The Kids Are in Charge

Activism and Power in Peru's Movement of Working Children

Jessica K. Taft

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479898640
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Details the possibilities and challenges of intergenerational activism and social movements

Since 1976, the Peruvian movement of working children has fought to redefine age-based roles in society, including defending children’s right to work. In The Kids Are in Charge, Jessica K. Taft gives us an inside look at this groundbreaking, intergenerational social movement, showing that kids can—and should be—respected as equal partners in economic, social, and political life.

Through participant observation, Taft explores how the movement has redefined relationships between kids and adults; how they put these ideas into practice within their organizations; and how they advocate for them in larger society. Ultimately, she encourages us to question the widely accepted beliefs that children should not work or participate in politics.

The Kids Are in Charge is a provocative invitation to re-imagine childhood, power, and politics.

Part I

Alternative Visions of Childhood

1

Learning with the Peruvian Movement of Working Children

Norma has been an active participant in the movement of working children for decades. She began participation as a twelve-year-old in 1979 and has continued her involvement through adulthood, taking on new roles and responsibilities over time. Immensely proud of the movement’s accomplishments and deeply committed to sharing its approach, Norma invited me to participate in a meeting of working children from her neighborhood on one of my first days in Lima. As she gave me the address, Norma explained that the group was in a housing cooperative that had been founded by the municipal workers’ union in the district of Surquillo. A plaque labels the concrete maze of small houses Barrio Obrero, and the small working-class community has a long history of labor activism. Adults in the barrio are often very active in their union, several youth are part of the Juventud Obrera Cristiana, and many of the kids who live in the barrio participate in MANTHOC, one of the central organizations in the movement of working children. Norma has been the colaboradora, or adult supporter, for this base group of MANTHOC for many years, and she plays a key role in the neighborhood, building and sustaining its localized culture of collective political engagement and community organizing.

When I arrived at the Surquillo Barrio Obrero for my first visit, Norma was playing a game of cards with four kids until it was time for their weekly meeting. As the daylight faded and the meeting time approached, all six of us went out into the neighborhood to gather the others. We headed into an open courtyard in the center of the houses, and Norma and the kids called out, yelling names to different windows and asking whether they were coming to tonight’s meeting. As kids trickled out of the houses, they would each run up to Norma and give her a hug. Having gathered about a dozen kids, the much larger group then returned to Norma’s place to begin their weekly meeting around her kitchen table. Lili, the oldest of the small group, was thirteen and helped to organize the younger kids, all between the ages of five and ten, but mostly eight- and nine-year-olds. She asked them to go around and introduce themselves to me and to tell me about their work. As they shyly said their names, most of them told me that they work helping their families around the house; a few added that they help at the market or sell things at school or on the streets. Lili described what they do together, as a base group of MANTHOC. As she explained it, they meet every Friday to make plans, to learn, and to discuss different issues related to the children’s work and children’s rights. They also get together on some Saturdays to go to the library or on other trips together, have fun social events and parties, and participate in larger movement activities like the annual May 1 march to celebrate the day of the worker. They sometimes make things together that they then sell in order to raise money for their activities, and they send a delegate to the regional, Lima-wide meetings of the movement in order to plan larger activities and political campaigns.

Watching the Surquillo group meeting that evening, very early in my fieldwork, I was struck by the strong emotional and personal connection between Norma and the kids, by the longevity of Norma’s participation and the depth of her commitment to fostering children’s social movement leadership, and by the group’s historical relationship to other working-class organizations. And, in listening to the kids talk about their work, I was surprised to learn that many of them identified as “working children” when all of their labor was familial and unpaid. While some worked occasionally as vendors and in nearby markets, none of them fit the stereotypical image of the child laborer that circulates in most stories about the subject published in the Global North. Finally, while the group described some time spent on political campaigns directed at large-scale, institutional change, many of its activities were less explicitly political in the traditional sense; the prefigurative politics of trying to build a new kind of intergenerational relationship was central to the group’s approach to social change. All of these things, I would later learn, are common patterns in the movement of working children.

Peru’s Movement of Working Children: A Brief History

Peru’s movement of working children was founded at a meeting of the Peruvian Juventud Obrera Cristiana (Young Christian Workers) in 1976. The JOC, one of two youth wings of the larger Catholic Action movement, has been active in Peru since 1935.1 In the mid-1970s, many union members and labor leaders, including youth labor leaders in the JOC, were being fired from their jobs as part of a wave of repression of popular movements that came with the transition to the government of Francisco Morales Bermúdez.2 In order to plan for the general strike called for July 19, 1977, around eighty JOC youth leaders held a national gathering. At this meeting, however, the JOC youth were not interested in talking about the problems that they were facing as unemployed workers, but instead wanted to discuss the future of the country and the future of organized youth. They had been organizing in the factories, but now felt that the future of young people’s work was not going to be in the factories, and if there were no youth in the factories, they needed to organize outside workplaces, in the neighborhoods. They were concerned that without the context of the factory, young people would not understand the concerns of workers or their identities and interests as part of the working class. This, some of the JOC youth argued, meant that they needed to begin organizing at a younger age. They argued that if their movement, the JOC, was concerned with the working class, they needed to also be concerned with working-class children. And, remembering their own experiences working as children, they articulated the position that having an organization like the JOC, but for kids, would have made a positive impact on their lives from an early age.

This 1977 meeting marked the initial founding of MANTHOC, the Movimiento de Adolescentes y Niños Trabajadores Hijos de Obreros Cristianos (Movement of Working Kids and Adolescents, Children of Christian Workers), although they would not take on this name until a group of kids themselves came up with it a few years later. The project was an incredibly new idea; the JOC youth had no models and no one to ask for advice about how to go about organizing kids. They started with five “intuitions” about how this new organization should operate, based in their own experiences as working children and as organized youth.3 The first of these was that the organization should be autonomous—not part of or dependent upon any adult or youth organization. Second, the kids themselves must be in charge of and represent the organization. Third, an organization is not an end in itself, but a tool for addressing the needs of those workers and children beyond and outside the organization—the masses, if you will. Fourth, the organization should be both national and international because the issues of workers are not merely local, but also linked to national and international political and economic conditions. And finally, members should not assume that what works in organizing and educating youth will also work with kids and should therefore develop a new methodology and pedagogy for this work. With these ideas in mind, the JOC youth from around the country began to immediately organize base groups of kids in different neighborhoods and parishes.

Figure 1.1. Working children gathered in 1979 in Surquillo for a meeting of the organization that eventually became MANTHOC. Photo courtesy of Movimiento de Adolescentes y Niños Trabajadores Hijos de Obreros Cristianos—Nacional.

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s MANTHOC grew slowly, with new bases emerging as individual JOC members, friends, and allies among both clergy and laity started to create spaces for working children in their own parishes and communities. MANTHOC kids were part of the larger popular movements taking place at the time around the country, but most especially in the pueblos jóvenes or barriadas on the outskirts of Lima. As waves of migrants moved to the city from the countryside, they created collectives and organizations that would take over and occupy empty land, building homes and communities nearly overnight.4 In Lima, this land is primarily coastal desert, with sand, dust, and little else. The work of building these communities and organizing for essential services was work that engaged whole families. As many other constituencies and groups had spaces for self-organization in a diverse and growing organizational landscape, the kids had MANTHOC.

MANTHOC was also closely tied to the development of liberation theology, a religious movement that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s that sought to refocus the Catholic Church on the liberation of the oppressed and the pursuit of economic and social justice.5 Alejandro Cussianovich, a Salesian priest and an active participant in ONIS, a group of clergy around Lima who were discussing and developing liberation theology, was the JOC’s advisor during the period in which MANTHOC was formed.6 Alejandro, or Chito, as the kids continue to call him, had written several texts on liberation theology, one of which eventually led to his expulsion from his order, and he had worked with young domestic workers involved in the JOC for several years prior to the founding of MANTHOC. Although he was originally skeptical of the JOC proposal to create a children’s organization, Alejandro is now an important theorist of childhood in Latin America, and he continues to be the intellectual and spiritual heart of the working children’s movement in Peru. He has written numerous books and essays on working children, pedagogy, and children’s protagonismo, a concept I discuss extensively in the next chapter. Alejandro also teaches courses on childhood and social policy at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and at IFEJANT, the movement’s training institute for adults. He is regularly asked by the organizations in the movement to lead discussions and workshops for both children and adults. Just over eighty years old, he is a beloved figure in the movement of working children, and his writings serve as the philosophical inspiration and ideological core of the movement. When he is not himself leading training sessions and discussions, his writings are used as resources, and his definitions and words, which are informed by his theological approach, circulate throughout countless movement materials and conversations.

MANTHOC’s roots in the vibrant popular movements of the 1970s and 1980s and in liberation theology continue to shape the movement’s culture, practices, and ideology, but the movement was also substantially transformed during the 1990s and 2000s, as three larger political shifts encouraged participants to focus increasingly on working children as children. First, the movement had to navigate and survive the period of internal conflict between Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the government. The escalation of Sendero’s guerrilla violence and the government’s authoritarian and violent response led many grassroots organizations, including those that made up the movement of working children, to de-emphasize some of the more class-based politics of their work. Speaking in the language of Marxism became less feasible and less desirable as the government failed to distinguish between different movements and Sendero frequently targeted leftist groups and parties in Lima’s barriadas for intimidation, harassment, and assassination.7 With base groups in many of the barriadas that experienced significant Sendero violence, the movement of working children re-focused organizational attention on children’s issues and distanced itself a bit from the dangerous and deadly space of adult-led popular left organizations. At the same time that it distanced itself politically, the movement also geographically expanded into some of the mountain zones most affected by the violence, because it saw its work as protective: by organizing with poor and indigenous children in the region, the movement was giving them a sense of their potential power and collective capacity to improve the world without resorting to Sendero’s violent tactics.

From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, the movement was also increasingly drawn into a new set of relationships and conversations centered more in Peru’s growing “children’s rights” community. In 1984 various NGOs in Lima formed the COTADENI, or the Coordinadora de Trabajo por los Derechos del Niño (Working Group for Children’s Rights). While MANTHOC eventually left the COTADENI due to the network’s difficulty including kids as participants in the meetings and decisions, the departure was fairly amicable and the movement continued to have a relationship with this larger children’s rights body.8 In the following years, MANTHOC was involved in a few large-scale events on children’s rights and continued to build its relationships with other child-focused NGOs and to participate in Peru’s conversations about the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the drafting of the Peruvian comprehensive national law on children and adolescents (Código de los Niños y Adolescentes). This connection with the larger children’s rights community in Peru continues to be a central feature of the movement today.

The 1990s were also a period of increased conflict over “child labor” as the International Labor Organization’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO-IPEC) increased pressure on nations to ratify ILO Convention 138 on the Minimum Age. Originally drafted in 1973, Convention 138 aims for the abolition of work done by children under the age of fifteen, with the exception of some “light work” for those between the ages of twelve and fourteen. However, ratification of this convention was very slow up until at least 1989, increased steadily through the 1990s, but was even more heavily adopted during the early 2000s as countries also began to ratify Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. Convention 182 prioritizes ending the most harmful and dangerous forms of children’s work, but Convention 138 instead assumes that all work done below the minimum age is harmful to children, despite a lack of compelling evidence to prove such harm.9 With the growing investment of the ILO’s program to end child labor and the changes in Peruvian law that prohibited work, Peru’s working children in the 1990s found themselves facing criminalization, including the threat of being removed from their families, and increasing stigmatization as they were discussed as a visible marker of both poverty and national “underdevelopment.” The movement thus needed to defend children’s work as morally and legally legitimate, a need that had not really existed during the first fifteen years of MANTHOC’s work. Previously, movement participants had been primarily focused on working children’s status as workers and as members of the popular classes. Now, their status as children was far more significant. Age-based inequalities and the idea of an “adult-centric society” became increasingly central to the movement’s discourse. Thus, the movement’s focus shifted to defending children’s right to work and challenging the “abolitionist” approach to child labor offered by the ILO.

MANTHOC and Movement Structures Today

In the forty years since it was founded, MANTHOC has grown significantly, generating an array of additional organizations and institutions, and inspiring working children’s movements in multiple countries around the world, including Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, India, and Zimbabwe, as well as support organizations in Germany, Belgium, and Italy. Today, MANTHOC itself involves around two thousand kids in twelve different regions of the country: Puno, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Lima, Pucallpa, San Martín, Cajamarca, Piura, Amazonas, Iquitos, and Cusco. Kids participate primarily in base groups of ten to thirty kids that meet weekly, biweekly, or monthly depending on the group. In Lima, there are currently seven base groups. One is connected primarily to a parish, two to specific small neighborhoods, including the Surquillo housing cooperative, and the other four to two different community centers operated by the movement. Each base group elects delegates who participate in regional meetings. These regional delegates must be approved by the entire region at biannual regional assemblies. In Lima, the regional coordination meets twice a month and plans city-wide events and activities. The regional assemblies also propose delegates to the national coordinating committee, and those delegates have to be approved by the national assembly, which meets every two years. The national coordinating committee members thus serve a two-year term and meet regularly via Internet conference calls as well as two or three times a year in person. The national committee plans larger movement strategies and generates national activities, campaigns, and goals. At each of these levels of organization (base groups, regional coordinating committees, and the national coordinating committee), one or two adults serve as supporting colaboradores. In the case of the regional and national groups, these colaboradores are elected by the delegates at the assemblies. The colaboradores of the base groups, on the other hand, are not elected and often serve as colaboradores for a base for ...