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111 Conclusion Begging as a Path to Progress XShortly before leaving Ecuador in 2003, I was sitting in my kitchen with a fourteen-year-old girl named Malena, when she posed a difficult and troubling question. We were looking at pictures and chatting about the community when she said to me, “We work like donkeys but we don’t make any money.” Then she looked at me inquisitively and asked, “Why do other people have so much money?” I must admit that I struggled to answer Malena’s question; my immediate response was to pull out a map and a magazine and begin pointing at pictures in an attempt to illustrate the inequitable distribution of wealth and power throughout the world. But despite my best efforts, my abstract explanation meant little to her. For many, it would seem logical to equate hard work with profits. This is supposed to be one of the mainstays of a capitalist economy. Yet things are different in Malena’s community. No matter how hard they toil on their lands, they cannot make enough money to live. After having spent much time in Quito (and interacting with gringos like myself), Malena recognizes the dramatic incongruities between her life experiences and those of others. For Malena and her peers, begging has become an effective way to overcome dire conditions of poverty and amend some of the inequities they encounter in the city. Ironic though it is, begging is helping youth get ahead, both in an educational and material sense. But despite its effectiveness, begging is a less than ideal way to attain this progress. Young people perceive it as a short-term strategy , which they hope will be discarded once they have attained some of their material and educational goals—or at least until they have found “something better.” Growing up in this era of increasing global complexity presents many challenges for these indigenous youth and, unfortunately, these challenges may not become any easier in the years to come. In this book I have tried to unravel a tale of what happens when modernization meets globalization. For many indigenous communities, globalization and the present-day neoliberal agenda have only exacerbated already difficult conditions. However, for the indigenous community of Calhuasí, the effects of globalization have been rather limited because, until recently, the community 112 • conclusion operated largely outside of the dominant market economy. In Calhuasí the key catalyst for recent change was the construction of the community’s road in 1992. For the first time, community members—particularly women and children —became more closely connected to a world outside of their community. Not only did outsiders have ease of entrance, but community members also had ease of exit. The road facilitated the entrance of new building materials, propane tanks, and material consumer goods—all of which have had dramatic effects on the community. Consequently, during the most recent phase of globalization , Calhuaseños have not become poorer but rather have developed a heightened sense of their comparative poverty. Within the context of these changes, children from Calhuasí aspire to futures that are different from those of their parents. They do not want to be agriculturalists , nor do they want big families. Rather, influenced by their experiences in the city and by media representations, they want to be doctors, teachers, pop stars, and police officers. They want big houses, trucks, and televisions. They want to be well educated so that they can attain some of these possibilities. Yet there are conflicting processes and ideologies in the community. While some parents have equally high aspirations for their children, others perceive little value in children’s education. Through the media, teachers, and interactions in the city, children are being told that their proper place is in school and recreation. Meanwhile , within their community, they are being told that they must work. There are also real financial demands that mean that children have to work if they want to attend school or even hope to participate in consumer culture. Children from Calhuasí deviate from current understandings of street and working children. These children are not from single-parent families and are not at risk of becoming homeless street children, largely because they work on the streets with their extended family members as part of tightly knit kinship groups. They are under constant surveillance by their aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmothers, parents, and/or siblings, who collectively are capable of exerting high levels of social control. Currently, children who work on the...

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