In an article about research with street children in three Latin American cities, Riccardo Lucchini (1996: 168) warns against “the use of extracts from testimonies or utterances outside the contexts to which they are linked, as well as using these extracts in order to ‘prove’ an assertion or hypothesis.” Anecdotes and carefully selected narratives – those pernicious tools of anthropologists sometimes used to conflate the individual and the collectivity – are brashly present in this book. While hoping to avoid the pitfalls of what Lucchini aptly criticizes as the opportunistic and decontextualized use of oral testimony, I have found it meaningless to portray the general without also illustrating with the specific, even though the specific is, perforce, unique. But certain problems arise.

Surrendering the tape recorder was part of an effort to allow children a voice in this study. But that voice has been altered, if not reinvented, in its metamorphosis from the original utterance, through capture on audio tape, transcription, and translation from Portuguese to English. What the children call a língua da gente (our tongue) – few know that what they speak is also called Portuguese – has been expressed here in standard English. Certain sayings peculiar to the private argot of Recife's street children have been translated into readily comprehensible Anglo-American expressions, with the inevitable result that aspects of the richness of the children's orality have been lost. Also missing in the transcriptions are the myriad facial expressions, gesticulations, laughs, and yawns that frame the meaning of speakers' words.