At Home in the Street

by Hecht, Tobias

• ISBN13: 9780521591324
• ISBN10: 0521591325
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-07-01
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Through innovative fieldwork and ethnographic writing, Hecht lays bare the received truths about the lives of Brazilian street children. This book changes the terms of the debate, asking not why there are so many homeless children in Brazil but why - given the oppressive alternative of home life in the shantytowns - there are in fact so few. Speaking in recorded sessions that participants called "radio workshops," street children asked one another questions that even the most experienced researchers would be unlikely to pose. At the center of this study are children who play, steal, sleep, dance, and die in the streets of a Brazilian city. But all around them figure activists, politicians, researchers, "home" children, and a global crisis of childhood.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix	(2)
A Note to Readers	xi
Introduction	1	(25)
1. Speaking of the Street	26	(15)
2. Being in the Street	41	(29)
3. "Home Children": Nurtured Childhood and Nurturing Childhood	70	(23)
4. Betraying Motherdom: Maloqueiros and "That Life" in the Street	93	(25)
5. When Life Is Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Violence and Street Children	118	(31)
6. Curing Street Children, Rescuing Childhood	149	(25)
7. Street Children and Their "Clients"	174	(14)
Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children	188	(27)
Appendix: The Setting: Recife, Olinda, and Northeast Brazil	215	(19)
Glossary	234	(5)
Notes	239	(6)
References	245	(12)
Index	257