins (2016) have shown: comparing data of 2002 and 2011 there has been a rise from 7 to 17.3% of lower-class youth in state universities and from 2.6 to 10.1% in private ones. The broadening of higher education opportunities for lower-class youth has been supported by affirmative action quota mechanisms which have been established since 2000. The State University of Rio de Janeiro was the first Brazilian university that modified entrance criteria in this direction by reserving 50% of its entrance places for students who had finished secondary education in a state school. Currently, a federal law (Brazil, Federal Law 12711/2012) guarantees affirmative action quota mechanisms in all state universities, taking into consideration race, ethnicity, income, and whether students attended state secondary schools. Affirmative action quota mechanisms have outlined a new horizon of educational opportunities for worse-off children and youth in Brazil, with the new qualifications creating, in turn, realistic chances for economic mobility. Moreover, affirmative actions strongly challenged the status quo of social and educational inequalities by facilitating the access of a great number of Black, coloured, and poor youth to state universities, which had so far only been attended by the élites who were able to pass the difficult entrance exams on account of having previously received an appropriate education.

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The decade of the 2000s, from 2002 to 2010, with governments led by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) which had elected Lula as president, was firmly attuned with the amplification of social rights for the elderly, coloured people, and youth. During this period youth organizations and collectives, dispersed throughout the country, were politically mobilized, to a great extent as part of a programmatic governmental policy, to take part in a public dialogue about youth issues. The motto for this mobilization was then “wave the flags ”. In 2004 President Lula established an inter-ministerial working group which soon after, in 2005, was to create the National Youth Secretariat with the mission of building up a National Youth Policy. de Castro (2010) argues that the intense convocation of youths in this period brought about performative identity struggles involving the building up of idioms, looks, and lifestyles that could be seen as delimiting a sense of singularity and being different from adults. The question of “what a youth is”, and “what he/she wants and demands” foregrounded the search to carve out a singularity for this social category that was now compelled upon to address society publicly. Along 2007 all Brazilian states hosted Youth Conferences leading to the summit of the National Youth Conference in 2008 which, together with the national surveys that were carried out on youth’s demands (Abramo & Branco, 2005), showed that their most important concerns were educational rights and professional opportunities; the most urgent social problems were violence, social inequalities, and poverty.

Youth’s Political Participation in Brazil: From National Causes to Generational Concerns The aim here is not to provide an extensive and exhaustive overview of the relationship between youth and politics in Brazil today. Rather, our less ambitious objective will concern an exploration of how the issue of education is taken up as a political issue by Brazilian youth, leading to the construction of a field of antagonism (Mouffe, 1993) whereby young people put forward demands about what they think is their due. The process of addressing these demands requires the collectivization of narratives and points of view about what is to be addressed, how, and to whom, which in turn implies the construction of meanings, symbols, identifications, and actions by youth groups and collectives.

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As a social category, youth are expected to begin participation in social and political life as they leave their minority legal status and become of age. They then become full political subjects, acquire their right to vote in political elections, and are expected to participate actively in the social and political world. However, youth engagement and interest in politics do not happen as a singular event, but as part of what has often been called a “political socialization process” whereby children are gradually acquainted with different aspects of conventional political life (Fendrich & Turner, 1989; Flanagan & Sherrod, 1998). Notwithstanding the clear pedagogical framework of political socialization processes, which conceives straightforward ways to prepare children, especially within the family and the school, for certain ulterior civic and political behaviours, dispositions, and values political experience can also derive from less linear and rationalized processes. Rancière (1995, 1996) helps us envisage “the political” under a different perspective which concerns an action of de-classification of the social order, putting in motion a litigation about what should be seen, said, listened to and taken into account other than what is given: introducing dissent and disorder in order to verify the conditions of the supposition that everybody is equal. For this author the process of political subjectivation is aligned with improbable identifications, those that are brought about, punctually and precariously, as an aesthetic re-organization of the given world is foregrounded to account for what should be included. Therefore, politics can concern children and youth not only as an ulterior stage for which they must prepare themselves but also as a possibility for identification evoked through processes of reframing the order of things (Rancière, 2004) whereby these subjects are suddenly taken out of the underworld of obscure noise and made visible and meaningful as they are projected into the world of enunciation. In Brazil, and in other parts of the world, youth political and social participation has not been limited to conventional expressions such as the affiliation to political organizations or the signing of petitions, as youth themselves have problematized the reification and formality of such expressions of political engagement. There is on their part a questioning of what politics is and how they would like to participate (Kovacheva, 2005). Moreover, as Eagleton (2000) has put it, the culture can be political, whenever gestures, lifestyles, songs, ways of dressing, and so on become key elements of narratives of domination and resistance. Therefore, youth political engagement and participation have changed in recent

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decades, not only on account of what youth regard as being the finality of politics, but also how political participation should be acted out. For instance, for Brazilian hip-hoppers interviewed during a National Seminar on Youth and Politics in Brazil (Mayorga et al., 2012), politics is not primarily a struggle to gain, or remain in, power, but rather to mobilize oneself and others around causes of personal and social transformation— one’s own as well as those produced through education, equality, and freedom. Youth political participation became visible in the Brazilian public scene mainly through the activism of university students whose political engagement began in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although in the 1920s many young people actively participated in an incipient movement of factory workers’ strikes (Rodrigues, 1966), their participation cannot be accounted for in terms of specific generational demands and generational conscientization but rather as part and parcel of the larger movement of workers’ struggles. The National Union of Students (UNE) of Brazil was founded in 1937, the year in which Brazil came under the civil dictatorship of Getulio Vargas which lasted until 1946. Notwithstanding the enormous difficulties of political expression and organization during this period, it was then that university students organized themselves nationally and the very first youth committees within political parties were created (Poerner, 2004; Mendes, 1982). University students’ demands assertively foregrounded the fight for “national causes” which encompassed a range of demands—from the struggle against Nazism and Fascism to the fight for the nationalization of petrol and steel industries and the struggle against illiteracy. Since the 1950s university students’ movements gained momentum in the scope of the modernization processes, the country went through (urbanization and industrialization processes and the creation of a dozen new federal universities). The ideological underpinnings of students’ militancy were decided by the political parties, which made themselves present in students’ movements. Foracchi (1965) reminds us of the articulation between the formation of the political category that is university students and the dynamics of social classes in Brazil. She coins the expression “transformation of youth into students”, a nutshell formulation about the interrelationship between university students’ positionality and the formation of the Brazilian middle class, concerned with its social and occupational mobility

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and ascension, the expansion of its political power, and its support of the values of a competitive society. In this context, it remained doubtful to what extent these youth, being “transformed into students”, would identify with values beyond their own social class (see also, Ianni, 1968). Mainly recruited from petit-bourgeois families, university students’ movements were composed mainly of white male youth in a country where the majority of the population was composed of Black and coloured people. In 1964, with the beginning of a twenty years’ long military dictatorship in Brazil, the students’ movement suffered a serious drawback with the legal extinction of the National Students’ Union. This organization would later survive over a decade clandestinely and its leaders would suffer through prison, torture, and “disappearance” by the military regime. This short incursion on the emergence of university students’ movements in Brazil leading to the visibility of the category of youth in the public domain helps us to understand how university students’ political engagement until the redemocratization of the country in 1984 was not imbued with an inter-generational concern whose struggle targeted a generational right, such as education. It was only in the 1990s, with the growing neoliberal reforms in the educational system, that an emergent youth conscientization about formal education as what they ought to receive from adults, adults’ generational debt, was bound to take place, presenting two notable aspects: that it is younger students of state schools who come to the public scene and that secondary students’ movements comprehend mainly the youth of disadvantaged social classes. Secondary school students occupied over eight hundred state schools in different states of Brazil during 2015 and 2016. This phenomenon— not only on account of its magnitude but also for its novelty—must be contextualized in the larger political framework and in the sequence of measures of State intervention in education that anteceded it. In 2013, a conflagration of huge street manifestations raided Brazil. It was the first time since the redemocratization period that so many people openly expressed their collective anger and indignation. Albeit the focus of controversial interpretation (Pinto, 2017; Scherer-Warren, 2014), these manifestations politically invigorated the public scene, with effects lasting to this day. In 2014, Dilma Roussel was re-elected after a turbulent and difficult presidential campaign to be finally impeached through a parliamentary coup in May 2016. Michel Temer, vice-president, assumed the

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presidency to promulgate soon after an Amendment to the 1988 Constitution (PEC 241/55) to freeze and cut down investments in education and health. In the National Assembly of Deputies (Câmara Federal), a Bill to criminalize teachers’ political expressions in schools was being analysed. In the meantime, state governments, in charge of the administration of secondary state education, were addressing their insolvency by means of cutting down educational expenditure: for instance, in the state of São Paulo, a Bill was sent to the Legislative branch to downsize and shut down schools; in the state of Goiás, to pass on to private organizations the administration of state schools and to militarize them; in Rio de Janeiro, to cut down teachers’ salaries and the educational budget. State education, in the whirl of neoliberal measures, was under serious attack. In 2015 students occupied over two hundred schools in the state of São Paulo. The wave of school occupations by secondary school students swiftly propagated in the country, mirroring the remarkable events of school occupations and marches that had taken place in Chile in 2006, involving over 600,000 students (Ziba, 2008). In March 2016, teachers of the state schools of Rio de Janeiro went on strike, due to the fact that they were not receiving their salaries. A month later the secondary students’ movement of school occupation exploded in Rio de Janeiro. From then to this day this movement has received ample attention in research from a gamut of perspectives since it seemed to demarcate the emergence of this novel actor in the public scene: secondary school students who had so far only participated in social and political struggles together with other social actors—university students, workers. These studies have emphasized the impermanent power and growing strength of this process (Crochik & Corti, 2018) as a valuable learning opportunity of collective intelligence (Costa & Santos, 2017), community learning (Carvalho et al., 2019), and horizontal and democratic relationships (Gageiro & Poli, 2019). The creative and combative power of students’ resistance has been laudably highlighted (Alvim & Rodrigues, 2017) as a form of autonomous political education (Catini & Mello, 2016), a defence of youth citizenship and its social rights, especially education (Oliveira, 2019; Ribeiro & Pulino, 2019), the expansion of repertoires of political action under repressive power relationships (Barreto, 2016), political conscientization and praxis (Rosa & Sandoval, 2019) and an exercise towards the decolonization of school and its democratization (Corsino & Zan, 2017). It has been argued that school occupations by secondary

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school students have unravelled the failure of a bureaucratized model of education which did not account for the expectations and demands of disadvantaged youth (Corti et al., 2016). These studies seem to converge on an evaluation of secondary students’ laudable political actions. Students all over the country defied their own parents, the police, their peers, and the government for the sake of the demands for a better education. Nonetheless, there have also been more critical studies, which pointed at the political slant of this movement focusing on immediate and subjectivist gains backed up by a perspective, which emphasizes personal experience and learning, empowerment, and identity (Gomes, 2017). There have been thus disputable interpretations of the movement and also of how students themselves retrospectively evaluate its gains. Groppo et al. (2018), in an instigating article, show that the memories that many secondary school students of the state of Minas Gerais are able to recall evoke deep malaise and anxieties similar to those caused by a traumatic event. They consider that further investigation on the life trajectories of these students is needed so that less negativized or idealized understandings can be worked out. In the section that follows we present an analysis of the interviews with secondary school students of the state of Rio de Janeiro who were occupying schools during the year 2016. Our aim here is to inquire about how the issue of education is taken up by students as what is due to them by the older generation, forging thus a field of antagonisms with those who seem to oppose, deny, or ridicule these demands. We are interested then in looking at their narratives about the occupations with an eye on how intergenerational relationships become politicized around the issue of educational rights.

Research Methodology During the months of April, May, and June of 2016, our research team visited twelve schools in different cities of the state of Rio de Janeiro, mainly in the city of Rio de Janeiro itself, in order to talk to students who were occupying them. In general, an appointment had to be made beforehand with the communications committee of the occupied schools in order to obtain permission to visit, sometimes spending the day there, and talk with the students. In general, one or two research assistants visited the school and carried out the interviews, often with two or three students at the same time. Sometimes a group conversation between students and

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the researcher took place. Researchers also had the opportunity to attend public classes and other activities that were taking place at the moment of the visit. These interviews, conversations, and activities during school visits were recorded, constituting the object of our present analysis. By the end of June, a group of researchers from different universities of Rio de Janeiro organized a regional meeting called “Occupy Secondary Education” (Ocupa Ensino Médio) where students of different schools were invited to discuss their perspectives on the movement in a roundtable session. This discussion was tape-recorded and also constitutes part of the empirical data of the following analysis. Having in view our main objective we categorized our empirical data along the following analytical dimensions: (i) how students think about their present education: their frustrations, criticisms, expectations and what ideas and opinions they have about the education they should strive for; (ii) how their adversaries are constituted and to whom their demands and struggles are targeted. I. What do young people think of education? In this category, we analysed how students evaluate the educational process: what their conceptions of education are, what complaints and proposals they have for the education they want to receive. One of the most reaffirmed aspects refers to the discomfort with the model of knowledge transmission, guided by a hierarchical relationship between teachers and students. The adult-teacher stands as the owner of the knowledge which is passed on to the receptive student who should listen silently to the contents determined by a Basic Curriculum. The students claimed that school should be a place where knowledge of life is included. One of them says: We want to take part in the pedagogical plan, we don’t want to go to the classroom and have the teacher as the owner of the knowledge and we are just a deposit. There’s got to be some exchange of experience and life, exchange of knowledge. (Student Speaker, in Occupy Secondary Education event)

According to the students interviewed, the model of transmission of knowledge reproduced in most of Rio de Janeiro’s state schools does not favour autonomous thinking.

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Public education does not make us think, it’s just memorizing to take exams. (Luiz Reid, M.)1

Many of them categorized this model as content-based, unfit for their realities: I think that education in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil is very content-based. It’s all about spitting content on us and that’s it. If you get a zero, you are dumb. If you get a ten, you are intelligent. That’s not it! (Hispano, F.)

They stress the conflict between memorizing the content and learning it through critically participating in its construction. Being intelligent, according to the students’ talks, is not related to the act of memorizing, but to developing the capacity to take part in the collective construction of a given knowledge. They also feel undervalued because their role is memorizing content, doing tests to graduate and leave school supposedly able to play their part in the job market. The content-based model, in their point of view, is defined according to job market demands, as if the school aims were only to prepare the workforce to be absorbed and not to prepare students for life. In this regard, they wonder about the development of their singularities and the fulfilment of their desires. In opposition to the content-based model, it is possible to identify in their speeches the desire for other, more democratic pedagogical models of knowledge production in school, along with their unique stories and life-courses: I think the government should create a more attractive method in the classes. Discussions in circles, where each could give their opinion in class, where each can participate in his own way. (Hispano, M.)

The students find it important that school learning can dialogue with their everyday life, making it possible for them to participate in the active construction of knowledge. For instance, they mentioned that Maths class should not be only about pure Maths, but Maths applied to their lives and to society: The Maths teacher only teaches Maths all the time, but not how this is going to influence our lives, society and everything else. Then, education does fail. (Rangel Pestana, F.)

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School has missed its role of teaching us to live out here. (Amaro Cavalcanti, F.)

Students also complain about how pedagogical interaction reinforces passivity and a non-critical attitude on their part. The student has a mind, has thoughts, and sometimes this should be more exposed during the regular classes. For instance, in History class, sometimes the teacher comes, talks about dictatorship, talks about politics and many students don’t understand politics. (Herbert de Souza, F.)

During the occupations and through the partnership with some teachers, the students experienced another way to learn. The students said that they learned a lot with the occupation, meaning that it was possible to reflect on the reality of the world, through the so-called “open classes” and speeches. They learned about History, Geography, Philosophy, and Sociology outside the standard model of class. The content-based model implies a hierarchy of power between teachers and students in which they feel obliged to obey orders and accept the precarious situation of public schools as for example: We accepted everything very silently. I started to shape some thoughts about things. Then, with the occupation, there are some open classes about History, Geography, Philosophy and Sociology, things like this. There was also an assembly, which lets us be aware of what is going on. (Balthazar, M.)

The criticism of the predominant pedagogical model in public school is connected, in students’ point of view, to the absolute precarity of public education. They evaluate the conditions in which they study as awful. The situation is so bad, that the teachers have to use their own money to make copies of the exams because there is no paper in the school. They have to bring ink for the markers. (Bacaxá, M.)

State schools are seen as not receiving sufficient investment from the government, having precarious and badly preserved infrastructure, bad food, and no equipment or even basic materials for the classes because, above all, they are the schools for young people of a less privileged social class. For many students, this precarity is the crux for comparing state

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and private schools, to the detriment of the former. Such a difference is experienced by students of state schools as segregating and discriminating: We know that our generation is the generation of technology, so if we don’t learn here and now, the guy who studies in a private school will and will go on, that elite there will stay and we will keep on being delayed. (Cairu, F.)

There are many factors related to school infrastructure that directly influence the educational process. The students stress the heat, typical of Rio de Janeiro, in classes with a big number of students and no airconditioning. There is the case of some schools that, to minimize the problem of the heat, rented air-conditioning, but that situation was threatened due to the lack of or the freezing of educational investments. Food—the snacks and lunch offered at schools—was an important demand mentioned by the students, as in many cases a great majority do not have much to eat at home. Food, teachers, paper, there’s no paper... Snacks are very scarce. The teacher doesn’t get a snack. There are no paper towels in the bathroom…. (Mendes de Morais, F.)

There are no guarantees that the technological updates offered in some private schools will ensure a better future for the students, but according to the interviewed students, this is another difference that determines the inequality in the educational process in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Municipal and state schools are recognized by the population as being for the people who cannot afford a private school. The students interviewed complained that the state school is not a pleasant place for the student, who ends up being compared and undervalued in relation to his/her peers. During the occupations, the students started to question the criteria of fund distribution among schools by the government. They understand that the model adopted which offers more funds for schools with higher scores according to the SAERJ2 system and fewer funds for the ones which are classified as having below-average grades does not seem fair. They claim they should have greater participation, as a student body, in the collective decisions that affect their trajectories as students, taking part

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in the processes of school management. They believe that their participation should influence the decisions that concern them. The majority of the students interviewed put forward the democratization of schools as the main agenda of the occupations. Students want to have a voice and there is a law in the educational guidelines… There’s an article where it’s very clear that a school has to have a democratic management and if this doesn’t happen, it gets to the point that it is embarrassing to demand that your government obeys the law. (Mendes de Morais, F.)

In the interviews there is great dissatisfaction with the fact that school officials are selected by the State Department of Education when the legal dispositions say that the school headmaster/mistress should be elected by the members of the educational community: We want students’ participation in this process. This participation comprehends the election for headmaster, and we want to have him/her focused on us, school management which represents students and not one which is imposed. (Chico Anysio, M.)

When asked about the meaning of democratization, they described it as the politicization and awareness of what the students experience as part of the school routine. During the occupation process, they could experience as democracy the deliberative processes originating from assemblies. They reported that, from this experience, a sense of collectivity that did not exist before was created. The experience of democratic processes during the occupations enhanced the demand for more clarification concerning the funding of schools and the management of the decisions that were related to them. II. Participation rights and the politicization of youth-adult relationships Students’ dissatisfaction with state education remains a key feature of their testimonies. A mounting feeling of being disregarded, of not being listened to and not receiving one’s due in terms of education is revealed, as shown in the following affirmation:

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We, the students, are struggling for the improvement of the infrastructure of our schools – the labs, our gymnasium, our classrooms -, the improvement in the quality of the food we have here, to have direct elections for the headmaster and the right of free association of students… Teachers must receive their pay to come to work and what we have now is the cutting down of everything. (Cairu, F.)

For long students’ dissatisfaction has been reported as a “symptom” of school malaise as shown by their apathy, high rate of student dropout and, quite often, localized upsurges of hostility and violent behaviour towards school buildings and personnel. Interestingly enough, in the present scenario, students’ dissatisfaction fuelled collective actions towards rebelliousness and rejection of the present educational state system. By occupying schools, students were foregrounding a straightforward refusal of the education they were receiving. As put by one student: We students realized - ‘my school is shit’… can’t I occupy as well’? (Luiz Reid, M.)

In the beginning of March 2016, schoolteachers in the state of Rio de Janeiro went on strike, which deeply affected students’ morale. As put by these students: “State school teachers are teaching us about how to struggle… how we have to act in our daily life to face social injustice.” (Amaro Cavalcanti, M.) “We have taken advantage of their strike [teachers’] because they are really struggling not only on account of themselves but on our account. For a better education and all that.” (Hispano, F.)

In this context, as was recognized by the majority of students in occupations, school teachers became a clear ally of the students who saw a convergence of interests between their and their teachers’ struggle: We have seen that if it were not for the teachers’ strike if they had not stopped working, we’d be in the classroom as usually… we would not be thinking about the conditions of our education… (Mendes de Moraes, M.)

As students occupied the schools, many teachers came out to support them, in part by offering to run workshops about subjects not usually

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discussed in daily classes. It seemed that teachers came to be seen as part of the “oppressed group” as much as students themselves. We, students, support teachers’ strike unconditionally because it is impossible to study, to enter a very precarious classroom and not get one’s pay at the end of the month. (Amaro Cavalcanti, F.)

Therefore, the configuration of an antagonistic field in students’ struggle along schools’ occupation preserved the teachers who, by sharing with students the ill-effects of a precarious state educational system, were included in the same oppressed group of the students. Students’ “enemies” were rather those who were in government—the politicians—who wilfully implement state educational policies to the detriment of youth, especially lower-class youth. In fact, we’ve found out that our true enemy is Pezão (the state governor), Dornelles (the state vice-governor), and all this bourgeoisie that works and lives all day to think out ways to subtract our rights in order that they accumulate more money …. (Amaro Cavalcanti, F.)

As this youth puts it, politicians serve an economic élite whose interests dwell on capital accumulation, disregarding republican ideals of equity and social justice. Students’ political opposition is directed to those who hold political power who neglect their office co-opted by economic élites. As students go on to justify the occupation of schools, they say that the occupations consist of a strategic means to call attention to the educational issue, to the degradation of schools, so as to press the government to change educational policies. For them, there is a “crisis” in state education that is shown by the fact that even teachers’ salaries are not paid while the state wastes money by reforming buildings, such as the football stadium. Students believe that school occupations will make their opponents search for dialogue. As another student puts it: If all schools are occupied, if we attain this goal, then they will have to change something. They will have to make an agreement with us because the SEEDUC (the State Secretariat of Education) will have to talk with us, not what they think is good, but what is good for them and us. (Hispano, M.)

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Young people’s narratives point at the different actors that stand as their enemies in this present context. For some, politicians play a key role; for others, state educational officers (the SEEDUC); others point to the “state” as if it were the present government. For better or for worse, the state wants us to un-occupy the schools… our concerns – our claims – do not interest them. (Hispano, F.)

Student testimonies indicate a comprehensive field of antagonism that is constructed during the conversations they have with those who visit them in school occupations. On one hand, it is clear that politicians, especially the Executive branch, remain their obvious target of political opposition; but also, as we have seen, the economic élite and the state educational officers (the SEEDUC) are marked as targets. Besides, most often, the headmasters of schools were accused of defending the interests of the state government, barring students from freely constituting their councils and occupying schools. The 1988 Brazilian Constitution established the “democratic management of schools” as a general principle of democratization of the educational system. Since then the issue of what democracy in schools concerns has taken over the imagination of educational researchers and professionals, as this principle was reiterated in the Educational Bill of 1996 (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases) and the National Plan of Education of 2014 (Bill 13005/2014). How the office of the school headmistress was to be elected has been a crucial aspect in this overall discussion, as the former practice was the “political indication” by politicians amplifying the power of state deputies and officers over the educational system and ostracizing school actors from participating. It was left to state and municipal laws to establish further principles and directives in concordance with the federal principle of democratic management, one of them being the direct election of headmistresses through ample consultation with the school community. In Rio de Janeiro, the state bill 3067/1998 legislated the autonomy of state schools, leaving without resolution the issue of how headmistresses were to be appointed. Although in many other states the election of the office of headmistress had been already established by consultation of the community, sometimes combined with other mechanisms, such as academic merit and public evaluation, in Rio de Janeiro political indication was still the case in state schools. Therefore, students’ protest was directed towards the authoritarianism of headmistresses together with

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demands for the direct election of this office. As shown by one student who says: If we succeed in kicking out this headmistress, that will be great… she is the horror of this school. (Luiz Reid, M.)

or, In many occupations, headmistresses have prohibited students’ assemblies and manifestations. They lied to us, they did everything to prevent us from occupying the schools… (Rangel Pestana, M.)

In this context, school headmistresses constituted a straightforward enemy of students’ actions notwithstanding their recognizing the fact that some of them did support their actions but could not demonstrate so. For students, most headmistresses had turned into automatons who simply obeyed rules from above. Interestingly enough, other adults, such as parents, who either doubted the efficacy of school occupations or thought that youth should be busy studying rather than occupying schools, were regarded as a group to be persuaded rather than attacked. Students were worried that their political action of occupation would be incorrectly interpreted by parents, the community where the school was located, and the population at large. In this sense, there was a concern to build up a legitimating discourse for occupations, which needed to be regarded as a radical action against the vilifying situation of state education and the deep neglect of poor youth’s chances of educational improvement. We have a concern to show all those who come here, the population, the parents, and so on, that the school is clean, that we’re not messing about. (Bacaxá, F.)

In many occupations, there was solidarity from parents, the community, and even police officers who were called by state authorities. In others, students had to face open conflict with parents who wanted their children to attend classes. However, parents did not constitute the enemy of students’ struggles but those to be co-opted into their cause. One student puts it in a clever way:

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This struggle is not to cause damage to anyone, it is to stop our being damaged. Therefore, we have to conquer everyone little by little. (Herbert de Souza, F.)

As students had to face opposition coming from their own parents, their schoolmates who feared missing final exams, and the media, which many times criminalized student’s actions as vandalism, they had to build up counter-arguments to legitimate their claims and their singular position as a political actor in the debate around education. This legitimation consisted of narratives that foregrounded the “stirring up of their conscience about reality and of themselves ”, “the advancement of secondary school students ”, “being knowledgeable about one’s own rights ”, and “building up one’s own thought about things ”. Against the accusation that they were still minors, they retorted that “they did have a head, a voice, they were not manipulated…”. In fact, students disdained and refused to accept the position of invisibility or non-authority and nonqualification in this debate that has been always attributed to them. They refused to remain the “part that was not counted”, as Rancière (1996) refers, to the collective actions of those whose political struggles disclose the unfairness of the conventional political order. These narratives questioned the generational difference in its ideological underpinnings, such as lack of maturity, lack of experience, being vulnerable to manipulation, and so forth underscoring students’ right to have a say: If dialogue is impossible, then we’re going to shout that we have a right to have a dialogue. (Amaro Cavalcanti, F.)

Along with the process of naming those who were the enemies, which adults to fight against, students’ testimonies also sought to build up a novel positionality for them as young people taking into account the generational difference. For their opponents to be a youth often constitutes a decisive and incontestable justification to support an unfair treatment based on essentialized differences between generations.

Concluding Remarks Brazilian legislation on the rights of children and youth has re-arranged intergenerational relationships posing new challenges to adult society. As far as schools are concerned, teacher–student relationships face grievances

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on both sides. However, as argued here, school malaise must be accounted for by the appalling deterioration of the Brazilian state educational system which has suffered since the 90s brutal cuts in public investment. Even considering the quantitative expansion of the state educational system, the mere increase of school attendance figures by children and youth has not meant coming to terms with the constitutional educational rights for children and youth as formalized in the Brazilian Statute of Children and Adolescents (ECA) in 1990. In this paper, we have focused on the very first strike of great magnitude by secondary students which, it should be noted, brought about a convergence of interests between students and teachers. It also foregrounded the political actorship of poor secondary students who took action to occupy their schools and demand better education. For disadvantaged students who attend schools of very bad quality, it seems clear that the State is failing to provide what is due to them in terms of educational rights. Moreover, they seem to interpret the State’s unwillingness to deliver such rights as taking sides with those who have economic power, thus falling short of carrying out its constitutional obligations. It has been argued here that students’ claim for education consists of a political response to these antagonistic forces as they are apt to step into the public scene against them. School occupations can be conceived as an “act of creation of a generationally political event” in that the latter represents both the construction of a political agenda around education, as a generational right, by students themselves and the construction of a field of political antagonists that this agenda entails. As such, teachers and students have turned up as allies even if, contradictorily, in the daily chores of school life they continue to deal with mutual hostility and disappointment. In a way, this rapprochement consists of a political gain as students have sorted out who their adversaries are in the public scene. It remains to be seen how this political gain will evolve in the context of an even more stringent and ferocious treatment of education by the present government in the context of neoliberalism.

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Notes 1. Students are here identified only by the names of their schools and whether male or female. 2. Implemented by the State Department of Education (Secretaria de Estado da Educação—SEEDUC), in partnership with the Center of Public Policies and Evaluation of Education (Centro de Políticas Públicas e Avaliação da Educação—CAEd), SAERJ attempts to collect information about students’ educational performance enabling action to meet educational and learning demands in the school context, as well as articulation of the planning of measures at all levels of the educational system. Access at: http://www.ava liacaoexternasaerj.caedufjf.net. Access on November 23, 2019.

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PART III

South American Childhoods, Migration and Neoliberalisation: The Search for Less Precarious Scenarios

CHAPTER 8

Children and Migratory Processes in Ecuador Between 1999 and 2009: From the Financial Crisis’ Trauma to the Promises of the Rule of Law René Unda Lara and Daniel Llanos Erazo

This chapter focuses its interest in the analysis of a body of significative experiences for Ecuadorian children and adolescents who experienced the migratory process between 1999 and 2001 because of the Feriado Bancario1 (bank holiday) decreed by the then president of Ecuador, Jamil Mahuad, on March 8, 1999, as one of the most impactful consequences of the implementation of the neoliberal policies established between 1992 and 1996 by the government of Sixto Durán Ballén. Ecuadorian migration has a long history. Studies about the migratory phenomenon identify three large waves: (a) the first one started in the 1950s in the context of expanding opportunities for the middle class,

R. Unda Lara (B) · D. Llanos Erazo Universidad Politécnica Salesiana de Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_8

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which saw emigrating to the United States during wartime as an opportunity to improve their living conditions. It is a particular type of migration determined by the creation of expectations of improvement of familial and individual living conditions (Gratton, 2005); (b) the one produced the 1970s, in particular within the first five years of the decade, when the oil crash reconfigured not only the financial market, but the productive market and the services market in the United States, where a large contingent of Central and South American migrants constituted a sector of the population with extensive availability to be integrated into the informal labour market, and on whom pressure could be easily exerted due to extreme income inequality without major difficulties. Data on the departure abroad of Ecuadorian citizens also records Venezuela as a destination, although in a much smaller proportion than the United States. (c) The third wave, which under the metaphor of a migratory “stampede” (Ramírez Gallegos & Ramírez, 2005) had its peak between 1999 and 2001, a consequence of the decisions Mahuad’s government made to protect the most powerful sectors of the banks, harming thousands of Ecuadorians who trusted their savings to those same banks. Unlike the two previous migration waves, this one can be labelled as a forced migration for the purposes of survival. The destinations, in contrast with the other two migration processes, were mostly in Europe: more precisely, some cities in Spain and Italy. The context of each of the three departures of people—to the United States, Venezuela, Spain, and Italy—shows the existence of singularities when structural aspects and conjunctural dimensions are taken into account. In the 1950s, Ecuador’s structure and demographic composition were mostly rural, as almost 72% of the population lived in rural zones (INEC, 2015) and the urban population kept strong ties of economic dependency to rural areas. The national development model, with the geopolitics of the aftermath of World War II as a backdrop, was based on an agrarian structure in which the axis of socio-economic reproduction revolved around the traditional landowner model (Quintero & Silva, 1998). Such characterization meant, fundamentally, an “order of relations” based mainly on the asymmetric interdependence between patronage and servitude, and marginally supplemented with salaried relations of production. The context surrounding the migratory event established a scenario of migratory possibilities in which urbanized middle classes carried the expectations associated with the “American Dream”.

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In the 1970s, structural changes in the economic and political spheres were closely connected with the transition from a rural agrarian society to an increasingly urban commercial and service-based society, with emerging industrial development. The first agrarian reform had taken place in 1964, and in 1974 the second and final part of this important socio-territorial event would take place, one which would signify substantial changes in the structure and functioning of the country’s economic, political and cultural order. The socio-economic modernization process carried out in the 1970s on the basis of the beginning of the period of oil exploitation and exportation, within the general background of hemispheric geopolitical relations, represents a “constitutive moment” (Zavaleta, 1990) of profound importance in the subsequent development of the Ecuadorian state. The third migratory wave, which occurred between 1999 and 2001, requires a radical change in the analytical perspective of the migratory phenomenon, since, unlike the previous two, it entails positioning oneself in a scenario that shows with great clarity the characteristics of an expelling society (Sassen, 2015). The initial socio-economic modernization of the country, elicited during the military governments of Rodríguez Lara (1972–1976) and the military triumvirate of Poveda Burbano, Durán Arcentales and Leoro Franco (1976–1979), should be paired with the inevitable piece of analysis that is the period of structural adjustment of the eighties with the external debt crisis, along with the successive governments that gradually adopted the guidelines of the Washington Consensus on fiscal policy, thereby widening poverty and deepening inequality gaps between the different sectors of the population, as shown by studies and reports from different institutional spaces (Cepal, 2001). The crisis that erupted in 1999, following the declaration of the bank holiday by former President Mahuad, represents the peak of the progressive exhaustion of an economic model based on policies focussed on both safeguarding the interests of business and financial elites, and the restriction of the population’s basic rights (health, education, work) through the triple dynamics of: deregulation of the financial market; widespread privatization of commons; and job insecurity that, since the 1980s, was described through the euphemism of “labour flexibility”. In each of the three relevant moments referred to the migratory process, the place of children and adolescents is invariably associated with

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the reconfigurations of the family as a sociological fact and, evidently, with the social determinations in which the family is the object. This study reconstructs and examines the web of relationships between the objective determinations established during the first neoliberal wave of the 1990s and the subjective dispositions of a qualitatively significant sample of children and adolescents who experienced the migratory process as sons and daughters of parents who, in a way, were forced to emigrate to Spain during those years. In this sense, this chapter puts the block of objective conditions into dialogue with a sample of co-produced narratives carried out by the Childhood, Adolescence, and Youth Investigation Centre, CINAJ, from the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana of Ecuador, since 2005. Those stories, in addition to being placed methodologically in the three key moments of the general analytical framework of the migratory process (reason of departure, departure, and arrival at the destination) are read and analyzed with a view on the effects that neoliberal policies produce in the materiality of the existence and subjective dispositions of children and adolescents (Bourdieu, 1997). Finally, we consider that, although the data used in this analysis refers to a wide temporal arc, it sufficiently illustrates the character and effects of the first wave of neoliberalism that unfolded in the region, and that it allows us to establish elements of contrast with the policies implemented during the progressive cycle, and forewarn, from a predictive and verifiable perspective, about the similarities and continuities of the recent post-progressive neoliberal attack that lurks in some countries, and is currently being implemented in others. The chapter begins by presenting a summarized overview of the establishment of the policies of institutional dismantling and liberalization of the yet immature socialdemocratic matrix of the state, endorsed by the government of former President Rodrigo Borja, and carried out by the government of Durán Ballén and Alberto Dahik between 1992 and 1996. It continues with the analysis of the failure of the State institutions between 1996 and 2006, the democratic blockade between the powers of the state, and the social and collective action that began to be made visible through the movement of defence of children’s and adolescents’ rights. The following section (“Children, Adolescents, and Family Strategies in the Migration Process”) concentrates on the 1999–2001 period. Element number 4 analyzes some of the aspects in which the progressive cycle went against the neoliberal logic and several others to which it

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returned because of neo-developmentalism and conservative derivatives. Item 5 refers to the second neoliberal wave and is framed as a conclusion.

Migration and the First Neoliberal Wave. The Situational and the Conceptual The numbers available in the official records of national institutions show that, between 1999 and 2002, the period of greatest migratory peaks in the history of Ecuador, nearly 600,000 people left the country, representing approximately 5% of the total population (INEC, 2015). The 1999 financial crisis which followed the bank holiday, and the dollarization of the economy decreed in 2000 by Mahuad’s government constituted the main causes of the “migratory stampede” (Ramírez Gallegos & Ramírez, 2005) of that period. These events were a consequence of the deregulation of the financial market supported by the legal framework established in 1994 during the government of Durán Ballén through the Financial Institutions Law. Parents with the economic capacity to get into debt, undertook the process of migration, mainly to Spain and Italy, leaving their children under the care of relatives and even neighbours, with whom they would experience the tensions, expectations, and trauma caused by the separation of the family nucleus. Other children, to a lesser extent, travelled with their parents to destinations where they would face processes of adaptation and integration in different social and cultural contexts (Gaitán et al., 2010). The period between 1999 and 2001 represents a disastrous moment for the vast majority of Ecuador’s population and, certainly, a tragic moment for children and adolescents whose parents had to face the decision to migrate to other countries. On March 8, 1999, the President of the Republic, Mahuad, had served almost eight months in office when he decreed a bank holiday for a period of twenty-four hours that was later extended to five days. The decree meant the suspension of all financial operations through banks and the freezing of the accounts of thousands of account holders who lost their savings or had to wait for a lengthy time (between one and twelve years) for the state to order the return of their money, that, due to the dollarisation of the currency, drastically lost its value (Salgado, 2002). The effects of both the bank holiday and the dollarization of the economy were devastating for most sectors of the population and caused the strongest migration wave that Ecuador has

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ever known (Unda & Alvarado, 2012). Based on this empirical finding, one of the most widely used theoretical approaches was that of economic cycles and the systemic crisis in the context of increasing inequality and a low level of average income (Sassen, 2007) that, in the face of events that imply an aggravation of the state of crisis, trigger situations of high social conflict. This, we consider, is the approach that, from the analysis of structural factors, can best contribute to explaining the migratory boom that occurred between 1999 and 2001 in the case of Ecuador. The idea of an expelling society (Sassen, 2015) whose policies and procedures make it impossible to think about possibilities of redistributing wealth, as well as the protection of the rights and guarantees of its citizens, provides, within the framework of the theoretical approach to the systemic crisis, broad analytical possibilities, since it is not only limited to the economic and political spheres but places the dynamics of the crisis in the social totality. It is from there that the web of relationships between childhoods, migration, and neoliberalism can be appreciated in a complex way, as it allows us to look at the multiplicity of aspects and factors that, in their interactions, reconfigure various spaces of society: family, school, work, and State institutions. In all of this, changes and transformations of objective and objectifiable conditions take place, represented in normative and legal frameworks, in statutory and regulatory adaptations in the school system, in variable morphologies that are processed in the world of work and, even, in unspoken objective regularities that tend to normalize the relations, in not infrequent conflictive events, between the figure of the immigrant and that of the native (Leinaweaver, 2015). Simultaneously, changes and objective and objectifiable transformations suppose and imply the production of subjectivity (Sánchez-Parga, 2009). The modifications in the dispositions of action that constitute the practices of individuals and social aggregations reconfigure the different areas of social life. The scenarios of economic and political crises, beyond their objective determinations, are constructions built by what the subjects do or do not do in the public and private spheres. In other words, the subjective presence of those who function as social agents in the different events that take place in a society raise points of conflict and tensions with what is or is being configured as “objective conditions”. For this reason, adopting the analytical approach of the systemic crisis within the framework of the great theory of economic cycles, where peripheral societies, or those that are marginally related to international

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production and trade circuits tend to generate conditions of extreme precariousness for impoverished sectors and those with a lower margin of social mobility, does not mean dismissing or ignoring other perspectives of analysis within the field of studies of migration, such as that of the expectations of social and family mobility (Aparicio, 2001), that of migrant imagery, closely associated with that of family support strategies to enable departure (Pedone, 2006) or approaches that place the category of transnational networks as the analytical and explanatory axis of intercontinental migration (Alcalde-Campos & Pávez, 2013; Portes, 2000). The theoretical perspectives of economic and structural sociology, as well as those approaches that favour the possibilities offered by the micro-social interactions and the subjective networks that operate in the migratory experience, constitute, in the case of work with children and adolescents, highly useful entries to try to explain the nature of the relationships established between the general macro-scenario of the neoliberal cycle from the last stretch of the twentieth century to the present day and the particular situations and experiences of children and adolescents involved in international migration. These perspectives are even more useful if we are considering what has happened to the exercise of rights and how these are processed from the condition of (being) a child of migration. Therefore, placing children and adolescents as subjects of analytical interest in the framework of the complex relationship between migration and neoliberalism implies taking into account the usefulness of several of the conceptual inputs and theoretical-analytical approaches that have been studied, at least, during the last three decades. The structural perspective linked to the notion of crisis, which, in the Ecuadorian case, had its most critical point in the last three years of the 1990s and the first two years of this century, finds its base in the financial crisis that began in 1994 and reached its peak in March of 1999, with the decree of the bank holiday and the following events. These events protected the financial sector and its representatives, to the detriment of large middle and popular sectors which experienced a sustained devaluation of income and purchasing power. To all this, other problems were added, such as the fall in the price of oil, and the massive increase of military spending during the Cenepa War (Peruvian border conflict) in 1995. As if this were not enough, we can add the meteorological phenomenon of El Niño that drove the agricultural sector to bankruptcy in 1998.

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In sum, the crisis that broke out in 1999 was due to a cumulative process that has its origins in the early 1980s, with the return to democracy and, even earlier, with the external debt of the military dictatorships of the 1970s, but that is institutionally configured between 1992 and 1996 during the Durán Ballén government. In that same period (1992–1996) at the political level, the early social disillusionment with the return to democracy that had begun in early 1980s began, starting in 1994, to normalize patterns of protest and mobilization. These increasingly displaced the political mediations for processing political conflicts (Revilla Blanco, 2010; Sánchez-Parga, 2005) in a society that was beginning to experience more and more quickly the effects of the increasing globalization of social relations and, with it, the repercussions of the exacerbation of global inequality in which transcontinental migration is inscribed (Sassen, 2007). It is no coincidence, then, that the same government proposal with which the right- wing duo Durán Ballén-Dahik won the 1992 elections adopted the discursive forms of pragmatic efficiency for the management of the State, moving away from both the conservative and openly authoritarian perspectives of the right who had governed the country between 1981–1988 (Hurtado, followed by Febres Cordero), as well as the socialdemocratic line with which Rodrigo Borja had held the presidency of the republic between 1988–1992 (Andrade, 2009). The Durán Ballén government (1992–1996) was, strictly speaking, the only government that considered the implementation of a neoliberal model as an integrated project of capitalist modernization. This included constraint and reduction of the structure and functions of the State, liberalization of the economy according to the interests of the importing sector, deregulation of the financial market, privatization of strategic sectors and public services, and job insecurity. Alberto Acosta synthesizes, from the economic point of view, the modernizing program established between 1992 and 1996: ... a massive financial liberalization were the reforms introduced during the Duran Ballén government, through the approval of the General Law of Institutions of the Financial System in 1994, which allowed bankers to expand their activities and diversify their businesses, while expanding the possibility of increasing credits for their own companies (linked credits). This liberalization was transformed into debauchery by reducing the

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capacity (and willingness) to control State institutions such as the Superintendency of Banks. Additionally, it gave way to a series of legal reforms, and the expedition of new legal regulations, such as the Stock Market Law and the State Modernization Law. On top of this we have the deregulation of deposits outside the country, in off-shore banking (branches of national banks abroad), which did not attract external savings, but instead channelled resources from Ecuadorians abroad to be handled extraterritorially in an environment characterized by fewer and fewer controls. (Acosta, 2012, p. 44)

The constant devaluations of the sucre (the national currency that was in place for one hundred and sixteen years, since 1884) and the unstoppable inflation, were rapidly deteriorating the living conditions of most of the population. However, between 1995 and 1996, the final year of this government, the population did not manage to articulate major mobilizations, mainly because between January and February of 1995 there was a military confrontation between the Ecuadorian and Peruvian armed forces in neighbouring territory. Under these circumstances, social energy was channelled towards the slogans of national unity, with the ineffable help of the media, of the elites that benefited from the various laws and reforms, and of the public institutions that were aligned with the regime, displacing the possibility of bringing forces together to make it possible to their claims heard and articulate their demands. The historian Juan Paz y Miño weighs the features that define the economic and social policies of that government: “Durán Ballén was defined by the market economy, privatizations, reduction of the State, support for banking and growth of national and foreign business investments (…) His anti-statist mission led to the social security crisis. And it lacked social policy”2 (Paz y Miño, 2006, p. 93). The precise identification of the deficiencies and deficits in the field of social policy during the Durán Ballén government contributes to a better characterization of how this neoliberalism was configured in an “Ecuadorian way”, to which Pablo Andrade alludes in his analysis of the State in contemporary Ecuador (2009). But also, from the angle of social policy, it is possible to see, under our particular academic interest in children’s rights, how a neoliberal government regime places childhood in the general framework of the scale of priorities that every government program establishes. It could be said that, contrary to the slogan “Children first” that the 1991 World Summit for Children, held in Stockholm,

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advocated, the criollo neoliberal program of the Durán Ballén government provided marginal funds for infrastructure work in areas with the greatest deprivation of services through the Emergency Social Investment Fund, FISE, created in 1993 as an instance of support, strictly speaking (Minteguiaga, 2012), for investment in public health and education. In this direction, the PAHO had already warned about the effects that budget cuts in the field of social policy have in relation to children and, more broadly, in relation to social conflict: “The growing deficit in social spending has determined the deterioration in the areas of health and nutrition in the poorest sectors of the population and has triggered strikes and protests. It is also important to consider the impact of malnutrition on schooling. Malnourished children do not fully benefit from their school attendance” (Organización Panamericana de la Salud, 2007, p. 67). Particularly in the strictly educational sector, not only were budget cuts applied, but direct disinvestment actions were also carried out on programs that were linked, a sign of the times, to the instructions of multilateral credit organizations such as the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank: “In the case of Ecuadorian education, the Durán Ballén period was characterized by a deepening of the preceding trends regarding disinvestment and deinstitutionalization of the sector. Low resources limited access to and quality of education, even reducing the goals set in the ‘Education for All Program’. Teachers also suffered deterioration in their living and working conditions, which led to enormous conflict in that sector. Additionally, the loss of the stewardship of the educational policy of the Ministry of Education is evident when it allows the World Bank and the IDB to direct the EB / PRODEC and PROMECEB programs” (Hidalgo, 2011, p. 4). The downfall that the education and health sectors accused was made by these government measures, quite clearly expressed the configuration of a model neoliberal program of the time, since the fiscal adjustment and financial deregulation reforms, in addition to having a direct impact on the different economic and financial spheres, involved regressive effects on the social area and, particularly, on the education, health and work sectors. Regarding labour reforms, the enormous similarities between the measures that were promoted in that period, and those that lately have been sought to be implemented by the Lenin Moreno government, are evident: “The structural reforms exacerbated the labour conflict— led by the Unitary Front of Workers (FUT)—radicalized the agrarian

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and environmental claims of organizations such as the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), with a combative tradition, and, in a consequence of great impact, caused deep anxiety in the electorate, which had already seen all the political offers transferred to government action and still saw no material progress. The sectors on the left found the new Hydrocarbons Law outrageously detrimental to national interests, whereby the State’s fiscal participation in oil revenues fell from 90% to a range between 12.5 and 18.5%, leaving the bulk of the profits to foreign contractors, and equally terrible, the austerity cuts in public health and education” (Ortíz, 2019, p. 4). Although in this section of the article a strong emphasis has been placed on the period of the government of Durán Ballén as a prototype of a neoliberal program of the 1990s, analytical lines can connect both with the 1980s, as a temporary political and economic framework of structural adjustment that results in a progressive installation of a neoliberal scenario, and with the years after the analyzed cycle, when the core of the crisis broke out, as this led to the departure abroad of more than 600,000 people in just two years and, with it, different forms of violation of children’s rights. It is essential to recognize the conditions and characteristics that surround a series of events that define the first neoliberal period in Ecuador and the region. But it is also important to look at the undeniable similarities between the neoliberal conceptions of the first wave and the most recent ones. We do this with a very clear purpose: to contribute to the understanding that the effects that this part of Ecuadorian history has caused on children who have lived the migratory experience are a constitutive part of a complex framework of supranational determinations, which adopt particular forms of disputes in each national state, in which the different social sectors modify their positions through and from their specific dynamics of social reproduction in the fields of family, labour, political socialization, etc. The migratory phenomenon is, from that sociological perspective, a complex area of study made up of multiple determinations of different orders. As we have already pointed out, this document’s interest is to propose certain analyses with a view on the social conditions that made possible a social event that marked the life of Ecuador, such as the massive emigration that occurred between 1999 and 2001, due to a generalized crisis, the focus of which was in the banking financial field, within the framework of the application of neoliberal reforms.

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1996–2006: Crisis, Transformations, and Mobilized Society. Those Who Departed The winner of the 1996 election was Abdalá Bucaram Ortiz, a populist leader who obtained the support, in the second electoral round, of almost a dozen political parties located from the centre to the left, to face the ever-persistent presence of the right- wing battling for access to government power through elections. The six months that Bucaram held the presidency of the republic showed that the neoliberal program installed by the previous government—that of Durán Ballén—had suffered cracks early on, since the changes in the political sphere at the institutional level meant a reconfiguration of forces that offset the correspondence with the economic sphere. Although the financial-economic sector was practically unbreakable, the increasing levels of inflation and devaluation of the sucre determined the government’s proposal for currency convertibility, as a strategy to contain the rampant devaluation and inflation that the country was experiencing. The proposal was created, and while the project was being discussed in the instances of the political system, Bucaram was removed from office, as a product of the social mobilization of the first days of February 1997. This event marks the beginning of a decade of sustained political instability and institutional dismantling of the State, in which the financial crisis that had been incubating for years would be unleashed, reaching its peak with the banking holiday in March 1999. One of the most striking facts of this period is that Ecuador had seven presidents in those ten years (1996–2006), where we would see the aforementioned bank holiday and dollarisation of the economy; that is, two of the determining facts that triggered the last wave of mass migration that Ecuador has experienced so far. Protests of indigenous peoples, workers, and various citizen groups during the first months of government became more robust when, in February 1997, people from Quito’s middle class sectors, students, and professionals joined. On February 6, the Armed Forces and the National Police withdrew their support for President Bucaram and the National Congress began to prepare for the transition to carry out the replacement that, by constitutional mandate, corresponded to the Vice President, Dr. Rosalía Arteaga, who held the post for forty-eight hours, due to an agreement between congressmen linked to the Social Christian Party and independent forces that ignored the constitutional mandate and process.

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This event ended with the commissioning of the government to Fabián Alarcón, an interim president, who carried out his functions between February 1996 and August 1998, and left after having promoted some reforms functional to the interests of the economic elites and having carried out the presidential elections, in which Mahuad triumphed for the period from 1998 to 2002. During the first year of his mandate, Mahuad saw his government management compromised, because the accumulated weight of a series of structural factors (external debt, economic crisis, devaluation of the currency, increased cost of living) had created the conditions for government decisions to produce a chain of events that would lead to his overthrow. The bank holiday, ordered on March 8, 1999, and the dollarization of the economy, decreed on January 6, 2000, meant the progressive activation of the mobilizations that determined his departure from the presidency on January 21, 2000. The 1990s were a ground-breaking decade in the area of children’s rights. On November 20, 1989, the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, ICRC, was approved at the United Nations. A year later, Ecuador, being one of the member states of the UN, ratified it, with the support of various organizations for the defense and promotion of human rights and a coalition that, over the 1990s, gradually became the Movement for the Rights of Children and Adolescents. In the broader context, the 1989 Washington Consensus established a favourable trend for the recognition of the rights of several sectors, particularly those of children. This expresses a flagrant contradiction, typical of this phase of neoliberalism, in which rights are declared, but the social conditions for their exercise are not considered. These contradictions would be analyzed beginning during the first years of the new century, through certain critical approaches belonging to the sociology of childhood (Sánchez-Parga, 2004; Unda Lara, 2003). The final phase of the 1990s is the stage in which, around the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and, more broadly, on children’s rights, a widespread institutional interest was generated in this field, and the capacity of agency of organizations, activists and, to a lesser degree, of academia was strengthened. Certain critical positions, based on cultural relativism and the anthropological analysis of cultural difference, began to be raised against the almost unanimous position of acceptance and adoption of the principles and contents of the ICRC (Nieuwenhuys, 2008; Sánchez-Parga, 2004). The object of their questioning was the

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supposed universal character of the principles and contents of the ICRC, and of the very rights approach. Firstly, it should be noted that the ICRC generated a powerful institutional and discursive alignment, because, from the decision-making spheres to the various operational spheres, passing through the diversified intermediate instances of planning, monitoring, and evaluation of programs and projects, its contents were adopted without the slightest discussion. The policy indications were given by the 4 principles established in the ICRC, which had to organize absolutely all programming aimed at children and adolescents. For this, in Latin America, two types of instruments were envisaged: the national action plans and the Code for Children and Adolescents. At the national level, the actions of the organizations and the institutions were then oriented towards the constant work needed to elaborate the childhood and adolescence code and national plan. In the Ecuadorian case, non-governmental organizations concentrated a good part of their efforts on the revision and reformulation of the minors’ code that had been in force since 1992. However, cracks occurred between different institutions around the area of so-called “child labour”, especially with the IPECL3 aimed at eliminating all forms of child labour. One of the difficulties was the conceptualization and operational definitions of this term, given that the available concepts were those proposed by the ILO in 1993. The economic and political conditions described above, coming from the unfolding of the generalized crisis of the late 1990s, make the problem of “child labour” one of the most sensitive issues to deal with. The institutional collapse that occurred after the overthrow of former President Bucaram in 1996 had its resolution with the inauguration of Mahuad in August 1998, since his platform was aimed at the harmonization of society, respecting the guidelines and indications that the international system offered for the sought-after national development. Mahuad and his economic team, which was strongly linked to the financial system, played their cards for the increase in interest for account holders in financial institutions and the liberalization of credits linked to different economic activities under the same business name, which meant that the flow of currency from the banks could boost the economy, at the cost of putting thousands of customers’ money at risk. Since the beginning of 1999, rumours about bank insolvencies flooded the social climate with sustained suspicions, and on March 8 of that year, the bank

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holiday was decreed. At that precise moment, the third migratory wave was activated and generated an irreversible socio-familiar and cultural reconfiguration that would last until the present day in Ecuador.

Children, Adolescents, and Family Strategies in the Migration Process In the context of the first neoliberal wave experienced in Ecuador and Latin America, family changes and transformations directly linked to the migratory event can be traced from aspects related to its structure and composition to those related to their specific ways of relating to each other in the marital, paternal/maternal and fraternal dimensions (Sánchez-Parga, 2004). These modifications intend, as confirmed by an already considerable sample of studies (Llobet, 2014), to place the focus of analysis on the changes and transformations of social subjectivity and on the multiple aspects on which such changes have an effect. These types of conditions suggest changes in the subjective constitution of society, that is, in what confers on a society a certain order of attributes and ways of managing its daily life. The family is in this dynamic, as a particular social unit of reference, which makes the existence of children and adolescents possible, and through which the different moments of the migratory event are processed. The family resents and manages the effects of structural crises, making decisions that are directly related to the decisions made by the State at the societal level. In this section of the analysis, the migration phenomenon and the family are assumed as a sociological fact, which implies that migration and family are socially produced realities, that is, that they are social configurations determined by the economic, political and cultural dynamics that operate on specifically situated contexts and subjects. The social dynamic in which the descriptions and analysis of experience are inscribed is precisely the one that has been discussed in the previous sections, and which corresponds to the first neoliberal wave. In this chapter, we are interested in looking at what the migratory experience has meant for children and adolescents in terms of their judgments during each of the three distinct moments of the migratory event: how they lived through the decision to emigrate, what aspects were perceived as positive or negative before the departure of their parents, and what considerations were made regarding the destination. To do this, we

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took a purposeful sample of the testimonies and the results of conversations carried out with children in two investigations carried out during the first decade of 2000 (Gaitán et al., 2010; Unda Lara, 2009; Unda Lara, 2010) and of an investigation carried out between 2014 and 2015 (Unda Lara & Solorzano, 2014). It is essential to bear in mind that the judgments, as a space of intersection of practices and discourses, that children and adolescents make regarding the migratory fact, constitute, in and of themselves, social productions that have been possible thanks to socialization processes through which they not only reproduce, but also recreate language; they are subjects of language, on one hand, and they are producers of reality through their condition of subjects produced by a specific social context (Sánchez-Parga, 2004) on the other. In a simplified way, what children and adolescents say and evaluate represents a discursive construction of their own, which has its world of relationships in the family, school, and, increasingly, in the field of socialization through screens (tv, cell phone, video games) as an inevitable reference. In this direction, the narration that they unfold on the different themes and aspects concerning the migratory process needs to be seen under the triple determination of their family environment, the migratory process, and the context of neoliberal adjustment policies. It should be noted, as methodological data, that we apply a variant of the ethnographic interview, which we call “themed conversation” (CINAJ, 2009). The children and adolescents at that time, (2006–2008) needed to have memories of the migratory event in which they were involved, and, as is usual in these cases, we had the informed consent of them and their legal representatives or the relatives who remained in charge of caring for them. They were children and adolescents from families in the second and third quintiles (impoverished middle sectors with little or no upward social mobility in the context of the neoliberal adjustment of the 1990s) who had minimal conditions for investment, but, above all, the ability to go into debt to undertake the project of migration. To this, we must add a certain (varying capital of contacts in the places of destination. My mom went to Spain so that my brothers and I can have the things that we cannot have here, so that we don’t lack anything. When she left, I felt bad, we’d never been away, but next year she’ll come. (Quito, twelve years old)

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This fragment of narration spoken by a girl while we were doing fieldwork in 2006, refers to the departure, separation, and absence of her mother in relation to her and her siblings. It also mentions the destination (Spain) and states the reason that justifies the separation (things that they cannot have in the place of origin). From the testimonial point of view, this fragment of narration refers to the idea of the lack of “things” or the impossibility of having objects or resources in the place of origin. As we continue with the analysis, framed in the process of qualitative data analysis (analysis of discourse, semantic fields and nuclei of meaning, complementary ideas and discursive saturation), it becomes evident that the aforementioned lack of “things” implies a real impossibility of access to goods, services and resources which constitute the primary sources for the provision of a series of resources, being more than simple objects. Of course, one of the elements that attracts the most attention in this and other testimonies is the fact that to acquire such “things” the mother of the family needed to emigrate to another country and continent and that inevitably means being separated from her children during an undetermined period. From the contextual or macro-sociological point of view, it is worth emphasizing that the time reference of this family occurrence was 2001, when the amount of people leaving the country due to the financial crisis was still on the rise. When referring to the time when the decision was made to undertake the migration project, the testimonies go, recurrently, into the sphere of the personal and even the intimate. Therefore, when we talk about the implications of neoliberal policies in the transformations of subjectivity in the individual and social dimensions, we refer to testimonies such as the following: It was difficult because... because I was no longer going to see him, that’s what hurts me. (Quito, fifteen years old) Later, when they told me that my mommy was leaving, since she was crying, it was worse. I felt sad because she was no longer gonna be with me. (Quito, thirteen years old) I used to cry, but then I kinda became a fighter. I miss him, I want to see him. (Quito, fourteen years old)

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Between the moment in which the decision is made to leave and the departure, the phantom of absence becomes real. It is about physical absences, of course, but also a deeply symbolic societal absence of what neoliberalism produces in the social fabric, which makes it impossible to affirm that, under such conditions, the rights of children and adolescents can be effectively exercised: ... It was very hard, because, for example, my friends took their parents to [school] meetings, and like, I had no one to tell to come .... (Quito, thirteen years old)

If we look at the fragments of the testimonies taking into account the IACHR’s statement, according to which children and adolescents have the right to participate in matters that affect them, the problem of discrepancy with reality assumes the form of contradiction, which can be synthesized in a couple of questions: Can the structural effects of the implementation of a neoliberal program maintain intact the conditions that allow children and adolescents to exercise their rights? And thinking about the current situation that several Latin American countries are going through, what should governments do, regarding the imminence of the application of neoliberal measures, to protect the exercise of children’s and adolescents’ rights, ratifying them, as is declared in the IACHR and the childhood and adolescence codes, as a priority of society? I went close to the door because I wanted to know what they were talking about, but my friend told me not to. She said that my mom was leaving too and that I shouldn’t hear that stuff, grown-up stuff. (Quito, fourteen years old). They start to sense that something like that is gonna happen, on their own, because of things they see: “I found out some weeks before because they were packing, and I asked, and that’s it, I understood”. (Madrid, fourteen years old) My aunt and uncle told me that my mommy had gone on a trip, that she was gonna come back in a year (…) but a lot of time went by and she never came back. (Quito, twelve years old)

Just the moment before the parents leave for the airport, they tell the minor about their departure:

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I found out when he had already left for the airport. (Quito, thirteen years old) I was sleeping when he told me he was coming. (Madrid, fourteen years old)

As can be seen, the participation of children and adolescents in matters of their environment that may affect them is reduced to almost nonexistence and, in this, not only the responsibility of the parents is at stake, but also a complex set of causes that these situations produce within family dynamics. In the Ecuadorian case, and during the first neoliberal wave, these factors have been described in considerable detail throughout this text. When the evaluations made by children and adolescents come into play, not only about their almost non-existent participation in the decision to leave, but also about the priorities that they establish from subjective dimensions, they adopt a deeply questioning tone that goes beyond the familiar and filial forms of relationship, placing criticism at the different corners of the relationships between objective well-being and subjective well-being, but, fundamentally, in one of the most sensitive nuclei of the tension produced between the decision to offer the family certain economic conditions for a dignified life or to stay together in a situation of vulnerability, precariousness, and uncertainty. A question that, moreover, invites us to reflect on the indivisibility and integrality of human rights in a generational key, since the exercise of children’s and adolescents’ rights is closely linked to the exercise of rights of the family nucleus that they are part of. Mom, dad, they’re only looking out for us, so it’s okay, but they should think about what we think and how we feel. Because they do their stuff on their own, I mean, they didn’t tell me anything, only that she was going away, that they had already done the paperwork. Instead, they didn’t ask me what I wanted or how I was feeling. (Quito, fourteen years old)

Regarding the very moment of the parents’ departure, when the decision to leave the place of origin is made, we have many reasons to suppose that it represents the highest point of a separation process that previously led to feelings of anguish and abandonment. The expression “it was the most heartbreaking moment” synthesizes the feeling that the separation from

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their parents causes in children and adolescents. Needs, not as an act of material requirement, but as a binding feeling of a strictly affective order, is practically misunderstood by parents who chose to migrate, since, in the representations and discourses of adults, the decision to leave was always the option to escape the material impoverishment with no return to which they were condemned after having lost, in many cases, their life savings after the 1999 bank holiday was decreed. When they said, ‘people on this flight have to go through the door, last call’, it was the most heart-breaking moment. (Madrid, thirteen years old) I told him not to go, that I need him, but he had already left. (Quito, twelve years old) I used to cry knowing my mom left, I didn’t want her to go because I can’t go one more day without her, because what will my life be if she doesn’t come? (Quito, fifteen years old)

Something clear is that the begging made towards their parents never affected the decision already made, on the contrary, the migrant parents were not willing to postpone their trip, or, even worse, to drop their decision. In this situation, children and adolescents develop expectations that are configured around the immediate and long-term reunion, they hope that the family will be reunited, and separation does not occur again. On one hand, I’d like to go and be with my mommy and my brother, but on the other, I can’t leave my daddy all alone, I don’t know what to do, we should all be together. (Quito, fourteen years old)

Other expectations that children and adolescents have are shaped around material conditions, that is, they envision a better future away from Ecuador. For the most part, these ideas are imposed by their families, and children value them as a possibility of an early family reunion. Q. would you like to stay and live here? A. Here, after starting a family, getting some money. (Madrid, fourteen years old) I think that fundamentally for an economy, for work issues, in Ecuador, it’s really hard to find a job where they pay well, that’s why I would stay here. (Madrid, seventeen years old)

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However, in numerous testimonies of children and adolescents who stayed in Ecuador, their expectations to travel to the place where their parents (father, mother, or both) went are low or, the idea outright generates rejection for affective reasons: It’s ugly where my dad is, it’s really cold, I don’t think it’s like here, and the food either. My friends are here. (Quito, thirteen years old)

Concluding Remarks The various studies and approaches that have been produced in the field of study of population mobility show a high level of consensus regarding the common factor from which the idea of moving from one geographical site to another is generated. This common factor is to improve certain living conditions, whether it is for survival, to stop and reverse dynamics of economic insecurity, or due to expectations of upward socio-economic mobility, in a global context where the most characteristic feature is the (increasing) production of inequalities (OXFAM, 2017). In each of the three fields of possibility, although it is not the only structural factor, the application of structural adjustment policies and unregulated liberalization of the economic sphere, especially in the productive and financial spheres, has produced trends of migratory mobility in certain periods and regions, fed and enlarged by significant population contingents. In the Ecuadorian case, as demonstrated in the first three sections of this text, the application of clearly neoliberal measures since the early 1990s produced a scenario of persistent crisis (Acosta, 2012) that shaped what authors like Saskia Sassen denominated “expelling societies” (2015), alluding to social spaces and situations that force, for different reasons, the departure of people to places socio-economically and culturally different from their places of origin; in the case of Ecuadorian migration at the end of the 1990s and the first years of this century, it was mainly for economic reasons. In this context, family separation had children and adolescents as the most vulnerable subject, from the perspective of children’s rights and, therefore, socially orphaned. After the first neoliberal wave (1992–2006), Ecuador entered a process of institutional reform of the State that favoured an approach of redistribution of the national wealth, based on important changes in the tax and collection system. The “long neoliberal night”, in the words of former President Rafael Correa, leader of that process, certainly found limits

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and ways of closure for practices at odds with everything that meant relegation of commons and the State, tax evasion, and discretionary selection of proposals, projects, and public workers. The expansion of the public sector and public investment, especially between 2007 and 2012, was the strongest evidence that neoliberalism was over in Ecuador. However, the reality showed that the aftermath of the neoliberal program of the Durán Ballén government and the successive governments had not completely left. In particular, the political field reactivated a large number of politicians who watched the privileges of the groups they represented vanish with each general and specific reform that the overwhelming State machinery imposed. In the field of children’s rights, the institutional strengthening was brought about with a typically sectoral perspective (health and education) with important results in terms of coverage and universalization of services (INEC, 2015), but these efforts were not deployed with the same intensity in the different areas of the well-being of children and adolescents, such as the areas of restitution and enforceability of rights. The restructuring of the State architecture in the field of children’s and adolescents’ rights involved conceptual, bureaucratic, and operational modifications, with which not all the actors agreed upon. Especially because by placing them conceptually in a common space of intergenerational relationships, and by bringing them together in spaces of shared operational management, they argued that there would be a supposed loss of the specificity and autonomy that each sector had since its creation. The arguments supported by instances that promoted the reforms have not been conclusively refuted up to the present date. On the issue of migration, the progressive cycle meant a period of recognition and demands, considering, above all, that migrant remittances represented Ecuador’s second-largest source of income for more than a decade, and when counted together, they continued to grow until 2017 (INEC). In the case of remittances sent from Spain, 2006 was the year in which the highest volume was recorded; thereafter, they have declined year after year. In the Ecuadorian case, the information analyzed clearly shows that neoliberalism, in any of its versions, represents an obstacle and a contradiction for the effective exercise of children’s and adolescents’ rights, because the priorities in the distribution of resources that a society

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produces and disposes are redistributed to favour the concentrated accumulation of wealth, a fact that, inevitably, implies delaying, displacing or suspending access to resources, goods and services to majority sectors of the population, including children and adolescents.

Notes 1. Feriado Bancario was the name given to the suspension of financial operations in all entities of the banking system. This episode constituted five days where the citizens could not carry out any bank transaction. 2. Text in italics written by the authors. 3. International Program for the Elimination of Child Labour.

References Acosta, A. (2012). Procesos Económicos Contemporáneos. Impacto de las reformas neoliberales en la economía. FLACSO. Alcalde-Campos, R., & Pávez, I. (2013). Infancia, familias monoparentales e inmigración latinoamericana en Barcelona, España. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 11(1), 229–243. Andrade, P. (2009). La era neoliberal y el proyecto republicano. La recreación del Estado en el Ecuador contemporáneo, 1992–2006. Corporación Editora Nacional. Aparicio, R. (2001). La literatura de investigación sobre los hijos de inmigrantes. Migraciones, 9, 171–182. Bourdieu, P. (1997). Razones prácticas. Sobre la teoría de la acción. Anagrama. CEPAL. (2001). Panorama social de América Latina. CEPAL. CINAJ. Centro de investigación sobre niñez, adolescencia y juventud. (2009). Informe de discusión metodológica para trabajo etnográfico con niños, niñas y adolescentes (Internal working paper), unpublished. UPS. Gaitán, L., Díaz, M., Sandoval, R., Unda, R., Granda, S., & Llanos, D. (2010). Los niños como actores en el hecho migratorio. Implicaciones para los proyectos de cooperación. Abya-Yala. Gratton, B. (2005). Ecuador en la historia de la migración internacional: ¿modelo o aberración? In G. Herrera, M. Carrillo, & A. Torres (Eds.), La migración ecuatoriana. Transnacionalismo, redes e identidades (pp. 31–56). FLACSO. Hidalgo, L. (2011). El saber de la escolarización neoliberal en el discurso del cambio educativo del Gobierno de Sixto Durán Ballén, periodo: 1992–1996. Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. INEC. (2015). Una mirada histórica a la estadística en Ecuador. El Telégrafo EP.

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Leinaweaver, J. (2015). La migración adoptiva: criando latinos en España. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Llobet, V. (2014). Pensar la infancia desde América Latina. CLACSO. Minteguiaga, A. (2012). Política y Políticas Sociales en el Ecuador reciente: Dificultades asociadas a la salida del ciclo neoliberal. Revista Ciencias Sociales I-II, 135–136, 45–58. Nieuwenhuys, O. (2008). Editorial: La ética de los derechos del niño. Infancia, 15(1), 4–11. Recovered from: https://doi.org/10.1177/090756820708 6941. Organización Panamericana de la Salud. (2007.) La equidad en la mira: la salud pública en Ecuador durante las últimas décadas. OPS/OMS. Ortíz, R. (2019). Web page information. Barcelona centre for Internattional Affairs. Obtenido de Barcelona centre for Internattional Affairs: https:// www.cidob.org/biografias_lideres_politicos/america_del_sur/ecuador/sixto_ duran_ballen/(language)/esl-ES . OXFAM. (2017, Enero). Una economía para el 99%. Informe de Oxfam. Paz y Miño, J. (2006). Ecuador: Una democracia inestable. HAOL, 11, 89–99. Pedone, C. (2006). Estrategias migratorias y poder: tú siempre jalas a los tuyos. Abya-Yala. Portes, A. (2000). Teoría de la inmigración para un nuevo siglo: problemas y oportunidades. In F. Morente (Ed.), Cuadernos Étnicas. Inmigrantes, claves para un futuro inmediato (pp. 25–60). Universidad de Jaén, Cruz Roja Española. Quintero, R., & Silva, E. (1998). Ecuador una nación en ciernes. Abya- Yala. Ramírez Gallegos, F., & Ramírez, J. P. (2005). La estampida migratoria ecuatoriana. Crisis, redes transnacionales y repertorios de acción migratoria. Abya-Yala. Revilla Blanco, M. (2010). América Latina y los movimientos sociales. El presente de “la rebelión del coro.” Nueva Sociedad, 227, 51–67. Salgado, W. (2002). Ajuste fiscal y dolarización amenazan la recuperación (Coyuntura). Ecuador Debate, 56, 5–17. Sánchez-Parga, J. (2004). Orfandades infantiles y adolescentes. Una introducción a una sociología de la infancia. Abya-Yala. Sánchez-Parga, J. (2005). Del conflicto social al ciclo político de la protesta. Ecuador Debate, 64, 49–72. Sánchez-Parga, J. (2009). Del niño sujeto al niño objeto. Desubjetivización de las condiciones infantiles. Faro. Pensar la Infancia. Revista De Posgrados De La Universidad Politécnica Salesiana De Ecuador, 1, 29–52. Sassen, S. (2007). Una sociología de la globalización. Katz. Sassen, S. (2015). Expulsiones. Brutalidad y complejidad en la economía global. Katz.

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Unda Lara, R. (2003). Sociología de la infancia y política social: ¿compatibilidades posibles? In IFEJANT (Ed.), Infancia y Adolescencia en América Latina, Tomo 1. IFEJANT. Unda Lara, R. (2009). Familia, niñez y adolescencia. Procesos de subjetivación emergentes en el hecho migratorio. Abya-Yala. Unda Lara, R. (2010). Jóvenes y juventudes. Acción, representaciones y expectativas sociales de jóvenes en Quito. Abya-Yala. Unda, R., & Alvarado, S. V. (2012). Feminización de la migración y papel de las mujeres en el hecho migratorio. Revista Latinoamericana De Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud, 10(1), 593–610. Unda Lara, R., & Solorzano, M. (2014). Jóvenes indígenas en la Sierra Central de Ecuador. Elementos para pensar sus prácticas comunitarias. DESidades, Revista Electrónica para la divulgación científica de la infancia y Juventud, 4(2), 9–19. Zavaleta, R. (1990). Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia. Siglo XXI.

CHAPTER 9

Venezuelan Children on the Move in Ecuador: Fragile Lives of Risk and Hope Gioconda Herrera Mosquera and Lucía Pérez Martínez

Over the past twenty years, migration patterns in Latin America have diversified significantly: new destinations have emerged, and migrants’ backgrounds are increasingly varied. Destinations for Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Bolivian, and Colombian migrants—who are increasingly female— have included Southern European countries as well as the United States. Likewise, migrations within Latin America have increased, creating important migratory circuits from various countries of the Andean region to Chile, Argentina, and Brazil (Herrera and Sorensen, 2017). But the most

G. Herrera Mosquera (B) Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales FLACSO-Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador e-mail: [email protected] L. Pérez Martínez Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales FLACSO-Ecuador, Guayaquil, Ecuador e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_9

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important phenomenon of recent years is undoubtedly Venezuelan migration. These new migrants are increasingly families of men, women and children, breaking with previous years’ more traditional patterns of maledominated migration. In addition, the socio-economic and educational profiles of migrants have also expanded. As diversity in the socio-economic and educational profiles of migrants has increased, so have the number of young migrants. Currently, it is estimated that in 2016 one in ten migrants in the region, 6.3 million, are children and adolescents (UNICEF, 2016). Undoubtedly, this number has multiplied with the exodus of Venezuelan migrants to destinations throughout South America that between 2010 and 2020 reached an excess of five million people (R4V, 2020), approximately 1.1 million of whom are children (UNICEF, 2019). These children migrate in many ways: alone, with their nuclear families, or with the help of relatives; through trafficking networks or autonomously; with or without documents. The causes of youth migration are also varied and primarily include violence stemming from poverty or political conflicts, a critical lack of vital opportunities, and the possibility of reuniting with their migrant parents (Álvarez Velasco & Glockner, 2018). Studies of children’s migration are not new. Much of the literature in this subfield is shaped by Childhood Studies and has sought to give children their own voice and role in research and interpretative processes. Within the new migratory dynamics of South America, three specific issues have been addressed: the experience of children left behind in transnational families (Dreby, 2010; Herrera & Carrillo, 2005), their lives in the countries of destination, both inside and outside educational systems (Moscoso, 2011; Pavez, 2012b; Queirolo and Torre, 2005; Sanchez, 2013) and the experiences of “unaccompanied minors,” a term coined to express their vulnerability in situations of prolonged transit, a phenomenon especially present in the migration corridor of Central America/Mexico/United States (Alvarez Velasco, 2016; Menjívar & Perreira, 2019), but also increasingly frequent in Venezuelan migratory trajectories. Studies have shown that children rarely participate in their families’ migration decisions, and that families do not always represent safe spaces for them. Neither are young migrants’ rights safeguarded by either origin or destination states, despite laws that purportedly protect them.

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In this chapter, we analyse the more recent migration of young Venezuelan. We aim to understand their experiences in a particularly difficult social context such as Ecuador, a country that, in recent times, has gone through significant economic slowdown, stricter migration policies, and increasing xenophobic sentiment (Herrera & Cabezas, 2019). Furthermore, Venezuelan displacement has taken place both very rapidly and at a massive scale, such that institutional networks of social protection have been both unprepared and insufficient. Finally, migratory journeys were mostly made by land, and were long, exhausting, and risky, rendering these children extremely vulnerable. This chapter recounts Venezuelan children’s long journey along the Ecuadorian-Colombian border, as well as their first experiences of settlement in two Ecuadorian cities: Quito and Guayaquil. We place our analysis within the fields of Interpretive Sociology and Childhood Studies, in which childhood is defined as a social construct that acquires meaning according to its cultural, historical, and social contexts (Prout & James, 1990). In this approach, children are active subjects participating in determining their own lives (Moscoso, 2013; Pavez, 2012a) and giving meaning to their own actions. At the same time, children’s knowledge and experiences are constructed relationally and framed within constraining social structures. To understand these experiences, it is useful to break down the very etymology of the word “childhood.” According to Pavez, the Spanish word for childhood, infancia, “stems from the Latin infant, whose primary meaning refers to the inability to speak and defines înfâns or înfantis as those who have no voice” (Pavez, 2012a, p. 81). In this study, we focus on the experience of migrant children, challenging the ways in which social and political institutions, as well as adult-centric paradigms, have represented them. As Moscoso (2013) argues, “understanding children’s points of view on their migratory processes implies… breaking with the invisibility to which they have been subjected and represents a reaffirmation of their subjectivities and their forms of living in the present” (2013, p. 38). Such an interpretation of childhood requires understanding both its relational character and the implicit power relations in both the adult and institutional worlds in which children live. Family, in this sense, can be conceived as a fundamental unit in which children’s social and emotional reproduction is ideally guaranteed. Regardless of whether a family conforms to the structure or ideal of the nuclear family, it can be

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understood as a unit in which social and emotional reproduction can be fulfilled. As a social institution, families may be changed by power relations of gender and age, as well as by the meanings that family members in different positions of power attribute to their experiences. Finally, these processes can be affected and modified by migration (Herrera, 2013). The literature on children and migration points out that, although parents frequently say that safeguarding their children’s futures is the main reason for migrating, children themselves are seldom considered or informed when deciding whether, where, or why to migrate. As such, children’s experience in both travel and transit, as well as in settlement, are quite different from those of their parents. In fact, children as migrant subjects are often overlooked, often only providing analytical interest insofar as they form part of an apparently indivisible whole of the family unit (Moscoso, 2013; Pavez, 2012a). Our goal in this chapter is to explore the experiences of migrant children, beyond their representation as passive victims of difficult circumstances. We will examine not only their unique vulnerability, but also their individual narratives and their own interpretations of their situation. To do so, we must overcome an adult-centric gaze and instead adopt a viewpoint that focuses on migrant subjectivity and recognizes that children are not simply future adults, but individuals with their own meanings constructed from an entirely different cognitive universe (Moscoso, 2013; Pavéz, 2012a). By recovering the complexity and variety of their voices, desires, and expectations, we seek to offer a better understanding of the Venezuelan exodus, and to highlight the consequences that these displacements have on the lives of children. The chapter is based on research carried out in 2019, that focused on reconstructing the migrant trajectories of Venezuelan children and adolescents in Ecuador.1 The study examined three moments in these trajectories: the departure from Venezuela, the travel and transit to Ecuador, and the process of installation upon arrival. Testimonies were collected in the Ecuadorian cities of Quito and Guayaquil, from children who had been living in Ecuador for at least six months, and at most three years. These children were from both working-class and impoverished middle-class families. Although their social, educational, and cultural backgrounds varied, these families faced similar socio-economic situations of increasing vulnerability due to their lack of stable employment in low-paid jobs.

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By including a border city in our study, we sought to capture the perspective of children in transit to other countries such as Peru or Chile, two important destinations for Venezuelan migrants. Testimonies show the diversity of this transit, which can be made in just a day, but can also take several months, especially in the case of children travelling without their parents. Border transit is the context of greatest vulnerability for migrant children, though they are also exposed to different risks in the cities of their arrival. Further, their experiences are shaped by variations in the two host cities of study. According to recent perception studies, inhabitants of Quito are more hostile to foreigners than those of Guayaquil (Zepeda & Carrión, 2015). We also found that many children interviewed had relatives in other Latin American countries, in the United States, or in Europe. In several cases, families were spread throughout multiple different countries. This contributes to their ability to imagine further destinations beyond Ecuador, and to the perception that Ecuador may be a transitory destination. The methodology of the study combined semi-structured interviews with teenagers between the ages of twelve and eighteen, with focus groups and workshops with boys and girls between the ages of six and eleven, who produced primarily drawings and short stories. Twenty interviews with adolescents and four focus groups were conducted in three cities: Quito, Guayaquil, and Tulcán, on the northern border of Ecuador. In some cases, we included interviews of migrant mothers and fathers as well. The first section introduces general features of Venezuelan migration to Ecuador. We then present our findings, as these follow the migratory trajectory of children. We begin with children’s narratives regarding their lives in Venezuela prior to their migration, the decision to leave, and their relationships with relatives left behind. We then examine children’s perspectives of their travel, which they remember both as an adventure but also often a traumatic experience, as many encounter various instances of violence. Finally, we focus on their lives at the border and in the cities of Quito and Guayaquil. The conclusions reflect on migrant children’s narratives of both the hope for a new life and the suffering and violation of their rights.

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Venezuelan Migration to Ecuador Ecuador is the country with the third-largest Venezuelan population, after Colombia and Peru. The arrival of Venezuelan families began in 2015, and sharply increased in 2018. By December 2020, an estimated 432,000 Venezuelans reside in the country, approximately 21% of whom are under eighteen years old, and 11% under ten years old (R4V, 2020). As a whole, Venezuelan migrants are a rather young population, typically falling between twenty and forty-five years old and, in terms of gender, there are still slightly more men (52%) than women (48%). Recent studies have observed migrant families’ staggered journeys, with members spread to various destinations, many remaining separated for extended periods, from several months to years (Blouin & Freier, 2019; Herrera & Cabezas, 2019). Unaccompanied minors have also been reported, as many children and teenagers travel without their parents (Herrera, 2019; Selee et al., 2019). Ecuador’s migratory policies initially demonstrated a certain openness towards Venezuelan migration, favoring migrants’ entry and settlement. With increasing arrivals of migrants, however, restrictions were introduced in 2018, gradually culminating in the requirement for a visa to enter the country. Such measures drastically slowed the regular entry of migrants but may have increased instances of irregular entries and human smuggling (Blouin & Freier, 2019). Some studies have classified the Venezuelan exodus as a survival migration (Freier, 2018), as migrants not only seek better economic opportunities, but are in fact fleeing from pressing insecurity. Conditions of arrival and settlement, however, are also becoming increasingly fragile and insecure. Studies of the social and labour integration of migrants show that conditions of precarity and insecurity are not overcome in destination cities, but instead tend to be reproduced due to economic crises and growing xenophobia (World Bank, 2020). Labour markets in Quito and Guayaquil have deteriorated significantly over the past five years, creating difficult situations for migrant livelihoods. In short, Venezuelan migration represents a new and unanticipated phenomenon, due to its great speed, its massive scope, the high percentage of children involved, and the great difficulties that migrants encounter as they try to make ends meet. In what follows, we present young migrants’ perspectives on this fragile situation.

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Life in Venezuela and Departure Memories of life in Venezuela and the reasons for leaving are marked by a sense of the gradual deterioration of daily life. For many children, their parents’ lives in Venezuela had become a never-ending pursuit of basic needs such as food and medicine. But their families’ struggle for survival did not end with migration, and on the contrary has lasted throughout the journey and at their destinations. Amy is from Isla Margarita in Venezuela, and now lives in Guayaquil. She recounts the six months she stopped attending school and mostly spent time at home, while her brothers worked on figuring out how to get food. Over this period, her family decided how to leave the country. As she remembers her home and her family, Amy also expresses the deterioration of their living conditions: My dad built it when I was little. The house was big, with 3 rooms. I had my own room… and then everything changed. Before, there were more tourists, the island was full, we all went to the beach together, the house at Christmas was filled with gifts. And then, that all disappeared, everything changed; there was less food than before, sometimes we couldn’t get medicine. But I didn’t suffer so much because even though my family sometimes had, sometimes didn’t, we somehow figured it out.

Amy’s respiratory problems meant that she experienced the medicine shortage in Venezuela firsthand. Her older sister, who worked in up to four jobs at a time, was left penniless on one occasion when she had to buy antibiotics for both Amy and her son. Currently, the family regularly sends her father’s medication for his heart disease, as it is impossible to access the medicine in Venezuela. For many young boys and girls, leaving Venezuela was neither difficult nor surprising because it seemed that everyone was already leaving: their teachers had left, their neighbours had left, and their friends and family were in the process of leaving. Their own departure occurred as part of a large-scale exodus that naturalizes the vulnerability and difficulties they face. Francisca, for example, says she does not miss Venezuela. She is happy to have left, as all her friends were already in Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador. “(…) everything is expensive there, there was no one left, … everyone had already left.” With the gradual deterioration of daily life in Venezuela, intensified by insecurity and violence, Venezuelans generally began to socialize less

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and hold smaller family gatherings. Families focusing on survival became more atomized, as food shortages, lack of medicine, and economic insecurity affected sociability and confinement. On several occasions, children reported that before leaving Venezuela they already rarely left their homes, and even more rarely at night. A striking constant among teenagers interviewed was their sense of responsibility for other family members; many had become providers for their relatives in Venezuela. Rosa, sixteen, who has been panhandling in front of a church in the border city of Tulcán, plans to send money to her grandmother, her caregiver during her childhood. Similarly, Rocío, seventeen, feels that her departure from Venezuela ten months ago is justified if she can manage to support her family by sending money and medicine. Rocío lived in a popular neighborhood in Eastern Caracas, in a large house with her mother, father, and five brothers. She describes her decision to leave as follows: “(…) we no longer had money to eat, and there came a moment I realized I had to leave. I had to help my little brothers, especially the little ones, and also my parents.” Rocío considers her own migration as part of her family’s economic and eventual migratory strategy. We can see in these stories that migration is viewed as a forced process, but at the same time represents a hopeful opening of a path for a future with greater opportunity for themselves and for their families. The teenagers we interviewed are fully aware that there is little hope for a better life in the immediate future in their home country, and that Venezuelans have been forced to leave their country to survive. In this sense, although their memories are selective, they feel no regret for having left Venezuela. Younger children, in contrast, express how they miss their friends, their pets, and their grandparents. In contrast to the teens, young children had no input regarding their parents’ difficult decision. Their memories are more often about their experiences of the period of transit to Ecuador. In sum, young migrants represent their departure from Venezuela as an inevitable reality. They construct a coherent explanation of why they left and are fully willing to begin a new life project. Older youth remember the progressive deterioration of daily life in Venezuela, culminating in a lack of food. They see in migration hope for change, and value their parents’ or close relatives’ sacrifices for their migration. This helps them to cope with the sadness and longing they feel for abandoning their affective relations, their cultural surroundings, and the security of their homes.

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The Journey All those interviewed made their trips by land, even those from less impoverished social classes, and the journey is remembered with great intensity. Although there are relatively uneventful accounts, in which there are no major setbacks over the course of the five days it takes to travel from Venezuela to Ecuador pass, most accounts show the many different risks to which children are exposed. The vulnerability they experience depends on both their resources for the journey and whether or not they had official documents to travel. Rocío’s journey demonstrates both the uncertainty that surrounds travel with scarce resources, as well as collective strategies improvised along the way to cope with the journey’s risks. Rocío, seventeen, started her trip carrying her identity card and her birth certificate—uncommon among Venezuelan migrants—and travelled with her siblings, cousins, and friends, among others, in a group that at some points numbered up to twenty-three. Some stayed in Colombia, others followed the road to Peru. Most of the trip was by bus, but other legs of the trip were made in the back of cargo trucks—or “mules”—and still others on foot. While in Colombia they were assaulted by a group of men, who tried to sexually abuse her sister, but were prevented from doing so with the help of another group accompanying them. “I cried: ‘Let my sister go!’ We grabbed stones and threw them at the men. If we hadn’t thrown the stones, they would have killed my sister!”. In addition to this traumatic experience, Rocío also recalls the difficulty of the journey, during which they slept on the street and often went hungry. On several occasions, she felt sick: “I vomited many times, sometimes I’d get dizzy on the way. Then I’d sit down and I’d tell my sister, and she’d give me pills.” One of the constants throughout these stories is the solidarity between siblings, relatives, or even other travellers, and the care that emerges towards the most vulnerable. Several teenagers interviewed travelled without documents, as they were unable to obtain them in Venezuela, due to high costs and lack of time. These teens resorted to their wits or to bribery to cross borders. In Flavio’s words: I had problems with the guard because I came without papers, with nothing (…) They kept asking and asking, but I ignored them and went over there (…) They’d told me I couldn’t cross but [over there] I spoke to another guy who did let me through.

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Flavio describes entering Ecuador via an irregular path or “trail,” since he had no passport, or identity card, nor the permits that a minor requires from his parents to leave the country. So far, Flavio remains undocumented in Ecuador. With or without official documents, the journey can take several months, and can itself become a struggle for survival, as we can see in Rosa’s description of her trip. Rosa lived in Barquisimeto, in the state of Lara, with her two brothers—fourteen and nine—and her grandparents. Her mother had travelled to Peru in December of 2018, where she currently lives with her partner. Rosa’s boyfriend was the first to leave for Cúcuta to work as a “carruchero,” helping to load suitcases at the border crossing. He sent her a ticket to travel and some money. […] I came because I was in great need, I was pregnant… I am not happy to have left my country, but I’m doing it for my son’s future. If I didn’t have my son, I’d still be there with my family. Starving, but studying at high school… and I’d have my [graduation] photo.

Rosa left three months before finishing high school. She and her partner temporarily settled in Cucuta, where their baby was born in a public hospital after long hours of labour. Almost a month after her son was born, she convinced her boyfriend to continue the trip further South, to try to join her mother in Peru. Her partner, an eighteen-year-old boy had lost his job when the border closed: “He was no longer a carruchero, he was a trochero.2 Everything got more difficult, and he wasn’t earning as much as before. When the baby was born, we began to fall into debt.” The couple and their baby got help from the Red Cross to get to Bogotá: “From Bogotá, we took to Cali, from Cali to Popayán. From Popayán we walked a little, they gave us some things there for the baby. From there we made it to Pasto, and the next day we started up to Ipiales.” The most surprising aspect of Rosa’s story is her vast knowledge of migration routes and regulations, as well as of the organizations that support people on the move and how they work. She is nearly an expert, speaking properly on the procedures and situations she has experienced in her short sixteen years. Being a teenage mother is complex: on the one hand, it is Rosa’s greatest vulnerability; on the other hand, her early motherhood grants Rosa aid from international organizations and NGOs at the border. In that sense, when we asked her if she considered the experience of the trip to be different for men and women, she answered that

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her partner “was lucky to be travelling with me… because they helped us everywhere.” As a teenage mother, Rosa benefitted from greater personal and institutional protection than other migrants. At her young age, Rosa has naturalized her situation of extreme vulnerability: she sees her panhandling as a job by which she obtains resources for her child and her partner and her condition as a teenage mother presents entry into the public world of adults and institutions. In short, the different stories of the migratory journeys clearly demonstrate instances of violence, risk, and fragility. and uncertainties. In this hostile and uncertain journey, the border represents a particularly formidable moment, which could mean a blow to the migratory project.

Life at the Border Cases like Rosa’s are frequent in the city of Tulcán, where many Venezuelan migrants and their families remain waiting. They may be missing a document for the children, a parental permission, an identification card. All these are documents required for children to cross the border, in order to continue their trip to a different city in Ecuador. During this time at the border, teenagers often look for temporary jobs to fund the continuation of their journey. Such transit is not new to the inhabitants of Tulcán, who have seen thousands of Colombian refugees cross the border over the last twenty years, fleeing the country’s armed conflict. But the massive nature of Venezuelan arrivals took city officials, functionaries, and inhabitants by surprise, leading to xenophobic reactions in which migrants became scapegoats for local social problems. The association between migrants, contagion, and illness is striking, and even premonitory to the critical situation that migrants later faced during the spread of COVID-19. The association of Venezuelans with disease was strengthened by intervention from authorities who demanded, for example, that Venezuelan children be vaccinated when entering the country. In our visits to the boost of the Ministry of Health at the border, we found cases of children who had been vaccinated three times, in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. The prolonged period that children often spend at the border is illustrated by the case of sixteen-year-old Francisca, who yearns to reunite with her mother living in Peru. Upon reaching the Colombian-Ecuadorian border, she and her brothers were not allowed to cross without their parents’ permission. The Red Cross took up their case, and when we met

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Francisca, her mother was on her way from Chiclayo, Peru, to Tulcán. At the time of the interview, Francisca and her brothers had spent three weeks waiting on the bridge of Rumichaca. My mom sent for us, and we wanted to come to see my mom because we can’t take it anymore. We’re all thinking of her all the time, that’s why we decided to come.

Francisca anxiously waits for her mother, sitting on the side of the road to see her as soon as she arrives. She also spends time with her siblings looking for food, as the kits provided by support organizations are scarce, and insufficient for the whole group. Francisca often feels sick, possibly due to lack of food: “I feel dizzy, or get a headache (…) I go there [to the humanitarian aid tents] and sometimes they give me some pills.” In Peru, her father works painting cars and her mother cleans houses. Francisca knows that her life will not be the same, that she will no longer have a house with a patio, as they had in Barquisimeto, and that she will have to help her family. “When I finish my studies, I will start working with my mother and doing the same as she does: cooking, cleaning.” Francisca’s case shows how difficult family reunification can be, and the hazardous journeys undertaken by children separated from their parents. It also shows how the border can suspend peoples’ lives, keeping them in a sort of limbo. Finally, her story expresses the crude realism of a migrant teen who knows that a difficult working life awaits her in Peru. Rosa, who we learned above has survived panhandling in Tulcán for two months is in an even more indefinite limbo. Panhandling for twelve hours a day on the stairs of one of the main churches in Tulcán is the main source of income for Rosa’s young family. Thank God I always sat in front of that church. I was able to buy a phone, clothings for my baby. I wanted to buy a phone to be in touch with my family. I spoke with my grandmother. This week I made $50 and I am going to send it to my grandmother so that she can buy some food.

Not only has panhandling allowed Rosa to make ends meet, she has even made some friends, “especially ladies.” Despite the difficulties, Rosa does not rue this period in Tulcán:

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Some people treat me well, others look at me badly, but I don’t feel bad. Once, a lady told me that if they don’t have [money, jobs, food] for themselves, they will hardly have for us… she also asked me why I wasn’t going back to Venezuela to fight against Maduro… I told her that it’s not that easy… I’d rather take care of my son’s and my own lives.

Still, life at the border is perceived as a life of transit, as a limbo period of great uncertainty. There is hope and hopelessness at the same time. Likewise, “waiting” must be combined with survival strategies. When there is nothing left to eat, nowhere to sleep, or no resources to continue the journey, children seek life in the streets. Survival for these children can mean begging, child labour, and the risks of trafficking and labour exploitation.

Life in the City: Quito and Guayaquil Venezuelans have settled in different cities across the country, and even in certain rural areas, yet the majority of the Venezuelan migrants in Ecuador are in Quito and Guayaquil. We can distinguish certain socioeconomic profiles according to migrants’ period of arrival. Those who arrived prior to 2017 typically have higher or technical education, and have been able to enter the labour market with relative success. Some professionals are employed in businesses and warehouses in more residential and affluent areas of the cities. However, more recent migrants live in poorer sectors of the cities. Their presence in these areas has become conspicuous and generated tensions and even xenophobia. They usually work in street markets and informal trade sectors. Many children who arrived in the last year live in overcrowded conditions, in shared flats with family and friends. Some children spend long periods at home alone while their parents are at work. One of our attendees in the focus group in Guayaquil explained: I live with my two cousins, one is five and the other two, and also my sister, she is not really my sister but we grew up together, she is three… she is the daughter of my mother’s friend.

The families’ priority is work, and children tend to support the family by working. Some of them even spearheaded the migration of their entire

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family, and continue to support them. This is the case of Trinidad, who arrived in Quito at sixteen: […] this is an experience that I will never forget. The first thing was that I travelled alone, now I’m here and I have a job. I have worked very hard for my relatives, I’ve helped them. I’m the only one who feels great… thank God!

Children’s experiences in the cities generally fall into three categories. First, there are those who attend school. These are usually children from middle-class families, whose parents have been able to settle down. Second, there are children who are at school but also work several hours on weekends or in their free time, in the family business or with their parents in their jobs. Third are those children who are dedicated almost exclusively to work, generally in street commerce or panhandling, and have therefore halted or altogether abandoned their education. Panhandling, or begging, has become almost an organized system of employment for those who have recently arrived, or whose situation is more precarious. Although most of the children in the study see panhandling as a transitory and even shameful activity, others considered it a more permanent situation. Children play an important role in this activity, since they are featured prominently\in order to receive more sympathy from passersby. This activity even functions as the performance of families in transit, as panhandlers often display suitcases despite being fully established—even having permanent places of residence—in the city. This is the case of José (eighteen), who with his sister (sixteen) and his younger niece (ten months), sell candies and beg in downtown Guayaquil. This is the main source of income for this family, which has enabled them to rent a room in Mapasingue, a marginal urban neighbourhood. None of these teenagers are currently studying, although José finished high school, and his sister has two years left to finish. Despite being able to make ends meet in the cities where they live, these migrants often consider Quito and Guayaquil places of transition. They know that their families have had many difficulties settling down. Alina speaks about Quito, where she now lives: I have always seen it as a place where I am going to finish high school, so I can go somewhere else, and there I feel that I will be able to do more. I have never seen Quito as a definitive destination.

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Although their current conditions may be precarious, and survival and work are priorities over other types of personal and family projects, children have professional aspirations of all kinds: studying cinema, accounting, veterinary medicine, and gastronomy; while still others aspire to economic independence by setting up their own formal businesses. Venezuelan migrant children’s educational trajectories are complex, with issues not only of access, but also of permanence. It is difficult for children and teens to return to the educational system, as several spend long periods without schooling in their move and while their families settle with the priority of finding employment and housing. Many children and teens have chosen to work rather than attend school. School officials point out that for many migrant children, attendance and education is an itinerant affair; they leave school between school years, because of their continued mobility or limited economic conditions. Therefore, life for Venezuelan migrant youth in Quito and Guayaquil is a precarious experience. Even if temporary, the impacts of migrant youth’s high school dropout rates on their future must be further explored. Additionally, children experience xenophobia both at school and in the streets. Amy narrates her relationship with her classmates: “I like them all but one… who said that Venezuelans were disgusting.” One of her classmates, also Venezuelan, confronted this girl. Likewise, fifteen years old Bernardo, who helped his mother at work recounts: About a year ago... when we got here, my mother got a job at an ice cream parlor and I helped her there… I had to deliver some flyers at the entrance... once I tried to give a flyer to a man who didn’t want it and told me to ‘go back to your country, fucking Venezuelan.’

Another teen, José, comments that as he begs in the streets of Guayaquil with his sister Lucía and his little niece, they feel both solidarity and hostility from passersby: “Ignorant people who hang out around here make me angry, and I keep quiet, but I think: ‘I hope they never have to go through a situation like this’.” Finally, there are important gender differences that help to determine whether children feel welcome or rejected in their new places of residence. Some young women consider that there is more sexist violence in Ecuador than in Venezuela; Alina, for example, says she has not experienced xenophobic attacks in Quito, but is emphatic that as a woman she feels at a disadvantage to the Ecuadorian men who constantly harass her.

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Concluding Remarks As we have seen in this study. the narratives of Venezuelan children make visible a migration experience crossed by structural inequalities and poverty, as well as the lack of public networks of social protection, both are factors that prevent them from fundamental social and economic rights. Continual stories of child labour and exploitation, as well as mendicity speak for the structural violence to which these children are confronted due to their parent’s precarious situations. Indeed, as we have mentioned before, Venezuelan migrants are usually inserted in instable and insecure labour environments, which deeply affect their children’s social reproduction and welfare. Structural inequalities and the lack of resources from the part of the state to take care of social protection of both Ecuadorian citizens and migrants in part explain the strong limitations that children and their families encounter for social and economic integration in these three localities. In addition to that, constant changes in migration policies toward Venezuelans in Ecuador and the progressive deterring character of these policies greatly affect the path to obtain regular permits and to fulfil visa requirements, and this puts more uncertainty in the lives of children and their families. In that sense, the stories that we have heard are embedded in a context in which social and economic rights are actually not fulfilled despite the state’s formal recognition of these rights both in its Constitution as well as in legislation. Nonetheless, these narratives also show resilience and determination from the part of the children to achieve a better life. On the one hand, children are well aware of the implications that the economic, social, and political has have on their everyday lives. Thus, the decision to move somewhere else is not only accepted but wanted. On the other hand, home is represented as the place of affections and good memories. Besides, the emotions and perceptions of children vary greatly depending on where they find themselves. While children at the border are generally hopeful and confident that they are starting a new life, once they and their families have begun to settle in cities, they face other harsh realities, such as labour exploitation and xenophobia. Despite their increasingly diverse socio-economic origins, the daily reality of

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Venezuelan migrant children and teens is precarious. Their parents are forced into informal, unstable, and poorly paid jobs. Their diverse cultural capital is used mainly in hoping and imagining their future lives. Children whose parents were professionals in Venezuela, and whose integration has been less difficult in Ecuador, tend to imagine their life in other countries, and retain a hopeful vision of the future. Those with less cultural capital live day to day, concentrating their efforts on survival. In all cases, imagining the near or distant future is intricately linked to experiences of mobility, and is directly related to the collective experience of the Venezuelan exodus. In addition to that, children’s experiences are crossed by gender. Girls and boys confront different situations and also different risks. We found several stories in which teenage girls took care of their siblings during the risky journey they undertake to get to their current destination, usually when parents are absent. And care activities such as supervising school activities or feeding smaller children tend to endure once they settle in the cities due to their parents more extended workdays. Another particular situation that girls confront is early pregnancy which pushes them to enter the labour market in very precarious conditions perpetuating their already difficult circles of poverty. Besides, we also found that girls may also be exposed to sexual violence during their travels and fall into trafficking networks. Thus, sexual and reproductive rights need to be addressed in migration. Finally, children tend to reminisce about their homes in Venezuela, and the fact that they do not live in their own home in their current place of residence is central in their stories. A house represents stability and certainty. Many of these young migrants consider their immigration experience to be a period of change, in which a premature maturity has both allowed and forced them to appreciate issues they considered previously irrelevant. In recounting his trip and arrival in Ecuador, one boy said: “[…] at the same time that it’s like an adventure, it’s also a story that has marked my life.” But it’s difficult in the current situation to move forward, as the lives of many Venezuelan migrant children in Ecuador is still imbued with impermanence, with the very real possibility of leaving again at any moment. The narratives of these children show us the resilience of a population that faces migration marred by deep vulnerabilities. Their perspectives also show us how they maintain hope that migration will bring meaningful changes to their lives.

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Notes 1. This was part of a broader project on migrant children in four Latin American countries directed by Gioconda Herrera for CLACSO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. We wish to thank Carmen Bolivar, Gabriela Ruales for their work in collecting information for this project. 2. A person who helps migrants to cross the border through irregular paths called “trochas ”.

References Alvarez Velasco, S. (2016). Frontera Sur Chiapaneca. El muro humano de la violencia. Análisis de la normalización de la violencia hacia los inmigrantes indocumentados en tránsito. Universidad Iberoaméricana. Álvarez Velasco, S., & Glocker, V. (2018). Niños, niñas y adolescentes migrantes y productores del espacio. Una aproximación a las dinámicas del corredor migratorio extendido Región Andina, Centroamérica, México and U.S. Revista Entre Diversidades, 11, 37–60. Blouin, C., & Freier, L. F. (2019). Población venezolana en Lima: entre la regularización y la precariedad. In L. Gandini, F. Ascencio, & V. Prieto (Eds.), Crisis y migración de la población venezolana. Entre la desprotección y la seguridad jurídica en Latinoamérica (pp. 157–184). UNAM. Dreby, J. (2010). Divided by borders: Mexican migrants and their children. University of California Press. Freier, F. (2018). Understanding venezuelans displacement crisis. E-International Relations, 4. https://www.e-ir.info/2018/06/28/understanding-the-venezu elan-displacement-crises/. Herrera, G. (2013). Lejos de tus pupilas. Familias transnacionales y desigualdad social en Ecuador. FLACSO – Onu Mujeres. Herrera, G. (Eds.). (2019). Voces y Experiencias de la niñez venezolana en Colombia, Brasil, Ecuador y Perú. CLACSO. Herrera, G., & Cabezas, G. (2019). Ecuador: de la recepción a la disuasión. Políticas frente a la población venezolana y experiencia migratoria 2015– 2018. In L. Gandini, F. Ascencio, & V. Prieto (Eds.), Crisis y migración de la población venezolana. Entre la desprotección y la seguridad jurídica en Latinoamérica (pp. 125–156). Ciudad de UNAM. Herrera, G., & Carrillo, M. C. (2005). Los hijos de la migración en Quito y Guayaquil. In G. Solfrini (Ed.), Tendencias y efectos de la migración en el Ecuador. Vol. 3: La situación de los hijos e hijas de emigrantes (pp. 11–89). Imprefepp.

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Herrera, G., & Sorensen, N. (2017). Introducción. Dossier Migraciones internacionales en América Latina: Miradas críticas a la producción de un campo de conocimientos. Revista ICONOS, 58, 11–36. Menjívar, C., & Perreira, K. M. (2019). Undocumented and unaccompanied: Children of migration in the European Union and the United States. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45(2), 197–217. Moscoso, M. F. (2013). Biografía para uso de pájaros. Memoria, infancia y migración. Quito: Editorial IAEN. Pavez Soto, I. (2012a). Sociología de la infancia: Las niñas y los niños como actores sociales. Revista De Sociología, 27, 81–102. Pavez Soto, I. (2012b). ¿Quién decide la migración infantil? Niñez y poder en familias peruanas transnacionales. Rayuela, Revista Iberoamericana Sobre Niñez y Juventud En Lucha Por Sus Derechos, 5, 103–113. Prout, A., & James A. (1990). A new paradigm in the sociology of childhood: Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: New directions in the sociology of childhood. Falmer Press. Queirolo, P. L., & Torre, A. (2005). Il Fantasma delli Bande. Genova e I Latinos. Frilli and Fratelli Editore. Response for Venezuelans (R4V). (2020). Refugee and migrant response plan 2020. https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/country/docs/venezu ela/72254.pdf. Sanchez, C. (2013). Exclusiones y resistencias de niños inmigrantes en escuelas de Quito. FLACSO Ecuador. Selee, A., Bolter, J., Muñoz-Pogossian, B., & Hazán, M. (2019). Creatividad dentro de la crisis: opciones legales para inmigrantes venezolanos en América Latina. Policy Briefs, Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpol icy.org/research/opciones-legales-migrantes-venezolanos-america-latina. United Nations Children’s Fund. (2016). The state of the world’s children 2016: A fair chance for every child. UNICEF. United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF). (2019). Migration flows in Latin America and the Caribbean. Situation Report N°3. https://reliefweb.int/rep ort/colombia/unicef-migration-flows-latin-america-and-caribbean-situationreport-no-3-april-2019. Word Bank. (2020). Challenges and opportunities of the venezuelan migration in ecuador (p. 199). Washington DC: World Bank. Zepeda, B., & Carrión, F. (2015). Las Américas y el Mundo. Ecuador 2014. FLACSO, FES-ILDIS, BID and PNUD.

CHAPTER 10

Back and Forth: An Analysis of the Processes of Transnationalization of Women’s Work and the Internationalization of Early Childhood Policies in Uruguay Pilar Uriarte Bálsamo

It is our opinion that migrants are understood as individual actors in debates surrounding migration and development. They may be approached as individuals of particular sexes, colours and classes, but seldom as relational subjects embedded in larger social structures. Yet migration research has demonstrated how migration decisions, choice of destination, adaptation and incorporation, and transnational relations are linked with family ties and bonds, although not necessarily in harmonious or tension-free ways (Nyberg & Vammen, 2016, p. 193). What happens when these migrants are children or adolescents? How can we view their position in family units, their bonds of kinship, migration networks, and national systems through the lens of migration theory?

P. Uriarte Bálsamo (B) Universidad de La República, Montevideo, Uruguay © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_10

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How are the specific protection mechanisms for these people under eighteen linked to the debate on migration and development? Is it possible to connect both transnationalization processes, that is, children’s and adolescents’ rights and the increase in human mobility and female migration? What kind of ties do we find in that intersection? We think of childhood as a particular moment in the course of life and as independent from the economic and political dimensions of the analysis of social issues. In this imaginary, children are or should be sheltered from the various forms of material and symbolic violence that make up our societies. This notion of childhood has led to the creation of specific protection mechanisms that are part of the international protection system, incorporated into binding conventions and treaties among countries. This process of globalization of regulations and, therefore, particular notions about childhood leads to specific manifestations in national legislations. These, in turn, address local conceptions and practices about what children are and how they should be protected. These popular conceptions may be distant from or even opposed to regulations (Fonseca, 2006; Leinaweaver, 2012). The Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1989 set in motion processes of adaptation of domestic laws. In 1990, Brazil became a pioneer in the region as it enacted the Statute of the Child and Adolescent. Uruguay adopted the Code on Children and Adolescents in 2000. At the same time and since the 1990s, neo-liberalization processes in Latin America have increased inequalities. This has led to greater human mobility in the region and global labour chains seeking to reduce production costs through precarious work. Although children and adolescents have their rights guaranteed by national and international regulations, they are directly affected by various forms of violence and insecurity—extreme, in some cases. One of the specific manifestations of this process is the possibility, or lack thereof, of exercising the right to live in a family and a community, as part of the processes of integrating global chains of women’s work. Globalization processes are varied and complex, encompassing various intertwined dimensions that may seem unrelated at first. Formal analyses focus on production chains and the movement of goods, as well as on the impact of capital transnationalization on national sovereignties. In this chapter, we adopt a different standpoint: we perceive these processes within various forms of transnationalization of imaginaries and

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expectations, addressing market integration and political, demographic, and cultural processes. Therefore, we aim to address the interaction between two processes. The first involves the formation and integration of regional circuits of human mobility that have increased in recent decades, integrating the feminization of migration into global chains of precarious work. The second process involves the establishment of childhood policies and their intersection with the concept of migrant children in Uruguay, regarding the creation of international systems to protect rights. We seek to understand how human mobility and policies for the protection of children and adolescents interact in a specific context, focusing on the experience of transnational families built between Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. To this end, I reread studies conducted in Montevideo among migrant women and their families to understand how neo-liberalization and transnationalization processes in Latin America have affected the experience of children, adolescents, and their families, in situations of international mobility. This chapter is structured in three sections. In the first section, we present the Uruguayan migration context, the process of integration of the country into regional human mobility dynamics, along with its local interpretation; producing a national/nationalist point of view of processes that can only be explained from a regional and global standpoint. In this local interpretation, migrant children have a specific and prominent place, since they are directly connected with narratives of national identity. In the second section, we present the link between migratory circuits’ integration processes and the inclusion of global chains of feminized work: care, sex work, and domestic work. We shall point out how the intersection of matrices of oppression creates extremely precarious forms of social integration. Finally, in the third section, we analyse how the Uruguayan state has responded to these forms of violence against children and adolescents that are part of families in a mobility situation in light of the country’s early childhood policies and migration and family reunification regulations. It is based on the concepts of transnational family and movement of children that we seek to understand the mobility dynamics of children, their mothers, and families as strategies to respond to the forms of reproduction of global economic and social inequality.

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Local Interpretations and Transnational Perspectives on Mobility The history of Latin America has been deeply marked and configured by human mobility processes to, from, and across the continent. In recent decades, regional mobility processes have increased, resulting in the socalled South-South migration system (Bengochea, 2018). In this context, integration and movement among countries in the American continent have increased, as described in the ICREMI report (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Organization of American States, 2015). This implies a significant exchange of people between two or more countries, who stay there long enough to build social, political, and economic ties (Pellegrino, 2000). Stricter migration controls and restricted access to Europe and the United States have been identified as significant drivers of South-South migration systems in the region (Ariza, 2004). Uruguay has historically participated in these circuits of human mobility as an immigrant-sending country. Between 1963 and 2009, there was a clear negative trend in the migration balance lasting almost half a century, with a current estimate of between 10 and 15% of the total population residing abroad (International Organization for Migration, 2011). Europe and North America hold a prominent position in the imaginary of Uruguayan emigration; however, neighbouring locations such as Buenos Aires, and to a lesser extent, Brazilian cities, have historically been the main emigration destinations (Pellegrino, 2000). This is not exclusive to Uruguay: migration systems in Latin America have more significant movement between countries that share borders. This is changing, as migration routes now include different scales and less linear displacement patterns. Nowadays, many Latin American countries have a dual role in the migration system, as both senders and receivers of population. From the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a greater integration of the Caribbean and southern Latin American migration systems, with migration circuits connecting Argentina, Chile, and Caribbean countries. The Dominican Republic is a particular case, as it is both a sender and receiver of population in the region, with a high flow of population sent to the United States. These destinations have recently diversified to include Spain (Ariza, 2004) and the Southern Cone (International Organization for Migration/Argentinian Commission for

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Refugees and Migrants, 2015; Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2017; Rodríguez, 2012). Since 2009, Uruguay has changed its role in mobility circuits from a purely sending country to a transit and settlement country for migrants. In 2009, after almost fifty years with a negative migration balance, more people entered the country than those that left it. The migration balance has reversed due to decreased emigration pressure, the return of Uruguayans, and the sustained increase in immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean (Koolhaas, 2016). The proportion of Latin American migrants from countries not bordering with Uruguay tripled in the 1996–2011 period. The Dominican population began this transformation, followed by Venezuelans and Cubans (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2017). As of 2015, the Dominican Republic’s migration flow has decreased significantly because, in mid-2014, the Uruguayan state unilaterally decided to require Dominican citizens to apply for a visa to enter the country. Additionally, neighbouring Brazil and Argentina also implemented visa requirements. In 2017, Venezuelan citizens received the highest number of residence permits granted annually, thus halting a historical trend. For the first time, Argentina was not the country whose citizens were granted the most permits. In 2017, 3.271 residence permits were granted to Venezuelans and 2.225 to Argentinians; the trend continued in 2018, with 5.448 residence permits granted to Venezuelans, and 1.484 to Argentinians (Secretaría de Derechos Humanos, 2018). The Migration Act (No. 18250) is the main factor that explains the increase in the number of people entering the country. In force since 2008, this law establishes equal rights for all the inhabitants of the national territory, regardless of their migratory status. This law has several features that explain the country’s changing migration patterns: it is a modern “model law” regarding human rights and migration management, as it protects people’s rights. Jointly with universal public policies, such as access to health and education, this law is essential in shaping the new demographic context (Uriarte, 2020). Alleged characteristics of the Uruguayan State, assimilated to a social welfare state in comparison to (the absence of) the State in the country of origin, are seen as decisive when people “choose” to migrate to Uruguay. Indeed, the Migration Act sets forth an open and protective framework for human mobility (Novick, 2011).

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This transformation in the national laws/legislation is considered a local process; furthermore, in the collective imaginary, it is associated with Uruguay’s modernist political class and the cosmopolitan leanings of our society. However, as we take a regional perspective, we can also see that this transformation process is connected to the internationalization of migration policy discourses. Far from the idea of policy management, the notion of “civic engagement” is understood here as a socio-political process that results from the different actions and legitimation processes developed by international agencies and national States in public policies. It also results from the different participation strategies deployed by some civil society organizations, such as immigrant organizations, human rights bodies, and ecclesiastical institutions (Domenech, 2008, p. 54). This transformation is linked to the internationalization of migration policy in several ways, not only regarding the action of international agencies, but also the responses of social movements fighting for migrants’ rights and for the construction of a “migration agenda.” This has been caused by increased mobility restrictions, border control, and the tightening of repressive measures in countries of destination. This context explains the drafting of the Migration Act as an intense process of political participation involving social movements fighting for migrants’ rights in Uruguay. This interpretation is consistent with and complementary to the idea that this was a transnational process, which does not mean that Uruguay’s legislation is unique or exceptional, but rather that what is essential is its articulation and integration into international guidelines. On the other hand, there is a collective logic that interprets the increase in migratory flows as a Uruguayan phenomenon. This is directly linked to older identity narratives based on the idea of a country built by European immigrants during the nineteenth century. However, neither now nor then can we interpret changes in mobility dynamics and the more significant number of people entering the country compared to those leaving as national phenomena. The idea that Uruguay is a good country to which to migrate is reinforced by a success-obsessed and strongly assimilationist interpretation of integration processes, built from the experience of the people who settled in the country successfully, but ignoring cases of return and transit to other countries. Once again, this strengthens the rational and individual explanations for international mobility processes. However, this does not appear to be the case if we analyse the data relating the national population to the migrant population at present.

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Many people believe that full access to rights as provided by law and the path to social inclusion is hampered mainly by the types of integration into the labour market. The Continuous Household Survey data show that migrants face more significant difficulties accessing employment and suffer more from informality and overqualification (Prieto et al., 2016). Although this population has lower unemployment than the total population, they suffer worse working conditions and find it challenging to match the types of occupation available to them with their educational and professional paths. Individuals from countries such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela show the greatest mismatches between their qualification level and their occupation; their overqualification rates are higher than those of the totality of recent migrants and significantly higher than those of the total population. This impacts women much harder than men (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2017, p. 65). Employment patterns are practically identical for men and women, as well as unrelated to previous work or educational paths. They face long working hours and rotating shifts, and are usually employed in night shifts and jobs with the poorest working conditions. Despite these common characteristics, the labour market is strongly segmented in terms of gender, built around job needs at the destination country. Men and women occupy different labour niches that are consistent with a traditional division of roles. Between 2009 and 2015, the migrant population had higher levels of poverty than the native population. For migrants from non-border Latin American countries, the situation is exacerbated: they have the highest overall poverty levels, with an unusual incidence among women aged between sixteen and sixty-four. These women have a 16.2% poverty prevalence, six percentage points higher than native or non-migrant women in general. In Uruguay, poverty has been directly linked, in terms of incidence, intensity, and severity, to the presence of children in households, and it has been even higher than the rates in households made up of older adults (Arim & Vigorito, 2007). Migrant children or children of migrants from Latin American countries other than Argentina and Brazil suffer the most, with poverty rates above the natives’, whose levels are already too high compared to the rest of the population (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2017, p. 51). Although these indicate the exclusion of the migrant population and the specific impact on women and their families, the national narrative

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continues to place migrant children or children of immigrants as privileged actors at the core of social inclusion processes. They bear the burden of the assimilation processes, and if they fail, they bear the moralization and guilt inflicted on them.

Gendered Globalization and Feminization of Migration Globalization is a gendered social process that builds on, exploits, and— naturally—reproduces pre-existing gender asymmetries (Mahler, 1998). The processes of transnationalization of production create demand for a female labour force, favouring more flexible recruitment and poor working conditions. At the same time, globalization has reactivated traditionally female labour markets: domestic work, care, and sex work. If in the first case, the feminization of precarious work involves the relocation of capital to areas with “more advantageous” working conditions, in the second case, it involves the transfer of bodies—the labour force—to the place where demand is located (Ariza, 2004). Federici (2015) highlights the essentiality of women’s unpaid household work for the production of the labour force and the global capitalist system. The global restructuring of work organizes the inclusion of female work outside the household in different directions. For women in receiving societies, it involves developing life projects linked to political, economic, and social participation, disconnecting from the ideas of women, family, and the home. For migrant women, entering the labour market involves long-distance movements across national borders to perform social reproduction activities that local men and women fail to do. Migrant women’s entry into the labour market is built around feminized activities, which are now commodified but had an invisible economic value when women in the family did them. Female migration also entails the restructuring of family and domestic routines in the place of origin, where other women take on performing the necessary reproductive and care tasks. The existence of women in the country of origin who can take over these tasks enables or hinders the migration project; while female migration to enter feminized labour markets with a minimal exchange value sustain—invisibly and to a large extent—the current global system (Hochschild & Russell, 2003; Sassen, 2003). Therefore, gender is a structuring category for the entire migration process, from decision-making, the journey, possibilities and

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difficulties in the country of origin, to how opportunities are or are not accessed in the society of destination, including also the social and economic structures that make up migratory circuits. The naturalization of social constructions that associate domestic work, reproduction, care and sex work with the female gender involves a level much greater than that of the women themselves or their projects: it entails the overall structure of the feminized labour market. In this regard, Gregorio (2012) emphasizes that while we need to recognize the heterogeneity, diversity and inequality that fall into the category of “women”, and the power relations it entails—as has been recognized by different forms of black and decolonial feminisms—the feminist struggle must not focus solely on this claim, but on deconstructing the association between the feminine, care tasks, and social reproduction. To understand the specificities of female migration processes, we must analyse how they relate to family structures and responsibilities traditionally assigned to women. This includes recognizing women’s agency and the possibility of deconstructing the male representations of the “migrant worker” that are usually associated with migration. Furthermore, feminist criticism implies breaking away from the category of “woman” as a homogeneous construction and integrating the heterogeneity of social positions where women, in addition to being gendered, are racialized and permeated by senses of belonging and categories of class, nationality, and various forms of culturalism (Gregorio, 2012). Migration implies renegotiating gender roles (González & Delgado, 2015), which does not necessarily mean ending inequalities or transitioning to more egalitarian forms. In many cases, it can deepen and create new asymmetries, but it always disorganizes/reorganizes the scenario in which gender roles are built, bringing together close and distant social and geographical contexts. Given these transformations, we can ask ourselves about the place of children in family relations. Restructuring gender roles implies transformations and tensions in domestic arrangements, and in many cases, children become the “bargaining chip” in negotiations. The concept of transnational family has been central in the analysis of migration and gender, side by side with the notion of global chains of care and affection. Based on the association between the role of women, care and (biological and social) reproduction, the global displacement of women raises the question of the families that these women can (or cannot) build, support, and provide for remotely. Transnational families are defined at the same time as a form of “social reproduction across

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borders” and as “families that live separated from each other for some or most of the time, yet still remain together and create a feeling of collective welfare and unit” (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002). Research on this topic is vast and has been critically reviewed through two vital points that are common to many of these analyses; on the one hand, by considering them as harmonious units, idealizing family arrangements that can create tension, over-responsibility, guilt and frustration among all or some of their members. Furthermore, the roles of woman/mother and woman/caregiver have been associated in a kind of unavoidable maternal vocation that leads all migrant women to send remittances to their families and to support them from a distance, invariably forging this type of bond (Gregorio, 2012). The analysis of motherhood has gradually enabled the inclusion of other actors, bringing together the study of fatherhoods and transnational childhoods. We are now beginning to focus on the role of sons and daughters in the creation and maintenance of transnational family configurations. Not all the children that are part of transnational families are so because their parents have migrated: they may migrate themselves. Besides, they have begun to be considered actors within family negotiations and not merely passive subjects, recipients of care and material resources (Nyberg & Vammen, 2016). Opening our eyes to these “new” actors does not mean abandoning our concern for gender or renouncing a feminist approach; on the contrary, it complicates how each person is positioned in power, economic and affective relationships that make up kinship ties and the social reproduction of life. It also involves paying attention to local specificities and how gender and generational relationships are built in each research context and not only from the opposition between local and transnational families. The feminization of global migration flows and the feminized nature of migration in Latin America have been documented, and are linked to how neoliberal processes have impacted the continent. The region has one of the highest female-to-male ratios among migrants (Bengochea, 2018). In Uruguay, migration flows from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Venezuela have been characterized in official and academic discourses as “new” Latin American origins. One of their main features is the high number of women. Representations on national origins and gender, associated with specific forms of racism, ethnic affiliations and moralities, are constructed in opposition to the last century’s migrations,

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thus consolidating their novel nature. The female nature of contemporary migration destabilizes the representation of “the migrant”, as well as how the processes of integration/assimilation into Uruguayan society are projected, imagined around the marriage of migrant males to native females (Pi, 2005). Statistical data indicate that the male-to-female ratio is slightly higher among Uruguay’s migrant population. However, feminization refers not only to these percentages, but also to how women shape their migration projects, with significant degrees of autonomy and through female solidarity networks, both in the countries of origin and destination. Focusing on female agency does not imply ignoring or marginalizing males, as they are also part of human mobility processes. On the contrary, it is precisely by considering the role of men in the representations of migration and gender—as well as the specific forms of domination, negotiation and resistance to the patriarchal order—that it is possible to think of migrations as female. In Montevideo, migrant men and women socialize in the same daily spaces. Regardless of their networks at the country of origin and of how they arrived in the country, people of various origins share public and domestic spaces nurtured by residential segmentation and other mechanisms of exclusion in the receiving society. Temporalities, projects, family spaces, joys and everyday hardships are shared. They live in a world inhabited by people of different ages, national origins, life and migration journeys; worlds the Uruguayan society scarcely relates to, if at all. In everyday life, men and women experience different situations of discrimination in social interactions, as well as forms of structural and institutional exclusion in their relationship with state agencies. Women, in particular, sustain many of the systematic types of violence that, by action or omission, society and the state inflict on the migrant population. Women migrants are the target of specific situations of violence: harassment at work, gender-based violence in public and private spheres, heavier domestic workload, as well as responsibility and guilt for the family unit left behind. The problem of access to housing and its most common solution for migrants—rooming houses or pensiones, in Spanish—is one of the main drivers of violence and exclusion affecting migrant men and women in the city (Fossatti & Uriarte, 2017). Rooming houses are a quick housing solution which is relatively easy to access, although not necessarily low cost. Appalling conditions are the other side of this ease of access: the

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construction and health situation, the danger of collapse, poor hygiene and pests. Rooming houses also present complicated dynamics of coexistence: overcrowding, lack of privacy, various forms of harassment (abusive and arbitrary rates based on ethno-racial and nationality criteria), and many cases of violence aimed directly at immigrants (xenophobic and racist insults). The situation is worse for children, as their presence increases conflict. Landlords explicitly prohibit the presence of minors. Excuses about potential noise or discomfort conceal an interest in higher economic returns per room or square metre, as well as fear of being penalized by the authorities, as they might be stricter if there are irregularities and illegalities involving minors. Many women report that their situation becomes exceptionally complicated with children, whether they are born in the country or if they are children and adolescents who migrated to join their families. Harassment, persecution and intimidation of minors and the women responsible for them become daily matters. We frequently hear stories of mothers who spend their working hours continually worrying about how their children are doing at home until they return, or who are desperate to find another home where they are not constantly harassed. Family units with children are the first to be threatened with eviction. They are the most vulnerable to this possibility, as it becomes harder to find another rooming house, which leads to higher prices. In contemporary migration to Uruguay, a significant number of women had their own and a collective migration project at the same time, which took them away from their families, sons, daughters and partners, if they had them. They arrived in a country that considers itself open to migrants but which was not open in their case. The difficulties they experience feature profusely in their stories. Many bear the responsibility of supporting the household in their country of origin. Women who left their children behind when they migrated find it very difficult to bring them to Uruguay. In addition to the costs of tickets and documentation, the arrival of children and adolescents is hampered by the visa requirements implemented in August 2014. Dominican and Cuban citizens, regardless of their family, personal and age status, must apply for a visa with high requirements, which directly limits the exercise of the right to family reunification (Uriarte, 2020). Women who manage to bring their children despite the administrative restrictions imposed by visa regulations must devise strategies to reconcile their reality as migrant workers with scarce family networks, limited

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housing security and the difficulty of managing working hours with care and upbringing tasks. Therefore, many Dominican and Cuban women living in Montevideo find it very difficult to establish or reunite their families. On the one hand, it is challenging to care for and raise their children in the social context and housing conditions they live in. On top of this, there are the long work days, low wages and the high cost of living in the country. These elements combined make it impossible for migrant-labour projects to coexist with motherhood. Families are formed within a geographical and symbolic space between the country of origin and Uruguay. This space includes bonds of affection and support built through means of communication, remittances and other forms of daily exchanges between people who are sometimes very close and other times, very distant. These transnational families are not only created when women leave the country and their children stay. Conversely, many children leave their mothers’ place of birth and residence to meet their siblings, grandmothers, and the entire family context, thus strengthening and making the transnational family fabric even more complicated, based on particular dynamics of movement of children (Fonseca, 2006).

Transnational Childhoods: Between Invisibility and Culturalism The theoretical problematization of migrant childhood(s) is an area of research and implementation of public policies different from the place of women/gender within migration theory. As in the case of women, it is not a matter of including a new actor—children and adolescents— in the analysis of migration processes and their protagonists; instead, it involves adding a specific topic—human mobility or child migration— to the issues of children and adolescents. Childhood and adolescence, defined as per chronological criteria, specify a moment in the life cycle with specific protection needs, which being defined according to the international rights system, aims to be universal in its scope. The agendas on children and adolescents are now beginning to include their global displacement in the context of family migration or outside their immediate reference unit, as well as issues related to potential family reunification (especially with mothers at their country of destination) (Instituto de Políticas Públicas en Derechos Humanos del MERCOSUR, 2016). In this field, which is strongly influenced by notions of rights and

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with a significant degree of institutionalization, the presence of migrant women, with their children, has undermined some of the assumptions on which human rights protection rests. Migration disperses, diversifies and deconstructs children and adolescents’ naturalized units of belonging and their natural environments: their family and country of origin. More than any other family category, the independent migration of children or “unaccompanied minors” shows the complex relationship between impulses to protect children (for example, from trafficking networks) and to protect receiving societies from increased immigration pressure (Nyberg & Vammen, 2016, p. 202). In the historically naturalized links between the feminine, the domestic, the family and children, public concern for motherhood and the bond with the children left behind and those born in the country is one of the two main factors that make female migration a major issue, together with work and sexual exploitation. Children belonging to families facing mobility are ambiguously characterized by the Uruguayan society culturally, administratively and legally, as migrant children, children of migrants, Uruguayans and/or foreigners. The definitions and actions taken regarding the “problem” they represent must be analysed by including the transnationalization of early childhood protection actions and the international system of law and protection. However, each specific national and regional context “adapts” these definitions according to local administrative traditions. Migration processes must articulate these local concepts with other ways of building childhoods and families. In Uruguay, early childhood care is one of the local pillars of these transnational policies. These policies combine notions regarding rights and full development at this stage of life, with proposals for improving the integration of women into the labour market. The first initiatives of this kind have been underway since the 1990s, with an especially strong momentum since 2005. This involved Uruguay’s adoption of the general work proposal of international agencies, such as UNICEF, around the concept of the “first 1,000 days of life”.1 In sum, they propose that the first three years of life are the foundation for the development of healthy human beings, or the cause of different forms of intellectual, emotional or organic deficit; depending on whether or not affective and nutritional needs are addressed. A range of programmes including the development of healthy recipe books and guides for good care practices, the nationwide deployment of teams dealing with problematic situations surrounding the care or upbringing of young children, the universalization of pre- and

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neo-natal checks and the construction of public educational centres for children aged three months to three years, are some examples. During 2017 and 2018, we conducted a study to understand the way transnational families were deployed (Ariza, 2004; Gregorio, 2012; Nyberg & Vammen, 2016) as they established networks of movement of people, care, and economic resources between the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Uruguay (Uriarte & Urruzola, 2018). This project results from the concern of educators and other operators of early childhood care centres who, in various formal and non-formal instances of institutional coordination, stated that Dominican children “were leaving”. Specifically, many infants between eight and twelve months old registered in the care centres stopped attending because their mothers decided to send them to the Dominican Republic with a family member or friend, or did not return after spending a holiday season “at home”. These situations were conveyed by the educators with great concern, as they feared the real fate of these children. However, they also presented varying degrees of misunderstanding and criticism towards these mothers: detachment, irresponsibility, lack of gratitude to the centre’s staff, were frequently mentioned. These educators did not analyse the women’s precarious working and housing conditions, or the scant public support; instead, they explained this behaviour of “sending babies” through “cultural elements”, what we shall call culturalist arguments. Agrela (2004) analyses the Spanish case and proposes that migrant women tend to be imagined and represented in particular roles by operators of state programs. They are expected to ensure family unity, and at the same time are seen as fragile subjects or victims of individuals—in situations of gender-based violence—or criminal groups—in trafficking and sexual exploitation. Migrant women represent extreme otherness, interpreting the processes of exclusion as an effect of their culture, not of social and economic conditions. The ways immigrant women are conceptualized are complex, ambiguous, general, abstract. Sometimes complementary and sometimes exclusive, they also reflect the contradictions—economic, political, ideological—that appear when dealing with migration (Agrela, 2004, p. 34). In this study, in particular, various discourses linked to the women accepting their partner’s male chauvinist attitudes or stating that it was impossible to maintain stable affective ties were presented as “cultural characteristics” of migrant women. The educators mentioned the extreme cultural gap between Uruguayan mothers and migrant mothers

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by focusing on the fact that migrant women send their children to their country of origin. Simultaneously, civil society organizations had identified this situation as well, but with different concerns and diagnoses. The children’s fate did not appear as a concern because the direct and daily contact that their mothers had with them and their mothers, sisters, or other women to whom they had entrusted their care cleared any possible doubts regarding trafficking or any other form of abuse. The problem was then built around the difficulty these women had to keep their children in the context of very precarious working and living conditions. The lack of care services compatible with having a job made it impossible for migration and family projects to coexist, and structural gender inequality was twice as heavy for these women, being workers, migrants and mothers. It also violated the rights of children to a family and community coexistence—the rights of those who should be a priority for society, public policies, and the legal system. Like any other interpretation of reality, this interpretation of the mobility of young children, based on the scarcity of services, also includes representations, images, and general discourses that lead to generalizations on who migrant women are (Urruzola, 2019). These representations, however, were built around the limitations, impossibilities, and shortcomings by concealing the positive side of the dynamics of movement of and caring for children among women from the same social network—even miles away. Indeed, field research found that many children of migrant mothers born in Uruguay travel with their fathers, a family member or a friend to the Dominican Republic or Cuba, on average, when they are six months old. Contrary to the educators’ ideas of detachment, these women showed a strong bond with their children, both those born in Uruguay who were sent “home”, and those who remained in their country when the women migrated. These educators’ arguments were dismissed by hundreds of photos, audio clips and anecdotes, sent mainly by maternal grandmothers, privileged recipients of their daughters’ children (Uriarte & Urruzola, 2018). Furthermore, the absence of a social context enabling women with children to enter the labour market—either through co-responsibility for care or through real support from public services—is by no means a problem for women in mobility. So why did migrant families/women not make use, as did local families/women, of those childcare services?

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One of the elements identified in the study was precisely the specificity of female migration. Unlike native women, these women were at a great distance from their family environment and from the care and reproduction strategies of the households they comprise, along with other women with whom they would implement care strategies if they lived together. In Uruguay, the entire early childhood care system is based on the idea that there is at least one adult, ideally the mother; but failing that, another woman, available full-time, to meet the demands of the child and the education system. Nevertheless, this is not only the case in Uruguay. As they claim to protect the “best interests” of children and adolescents, these early childhood care policies respond to global concerns, objectives and implementation models that remove children from their social, family, and cultural context (Fonseca & Cardarello, 1999). The main caretaker (a woman) and the family become the contexts that provide the necessary conditions for the emotional, intellectual, and physical development of children. The family context, the working conditions of mothers, women, or other significant adults are not necessarily considered independent from the children’s development conditions. These women believe that the programs merely aim to train them to provide care and stimulation, without integrating them as subjects of rights. Under these conditions, children’s access to these services depends on the presence and availability of a family member who is responsible for the child. Women/mothers face two options: to pay for another person (again a woman or a private centre attended to by women) to take over the task or to assign at least one person from the family unit who must then neglect their own work or education. The most impoverished sectors of the country, with the youngest population and the highest birth rates, also have the highest number of unemployed women. For migrant women, however, leaving the labour market contradicts the original intention of their decision to migrate. Remittances become a priority, as these women aim to enter a more robust labour market than that of their country of origin. The very imbalance of economies that makes the migration project feasible creates the difficulty of having to exclusively allocate the tasks of care and reproduction of social life to members of the family unit who could be working, in a context with a much higher cost of living than in the country of origin. However, this response alone did not seem to fully explain the complexity of the senses and intentions given to the mobility of young children. The dynamics of transfer, placement and movement of children,

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whether within a few metres in a city or a neighbourhood, or at greater distances that involve more permanent displacements, can be analysed as strategies to optimize the resources available for the care of new generations. The economic asymmetries between the sending mother/family and the receiving mother/family characterize the forms of transfer of children, which mainly seek to alleviate the economic burden of child rearing in the family unit. However, movement dynamics go far beyond the optimization of unidirectional resources (giving/receiving families), also considering the ever-present economic dimension. In various cultural contexts, the movement of children has been described as a way of building or strengthening ties and forging reciprocity either at present or in the long run. By observing cohabitation, redistribution of resources, exchanges of affection and everyday life, we can see how family and kinship ties defeat distances, but also recognize and seek to eliminate them. Children in a community can be considered a valuable resource, and by entering the game of everyday social and economic exchanges, they can subvert these asymmetrical relationships. As Fonseca (2006) shows in her work with low-income families in Porto Alegre, children move around not only out of necessity, but also of their own free will; as a way to strengthen or build kinship among people in the same network, or to solve tensions within a household. In this case, and in general for research on transnational families formed due to migration processes, these asymmetries are created differently from other movement dynamics. In such cases, migrant mothers lack the necessary availability or human resources to raise these children but can transfer the economic resources needed to pay for their care. Asymmetries between regional economies and global financial systems come into play at this point. The proactive and creative dimension that also appears (although not exclusively) in these movement dynamics was utterly missing from almost all the receiving society’s explanations about the movements and mobility of the children we analysed. The children’s departure was always posed as a “problem” to be solved or corrected because of specific shortcomings in early childhood care services or negative characteristics assigned to these mothers. Several elements are at stake in this construction of child mobility as a problem. First, the specificity of children as incredibly fragile and vulnerable subjects of rights, linked to the idea of the best interests of children and adolescents in individualising moulds, disconnected from

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their collective heritage. Second, essentialising the mother–child affective bond as a unique, irreplaceable, and sufficient bond in itself, to the detriment of or in opposition to other possible ones, such as the bond between siblings, with grandmothers and other relatives and with the community of reference. The possibility that these displacements could be positive, desirable for mothers, children and the immediate familiar and social context (always within inequality on multiple scales) only arises when all these strongly naturalized associations begin to fall apart.

Concluding Remarks We would now like to go back to the questions that led to this text. As presented, we continue to hold the view that all decisions around migration include an element of individual and collective decision and an element of contextual factors that lead to migration. Women are unable to find available early childhood education centres (as these are inevitably running at full capacity), or these centres cannot respond to time flexibility demands, or even succeed in covering a significant part of their working hours. As a consequence, they send their children to their grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and other women in the country of origin, where the availability of care providers is much higher and child-rearing costs are lower. Under the current constitutional system, these children are Uruguayan, and having their passports from birth, they can enter and leave the country freely. These young citizens, their fates, and their reasons to travel are invisible to the Uruguayan state. Therefore, the two most visible programmes, the CAIF Plan and the CAPI Centres, aimed at protecting and encouraging early childhood development, fail in their primary objective: to turn the State towards the most vulnerable sectors of society, providing the necessary conditions for the full development of very young children and detecting “deviations” early along that path. Despite the specificities of this stage in life, girls and boys are no different from adults and young people in the community. Transit between Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, but also Brazil, Spain, Chile, or the United States, is ongoing. All the conversations include someone coming or someone leaving, whether to visit for a short period, to spend a season or to stay permanently. Money, documents or gifts travel with them or circulate independently. Communication in these spaces is not restricted to geographical movements. Photos, calls,

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and audio messages are ever-present. Economic, family, and employment decisions are run through family members in different countries on a daily basis. These decisions are made miles away, so naturally, those of us outside the network find it impossible to know if the other phone in the conversation is in a similar room at another downtown rooming house in Montevideo or miles away. The little ones also come and go, from the Dominican Republic or Cuba to Uruguay and from Uruguay to Cuba or the Dominican Republic, overcoming the same or greater obstacles than adults. They are part of an interconnected world, located in more than one national territory, but in a common transnational space. However, at the same time, babies, girls, and boys are different. Their movements and stays seem to be more significant, as they are recounted in more detail and with more emotion, illustrated with photos and videos which mothers, grandchildren, and grandmothers show again and again until they are ingrained in our memories. It is essential to point out these positive ways of thinking about “migrant children” so that the blindness of the State and its public policies is not perpetuated in the good intentions of civil society organizations and academic research, multiplying the forms of violence that society projects on children, mothers, and migrant families. If human mobility, female migration, and child displacement are strategies that seek to address the global mechanisms of reproduction of economic and social inequality, let the research of these topics not be transformed into a space that reproduces the various forms of violence of their representation.

Note 1. https://www.unicef.org/uruguay/1000-dias-para-toda-la-vida.

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Pi, R. (2005). Asimilación cultural de los siriolibaneses y sus descendientes en Uruguay. In Centro de Estudios Interdisciplinarios Migratorios (Ed.), Anuario de Antropología Social y Cultural en Uruguay (pp. 53–58). https:// www.fhuce.edu.uy/index.php/institucional/estructura-academica/centrosde-estudios/centro-de-estudios-interdisciplinarios-migratorios/publicacionesceinmi/6111-pi-hugarte-renzo-2005-asimilacion-cultural-de-los-sirioliba neses-y-sus-descendientes-en-uruguay. Prieto, V. Robaina, S., & Koolhaas, M. (2016). Acceso y calidad del empleo de la inmigración reciente en Uruguay. REMHU—Revista Interdisciplinar da Mobilidade Humana, XXIV (48), 121–144. http://www.redalyc.org/html/ 4070/407048610009/. Rodríguez, E. (2012). Peluqueras y trabajadoras sexuales de origen dominicano en la Argentina. In S. Novick (Ed.), Dimensiones de la problemática y desafíos para la política social migración y políticas públicas: nuevos escenarios y desafíos (pp. 293–325). CLACSO. Sassen, S. (2003). Cartografías de la globalización. Género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos. Traficantes de Sueños. Secretaría de Derechos Humanos. (2018). Movilidad Humana. Presidencia de la República. Uriarte, P. (2020). “Cada uno puede tener la opinión que quiera”. RUNA, Archivo Para Las Ciencias Del Hombre, 41(1), 17–36. https://doi.org/10. 34096/runa.v41i1.7992. Uriarte, P., & Urruzola, J. (2018). Las mujeres, los niños y las niñas también migran. Corrientes migratorias latinoamericanas en Uruguay desde una perspectiva de género. Encuentros Latinoamericanos, 2, 23–48. https://ojs. fhce.edu.uy/index.php/enclat/article/view/123. Urruzola, J. (2019). Las palabras no entienden lo que pasa: dilemas éticopolíticos en la construcción de un trabajo antropológico. Revista Uruguaya de Antropología y Etnografía, 4(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.29112/ruae. v4.n1.5.

CHAPTER 11

Concluding Remarks Ana Vergara del Solar, Valeria Llobet, and Maria Letícia Nascimento

At the same time, while these analyses are local—they are located culturally, historically and geographically in South America—they have taken related global processes into account. In particular, the global demand for implementation of the CRC, as one expression of the globalisation of law and the internationalisation of a Western notion of childhood (James & James, 2004) has transformed childhood as a social space in most Western countries, as has the incorporation of neoliberal criteria in the implementation of state and public policies. In this sense, the book has a double purpose: to examine in depth the particularities of a region, as well as

A. Vergara del Solar (B) Universidad de Santiago, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] V. Llobet Universidad de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina M. L. Nascimento Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7_11

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serve as a case study of the tensions that have marked the juncture of these two historical macro-processes. The relationship between the global and the local dimension has not been predefined but considered a matter for interrogation and research. How to connect these dimensions without diluting the particular in the universal is a challenge that we hope we have met successfully. Moreover, we know that the evolutionism of modern rationalities is intimately connected to the processes of colonisation. Indeed, a parallel has been drawn between the development of societies and of individuals (Prout & James, 1997), in that the countries of the Global South, including those of South America, have been “infantilised” and conceived as mere late receivers of historical phenomena that originated in the North (Burman, 2007). The contributions of this book show, in contrast, that the relationship with the North is one of simultaneity in terms of processes related to both neoliberalisation and the emergence of children’s rights perspectives. Paradoxically, as Liebel (2016) has emphasised, South American children are often seen as bereft of a childhood, insofar as their experiences do not seem to match up fully with the modern prototype of a protected childhood. Analysing the obvious difficulties experienced by South American children and their families in contexts of enormous inequality, but without victimising or “affectivising” them (Giberti, 1997), has been another challenge we set ourselves when imagining this book. In our chapters, the emphasis is placed on a vision of children and their families as social agents and actors, either in organised groups or by the decisions they take and the creativity they bring to bear in more individual spaces. However, it has not been possible to explore this aspect much more deeply, an interesting task that we leave for future publications. The book focused on the post-1990s period, one that we describe as especially complex from a sociological and political point of view and underexplored in the Latin American literature. This did not involve treating the period in isolation; rather, the authors investigated different forms of historical continuity and change that provide context for the analysis. In this sense, this book shares the childhood studies field’s intention to investigate the particular forms that the socio-historical construction of childhood has taken in specific periods and scenarios, but always establishing dialogue with phenomena that apparently go beyond the immediate focus of interest.

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The first part of the book deals with the discursive and material conflicts arising from the implementation of the CRC in South America, starting in the 1990s. For the case of Argentina, Villalta reports on an overhaul of the judicial system, which expresses neoliberal logic and at the same time emphasises the need for participation by children, who are considered to be “subjects of rights". The author points to the contradictions between the judicial system and policies on rights, and how the relationship between the two affects interpretation of what can be called “the best interests of the child". In this way, she expresses the tensions inherent in “the interpretive codes that underlie our perception of children” in an adult-centred and therefore asymmetrical society, pointing out the inequality of the procedures used to listen to children. The debate raised by Zucker and Rausky’s text, also in the first part, calls into question ILO documents on child labour, a central theme in discussions on children’s rights in the region. The researchers contrast the interpretation established by the ILO of child labour as a problem, with the views they observed in studies with working children and their families carried out in Argentina. As argued in the article, child labour is a complex phenomenon that is open to discussion of its role in the lives of children, and this depends on the contexts in which it occurs. This analytic approach questions universalistic interpretations and calls for a more situated debate on the effects of work on children’s lives. Amador’s chapter, also in Part I of the book, analyses the educational career of young children in socio-educational institutions in Colombia. It calls attention to the contradictions present in neoliberal discourses that insist on the social and economic importance of investing in children and their future, while refusing to provide sufficient resources to grant them a quality education. Early childhood policies focus on children in poverty while promoting interventions that serve the needs of the market, since they do not recognise social contexts and children’s lives in concrete terms. Our aim in the second part of the book is to describe educational systems in the region that are deeply exclusive, whether exclusion involves children being left out of school. or makes itself felt even within schools. In this way, premised on a conception of education as a right—something that is not obvious in neoliberal contexts—the text shows explicitly how social and educational inequality is inherent in the relationships between children, teachers and school. In the case of Chile, Guerrero explores the relationship between teachers and students and the accompanying

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responsibilities, showing how difficult it is to make them consistent with a leadership style based on neoliberal managerial principles. The author affirms, then, that “how the bond is constructed depends on the history of both children and teachers concerning authority” (p. 155), which refers to the non-universality of the school environment, as required by neoliberal management. Writing about Peru in the second part of the book, Cavagnoud shows the perverse effects of educational neoliberalisation policies as they affect students who are excluded from school, thus expressing a non-right to education for all children. The author views educational inequities in the context of other forms of inequality—economic, political and social— and concludes that “the congruent expansion of neoliberalism that causes a desubstantialization and violation of the right to an education for all children and adolescents” (p. 204). Part II of the book closes with the text by Rabello de Castro y Tavares analysing the student movement in protest against the growing precarity of public schools in Brazil, when seen through the lens of age disparities. The students’ voices are blocked or delegitimised compared to those of the authorities, in an attempt to play down the right to a quality education that the movement demands. The processes described by the authors recall the treatment of recent student movements in other South American countries, such as Chile, Argentina and Colombia. The third part of the book investigates those migratory processes that include children and migration’s complex relationship with neoliberalisation. Unda and Llanos’s chapter accounts historically for the application of neoliberal measures in Ecuador and how they contribute to the “expulsion” of important groups of the population who feel forced to leave the country. The authors emphasise contradictions between the logic of a state shrunken in its social responsibilities and a rights policy aimed at children and adolescents. Meanwhile, Herrera and Pérez’s text focuses on the experience of Venezuelan migrant children in Ecuador and points out an imbalance between their activity and how social and political institutions represent them. They discuss the asymmetry in the relationship between adults and children, of which the migratory processes discussed here are an example. Turning to Uruguay, Uriarte’s chapter explores big contradictions in how institutional systems connect with children and their mothers and how they devalue the reciprocal forms of care that exist between them. At the same time, Uriarte points out “the forms

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of violence that society projects onto migrant children, mothers and families”, exposing them to a situation of social exclusion. As described, this book has explored the question of South American childhoods over the last three decades from several different vantage points. It has emphasised how the social question has been structured based on the problem of socioeconomic, political and cultural inequality. By viewing children’s experience and age as pivots of social differentiation it has been possible to explore questions and nuances that would otherwise have remained invisible, despite childhood’s centrality as a disputed territory in the reproduction of the social order. As is evident, what is discovered by observing South American societies through the prism of childhood has implications that go far beyond it: it is another example of how analysis must overflow its immediate object to acquire meaning. In play here are dissenting projects of society, as well as dissenting conceptions of the subjects called to partake in such projects. In other words, the processes by which childhood is constructed socio-historically have a decisive role in the hegemonic struggle over the character of the desirable state, the priorities of social spending, and the definition of family responsibilities (James & Carli, 2002; James, 2004). Such is the case, regardless of how much neoliberal logic insists on the conversion of childhood policies into technical issues, by following a problem–solution pattern (Fairclough, 2004) and deploying apparently value-free criteria. Neoliberalism, in particular, has been discussed as a project of refoundation, or societal restoration (Harvey, 2008). That is, as a political rationality aiming to revert to a concentration of power and wealth that had been challenged by the redistributive projects deployed in the region for several decades preceding the 1980s and 1990s. In this historical restoration, dictatorships and state terrorism meshed with policies aimed at restructuring relations between social classes and returning to a regressive distribution of wealth as well as profoundly unequal access to speech and influence in decision-making. The conceptions about the state and the social question that were deployed and debated during the period analysed in this book suggest questions about the specificity of this restoration process. This is evident, in particular, in those states that show varying degrees of commitment to neoliberal reforms; have developed societal projects that are not fully coherent with, or even contradict them, and accumulate different timescales and ways of adapting to conflicting interests and powers.

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At the same time, the analyses developed in this book show a need to counter the excessive optimism of proposals about a post-neoliberal phase in Latin America (Friedman, 2007; Sader, 2008), given the repositioning of neoliberal agendas in the region in the twenty-first century, as well as extreme forms of concentration of power and wealth that recall the oligarchic and repressive practices of the states and elites of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the relationship between these conservative reactions and the emergence of social movements based on the discontent of children and youth needs further exploration. We should not forget, for example, that the so-called Chilean “social outburst” of 2019, which involved massive and long-lasting protests across the nation, began with the actions of secondary school students. In the novel antagonisms that Rabello de Castro and Tavares analyse in their chapter, they also find in intergenerational dynamics a starting point from which to analyse broader processes. It is important to mention that in many countries of the region children and young people have been among those most affected by the criminalisation of social protest and repressive policing. Seen from the perspective of generational relations, this involves an increasing effort to maintain their cultural dependence and control their behaviour and activity. At the same time, it occurs in contexts in which their participation, more so than that of adults, breaches the narrow institutional margins established for this purpose in our countries. When this intersects with class relations, it makes children and young people from poorer sectors habitual targets of police violence. For all these reasons, seen in the light of the dynamics of childhood and of children’s experience, the region and its tensions seem fertile territory for a new research agenda able to connect microsocial processes more substantially with the social relations and historical processes in which they happen. We believe that this is, and can be, a particularly valuable contribution of South American childhood social studies to the global field, both because of the effect of our critical intellectual traditions as well as the fact that it is unsustainable in our countries to abstract particular phenomena from their general contexts. The construction of new images of the future able to escape the overpowering “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2016) of the neoliberal imagination is a central scenario of the contemporary battle for democracy (Stefanoni, 2019). Another one is the search for forms of transformation with which

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to evade neoliberal entrapment in novelty (Fisher, 2016). Among other things, this involves relativising the processes of neoliberalisation—usually presented as natural, inevitable and immutable—by emphasising their historical nature. It also involves retracing the path by which different spheres of our societies have become subject to discursive colonisation by free-market optics (Fairclough, 2004). Feminist narratives and sexual rights agendas have a significant place in this process by their focus on life quality and their role in the emergence of a discontent that is able to politicise the widely experienced malaise of everyday life. The Chilean slogan displayed in the street riots, “Until life is worth living”, decries a life measured by long working and school hours, with consumption as its only satisfaction. At the same time, this politicisation allows us to consider the relationship between childcare and indebtedness (Han, 2012), a feature of the link in South American neoliberalism between social reproduction and the maternal and childhood ideals reinstated by the institutionalisation of children’s rights, as shown in the works of Villalta, Amador and Rausky and Frasco Zuker. On the latter point, the debate on childhood in South American democracies in recent decades has been strongly linked to issues of family, paternity and maternity, the entrance of women into the labour market, fertility, contraception, abortion and the participation of parents in the health and education of their children. In these terms, a central arena for conflict and definition in the socio-historical construction of childhood has been the family and parenting. Conservative reactions have placed a striking emphasis on the family as a self-justifying value, and on prototypical nuclear family models, whether in terms of family composition or a gender-based division of labour. This has been, then, an “indiscriminate familism” (Vergara, 2009). Once more, children are merged into the family environment, and arguments from the CRC such as the right to a family are rehearsed in order to justify the excessive holding to account of mothers, the rejection of family diversity and the devaluation of children’s autonomy. We are concluding this book in the midst of the global Covid-19 crisis. Latin America has the dubious distinction of being the first world region to close its schools and the last to reopen them—in the cases where this has yet happened. On top of this educational catastrophe, it is pertinent to add the re-emergence of the fiercest ambiguities in how childhood is conceived: the child as incapable of the necessary care practices, and the dangerous child who transmits the virus to his elders (Llobet & Cosse,

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2020). Thus, the child who can be called out by adults: teachers, mothers and fathers, and the child who must make the effort to renounce rights for the common good. Making children simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible in this pandemic context, the homogenisation of childhood experiences and the minimisation of inequalities have been a hallmark of government reactions. Furthermore, the social, subjective and educational cost that government measures have made, and make children pay, has been underestimated. South American states’ capacity of response has varied widely, based not only on the forms that the neoliberalisation analysed in this book took in each country, but also on the positions of the different governments. Thus, we observe nuances that have ranged from the maximisation of care measures of governments such as Argentina, to the hyperbolic denialism of governments such as Brazil, with advantage taken in most cases for authoritarian purposes. The precarity and uncertainties unleashed by the pandemic have intensified these tendencies that already existed in our countries, making them visible in the public space even as a forum for public debate. Catastrophism, “save himself who can” and the threat of the future appear as worrying features of this juncture. But perhaps children´s thoughts and our thinking about them will be the spark needed to reignite a radical imagination.

References Burman, E. (2007). Developments: Child, image, nation. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Carli, S. (2002). Niñez, pedagogía y política. Transformaciones de los discursos acerca de la infancia en la historia de la educación argentina entre 1880 y 1955. Miño y Dávila. Fairclough, N. (2004). Critical discourse analysis in researching language in the new capitalism: Overdetermination, transdisciplinary and textual analysis. In L. Young & C. Harrison (Eds.), Systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis: Studies in social change. Continuum. Fisher, M. (2016). Realismo capitalista: ¿No hay alternativa? Caja Negra. Friedman, E. J. (2007, March–April). How pink is the “Pink Tide”? (pp. 16–44) NACLA Report on the Americas. Garcés, M. (2017). Nueva ilustración radical. Anagrama.

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Giberti, E. (1997). La niñez y el hacer política. In E. Giberti (Ed.), Políticas y niñez (pp. 23–113). Losada. Han, C. (2012). Life in debt. Times of care and violence in neoliberal Chile. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harvey, D. (2008, enero-junio). El neoliberalismo como destrucción creativa. Revista Apuntes del CENES, 27 (45). James, A., & James, A. (2008). Changing childhood in the UK: Reconstructing discourses of “risk” and “protection”. In A. James & A. L. James (Eds.), European childhoods: Cultures, politics and childhoods in the European Union. Palgrave. James, A., & James, A. L. (2004). Constructing childhood: Theory, police and social practice. Palgrave Macmillan. Liebel, M. (2016). ¿Niños sin niñez? ¿Contra la conquista poscolonial de las infancias del Sur global? MILLCAYAC, Revista Digital De Ciencias Sociales, III (5), 245–272. Llobet, V., & Cosse, I. (2020). Fotografías, niñez y pandemias. Revista Ensambles, 7 (13), 189–196. Prout, A., & James, A. (1997). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhood? Provenance, promise and problems. In A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study if childhood. Falmer Press. Sader, E. (2008). Refundar el Estado: Posneoliberalismo en América Latina. Clacso. Stefanoni, P. (2019). El futuro como “gran reemplazo” Extremas derechas, homosexualidad y xenofobia. In A. Kozel, M. Bergel, M., & V. Llobet (Eds.), El futuro: miradas desde las humanidades. UNSAM. Vergara, A. (2009). La intervención social como conflicto. El caso de la infancia y juventud en Chile. Revista El Observador, 3, 19–36.

Index

A Adolescence, 54, 67, 68, 78, 90, 105, 110, 165–167, 171, 208, 218, 222, 263 Adult-child relationships, 27, 178 Argentina, vii, 4, 6–14, 21, 24, 25, 47–49, 51, 64, 66, 67, 73–79, 88, 92–96, 231, 254, 255, 257, 277, 278, 282 B Brazil, ix, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 17, 21, 22, 27, 34, 49, 84, 94, 175–177, 179–184, 252, 255, 257, 269, 278, 282 C Child diversity, 20 Child educational rights, 180 Childhood, v–vii, ix, x, 1–4, 11–14, 17–29, 31, 32, 48, 49, 52–55, 57, 63–68, 74, 76–79, 81–86,

88–93, 104–108, 110, 111, 119–121, 131, 135, 146, 147, 161, 162, 164–166, 171, 172, 178, 208, 210, 213, 217, 218, 222, 233, 238, 252, 253, 260, 263, 264, 275, 276, 279–282 Childhood studies, 3, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29–32, 75–77, 79, 104, 107, 130, 131, 135, 232, 233, 276 Child labour, vii, 2, 21, 22, 24, 73–79, 81–96, 218, 243, 246, 277 Child participation rights, 176, 177 Child poverty, 18, 30 Children’s policies, 54, 105, 253, 279 Children’s rights, vi, 12, 20, 24, 54, 82, 86, 88, 92, 94, 109, 110, 131, 217 Children’s rights activism, 49 Children’s rights approach, 66 Chile, vi, viii, 6, 8–11, 14, 25, 30, 105, 130, 131, 133, 135, 138,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Vergara del Solar et al. (eds.), South American Childhoods, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78949-7

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148–150, 185, 231, 235, 237, 254, 269, 277, 278 Colombia, vii, 7, 10, 11, 15, 21, 24, 103–106, 109, 110, 114–118, 120, 236, 237, 239, 241, 277, 278

D Discourses on childhood, 22, 89

E Early childhood, vii, 24, 28, 103–107, 109–120, 253, 264, 265, 267–269, 277 Ecuador, x, 7, 8, 10, 28, 205, 206, 208–210, 213, 215–217, 219, 224–226, 233–241, 243, 245–247, 278

F Family justice, 24, 48, 52, 54, 55, 64

G Gender issues, 11, 17

L Latin America, v–vii, x, 2, 6, 9, 12, 14, 15, 34, 51, 78, 85, 86, 94, 104, 172, 218, 219, 231, 252–255, 260, 280, 281 Latin American children, 15

M Migrant children, 233–235, 245, 247, 248, 253, 257, 258, 264, 270, 278, 279 Migrant families, 236, 266, 270

N Neoliberalisation, 1, 2, 4–6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 17, 20, 22–25, 27, 30–32, 48, 49, 51, 154, 276, 278, 281, 282 Neoliberalism, v, vi, x, 4, 5, 8–10, 16, 24, 27, 51, 52, 66, 96, 117, 134, 137, 146, 155, 157, 172, 197, 208, 210, 211, 213, 217, 222, 226, 278, 279, 281

P Peru, viii, 8, 21, 27, 94, 153–155, 157, 158, 161, 171, 234, 235–237, 239–242, 278

S School dropout, 155, 156, 158–160, 163, 164, 168, 170, 171, 180, 245 Social inequality, v, x, 18, 20, 32, 50, 51, 75, 84, 92, 154, 155, 176, 181, 253, 270 South America, 1–6, 8, 9, 12–15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, 32, 74, 232, 275–277 South American children, 276

T Teacher-student relationships, 175, 176, 196

U Uruguay, ix, 6, 8, 10, 13, 25, 28, 29, 252–257, 260–267, 269, 270, 278

INDEX

V Venezuela, 7, 8, 10, 11, 28, 206, 235, 237–239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 257, 260

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