At Home In The Street - 98 edition

"This is a powerful ethnography which puts children's reports at the centre of its analysis. We learn how street children speak about their families, the violence in their everyday lives, their bleak futures, and interventions from welfare organizations."

--Catherine Panter-Brick,Durham University

"Hecht has been very lucky in the appropriation of the ethnographer's tape recorder by the street children themselves to hold their own 'radio workshops.' As a result, this work achieves something very special: the children themselves set the frame and limits of the otherwise inevitable and predictable outsider's sympathetic discourse on their plight. Never in ethnography has the agency of the subject's voice been so creatively present; never have the stories of such children who partly stand for contemporary Brazil been so plainly compelling."

--George Marcus, Rice University

"A moving, provocative study that probes below the surface of everyday Brazilian life. Tobias Hecht...gives voice to the country's marginalized street children, tens of thousands of whom roam the cities, orphaned or abandoned by their families, seeking through petty crime and by living by their wits to avoid being sent to the repellent state institutions. This is ethnography at its best: riveting, compassionate, pithy, handsomely illustrated with photographs, always aware of the larger social and political context."

--Robert M. Levine, University of Miami

Cambridge University Press Web Site, June, 2000

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
References Cited
Notes