Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note To Readers
- Introduction
- 1 Speaking Of The Street
- 2 Being in the Street
- 3 “Home Children”: Nurtured Childhood and Nurturing Childhood
- 4 Betraying Motherdom: Maloqueiros and “That Life” in the Street
- 5 When Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Violence and Street Children
- 6 Curing Street Children, Rescuing Childhood
- 7 Street Children and Their “Clients”
- Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children
- Appendix: The Setting: Recife, Olinda, and Northeast Brazil
- Glossary
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - Betraying Motherdom: Maloqueiros and “That Life” in the Street
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- A Note To Readers
- Introduction
- 1 Speaking Of The Street
- 2 Being in the Street
- 3 “Home Children”: Nurtured Childhood and Nurturing Childhood
- 4 Betraying Motherdom: Maloqueiros and “That Life” in the Street
- 5 When Life is Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Violence and Street Children
- 6 Curing Street Children, Rescuing Childhood
- 7 Street Children and Their “Clients”
- Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children
- Appendix: The Setting: Recife, Olinda, and Northeast Brazil
- Glossary
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Given the ubiquity of the image of street children in popular conceptions of Brazilian social life, one might expect to see homeless children every where in Brazilian cities. Living in the street, homeless children are indeed in the public eye. As one would expect, they can be seen begging and stealing along the thoroughfares and sleeping on the sidewalks. But sometimes they are harder to find than one might think. On many occasions, I would go out to the street and have to search long and hard to find any. And some days there were simply none on hand.
But for whom was I searching? Thus far, this book has referred to street children as if the meaning of the term were self-evident. How is it possible to distinguish street children, or meninos de rua, as they are called in Brazil, from other children? The preceding chapter discussed nurtured and nurturing childhood, two contexts in which children in Northeast Brazil grow up. This chapter considers street children in relation to these two ideal types, particularly to childhood within the world of Brazilian matrifocality in which poor children are expected and themselves expect to nurture the household. If children can be imagined as social actors rather than as merely the passive recipients of adult culture, they can also be seen to have a claim on defining their own identity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- At Home in the StreetStreet Children of Northeast Brazil, pp. 93 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998