Social Death

"To the sons of workers, I will say that the guilty ones for the beatings they got for having eaten earth and shit out worms are not their parents at all. I know who they are."

—Marilene Felinto¹

Tobias Hecht's At Home in the Street is a social constructionist account of the cunning, loving, violent, and ephemeral lives of children dwelling in the poor streets of urban Recife, in the Northeast of Brazil. The children are presented alone and in groups as they help and hurt each other, as they get imaginarily transformed into workers by too many pastoral institutions standing for a largely absent state, as they lament having abandoned their matrifocal household and become children-fathers-mothers on their own, as they threaten the goods and order of a selective and well-guarded society of which they are the (circumscribed) social problem, and as they are all too early destined to "prison, insanity, or death," in the words of young Camilla (p. 209). In the face of this inescapability, the protagonists of Tobias Hecht's child-centered ethnography distill an ordinary wisdom that at times borders on poetry—"will I ever leave this life?" (p. 117), "When I die, no one will cry" (p. 145). As Ester Ribeiro, a street girl I met in Recife in 1992, the same year Hecht began his fieldwork, wrote: "Brazil is not and never was beautiful."

Hecht skillfully assembled such an in-the-face critical consciousness, as well as narratives of wishful thinking and of everyday violence in his "radio workshops" and in extended interviews. The book's final texture and stark snapshots (his own and from photographers such as Daniel Aamot2 ) privilege the sad and joyful voices and performances of these "fallen creatures" belonging to the law of the streets, its harshness, dionysiac, and all consuming mode, and to the politics of a society increasingly "NGOnized." The book's central question are: how do these children interpret their street predicament and which ideas of childhood are revealed in their sense of self and in the social apparatuses aimed at saving them? The book is also intended to correct the record on national and international street children talk whose focus on death squads and child victimhood ends up, according to Hecht, obscuring even more "the quiet, private death that is hunger and disease" (p. 146), and dismissing the children's own agency. Hecht's data, both qualitative and quantitative, are sometimes provocative. He reveals, for example, that the size of the population of street children in Brazil is probably less than one percent of what is advertised by national and international agencies such as UNICEF and WHO. He also discloses that in Recife there is about one care-giver for each child sleeping in the streets, and that these street kids are more likely to be killed by their peers than by death squads. These new data are then put into cross-cultural and comparative perspective and framed by Hecht (a bit too neatly) within Brazilian house/street social history and cultural anthropology like those accounts championed by Gilberto Freyre and Roberto Da Matta.

Hecht uses the testimonies of Edivaldo and Margarete to give the reader a broad picture of how Recife's street children meet their daily needs and how this collectivity sampled by the anthropologist organizes itself socially, in and out of the infamous state reformatories and through non-governmental assistance and marginal economies. Hecht then critically examines the divergent ways in which scholars and activists have portrayed childhood in social science, policy, and activism. In contrast, he presents two different contexts and concepts of childhood that he identified: poor nurturing childhood and middle-class nurtured childhood. "I argue that street children ground their sense of identity in opposition to the lives of nurturing children" (p. 21). The essence of their difference, revolves around their betrayal of motherhood, "the moral and economic logic of the matrifocal home" (p. 94). Street life is understood by many of its young inhabitants as an alternative to a...