Begging as a Path to Progress: Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador's Urban Spaces

Chapter 4: Antibegging Rhetoric: Gendered Beggars, Child Beggars, and “Disguised” Beggars

74 Chapter four Antibegging Rhetoric Gendered Beggars, Child Beggars, and “Disguised” Beggars They like the easy life. . . . They prefer to sit and beg. —Social worker, Quito, July 29, 2003 XLife in the city is challenging for women and children from Calhuasí. Their difficulties are compounded by media portrayals and popular misconceptions that unfairly misrepresent their life circumstances. In this chapter I explore how rhetoric pertaining to indigenous beggars informs policy and practice to exclude indigenous women and children from the streets. I focus particularly on the rhetoric being produced and reproduced by urban planners, social workers, religious leaders, and the media. Within these groups, indigenous women and children are regularly described in terms of child exploitation and delinquency, false manipulation of public sympathies, ignorance, laziness, and filth. They are further described as being “out of place” in urban areas. I argue that these types of rhetoric draw attention away from problems associated with market economies that fail to redistribute wealth to the poor by instead focusing on the alleged vices of beggars themselves. As a counterpoint to these rhetorics I also explore the ways in which indigenous women and children work with and around oppressive conditions and mobilize them to their own advantage. Cindi Katz suggests that the term resistance is often used too broadly to encompass a wide array of social practices that could be construed as oppositional. Instead, she distinguishes between resilience —autonomous initiatives that allow people to shore up their resources and get by each day; reworking—practices that attempt to recalibrate or rework oppressive and unequal circumstances; and resistance—methods intended to subvert or disrupt conditions of exploitation or oppression (2004, 242). I find these distinctions useful when discussing the lives of indigenous beggars , particularly in terms of child “renting,” a practice whereby the presence of Antibegging Rhetoric • 75 children has become integral to women’s begging tactics. Women and children have also begun to rework conditions in their village to overcome dire poverty . I discuss instances of reworking and resilience to suggest that indigenous women and children are not passive victims in the face of oppressive socioeconomic conditions; rather, they actively engage with and rework the forces that affect their everyday lives. The Offensive Beggar Before exploring how women and children contend with their representations in the city, I want to delve briefly into the academic literature on begging to uncover how begging has become negatively framed within moralistic rhetorics and criminalized through legal codes. Despite the prevalence of beggars throughout the world, there has been very little Anglo-American research on beggars beyond North America and northern Europe (exceptions include Chaudhuri 1987; Martínez Novo 2003; Schak 1988). Within North America and Britain, much of the contemporary research on begging explores the issue through the lens of homelessness and focuses particularly on men (e.g., Dean 1999; Duncan 1978; Fitzpatrick and Kennedy 2001; Lankenau 1999; Snow and Anderson 1993; Wardhaugh 1996). While valuable, this literature is not entirely relevant to the situation of women and children in Ecuador; however, it is helpful in unraveling how moralistic rhetoric based on the circumstances of homeless men in the Global North is being used to regulate beggars in Ecuador, despite a vastly different political, economic, and social landscape. Historically, charitable donations to the poor have been indicative of personal goodness and regarded as the moral duty of upright citizens. Almsgiving has played an important role in poverty relief and has been widely advocated within most major religious traditions. However, as industrialized societies developed and social welfare systems evolved, the state came to replace the individual donor in redistributing wealth (Dean 1999). In fact, by the nineteenth century indiscriminate almsgivers were held responsible for the “demoralization” of the working class and targeted to control further outpouring of beggars (Stedman Jones 1971). According to Joe Hermer (forthcoming ), this shift was emblematic of changing notions of charity and public space. In recent years these notions have manifested through diverted giving campaigns, which discourage individual gifts to beggars in favor of organized giving. In this way the organized charity replaces the indiscriminate giver to discern between the truly “deserving poor” and morally questionable “impostors .” Donors are thus assured that their donations will be put to “good” use (Dean 1999). 76 • chapter four Much of the criticism directed at beggars is imbued with discourse concerning the deserving versus the undeserving poor. In Britain this distinction arose in the 1600s and...