Political Children: Violence, Labor, and Rights in Peru is Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland’s valuable contribution to scholarship on working children, on the one hand, and transforming received wisdom about the state, on the other. She draws on extended ethnographic fieldwork across the sprawl of Lima, the nation’s capital and a coastal megacity of more than 10 million, a third of Peru’s population.
Two fieldsites each offer different groupings of young people. One is the shantytown of Lomas de Carabayllo in far northern Lima, adjacent to a large landfill and populated by many rural-to-urban migrants. The children in Lomas observe the daily life and challenges of those around them, lamenting environmental degradation, an absence of the state in both infrastructural and personnel commitments, and painful indignities of neighborhood life, like the mysterious poisoning of barking dogs. Many of the children have worked to help support their families, like Clara, whom we meet at age 10½, who is paid to cut glass bottles at the landfill. By contrast, the other fieldsite is an activist organization of young workers called MANTHOC, which has been a part of Peru’s labor landscape since the 1970s. MANTHOC members reside all over Peru, although Luttrell-Rowland focuses on those in Lima. But they cohere not as coresidents of a neighborhood but as comrades, as participants in a shared political and ideological project. They work, too, in a range of roles, and through their activism and use of “rights language,” they ask for recognition of the contributions they make as workers. The differences in these two populations are illustrative and instructive, and Luttrell-Rowland learns from those differences to great effect as the book unfolds. She also maintains that despite those differences, “what connects those young people is their shared experience of disparity and state violence” (17).
All of the real children she speaks and listens to are contrasted with imaginary ones: the symbolic imagery that discursive children offer to politicians who make speeches about vulnerable children in order to justify the various interventions they propose. This is particularly relevant as Peru’s government, in line with international norms and treaties, seeks to curtail child labor even further (159), framing it as a social problem, and as such, as Leigh Campoamor has argued, “depoliticiz[ing] the inequalities within which [particular kids] struggle to survive each day” (Reference Campoamor2016, 169). Luttrell-Rowland notes that at least since the 1990s, Peru’s government, like many others, has verbally celebrated the rights of children (as one of the early signers of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) while insufficiently battling stark inequalities. History, both relatively recent and quite deep, also permeates Luttrell-Rowland’s analysis: Peru’s signing of that UN convention took place amid the two decades of bitter internal violence between Shining Path and government counterinsurgency forces, and even the violence of the colonial period hundreds of years previously has, Luttrell-Rowland argues, echoes in today’s enduring injustices. When 17-year-old Vanessa comments that “we are very forgotten,” for example, Luttrell-Rowland notes that it is a term with a racialized and colonial history that “implies a sense of neglect” that is relational, personal, and comparative (78).
Though he is not cited, I was reminded of Paul Willis’s classic book Learning to Labor (Reference Willis1981[1977]). Willis shows how working-class youth perceive the structural production of injustice and inequality, yet ultimately how they are compelled to participate in it rather than overthrow it. Luttrell-Rowland, too, demonstrates the everyday contradictions of capitalism: how the children who cut glass at the landfill both contribute to their families’ well-being and expose themselves to physical harm (31). “If we burn garbage then we make smoke, right?” asks 9-year-old Ana with great insight about people’s complicity with and participation in the structures that constrain them (38). The chapter on visual political messaging is especially powerful in showing the mechanics of this process: the dynamic relationship between laudatory, optimistic hand-painted slogans and an everyday sense of the state’s material absence informs children’s insights on the gap between possibility and experience (81). Far from fading into the background, these ubiquitous murals and the deferred promises they gesture toward are evidence for “why the young people understand ‘politics’ as largely ideological and absent” (99).
A great strength of Luttrell-Rowland’s approach in both the methodological conduct of this research and in the writing of it is how constructively and ethically she recognizes the humanity of others. This is, first and foremost, true of the children she comes to know. Anyone who does serious research with children must reflect quite deliberately on how to access their unique views of the world, given that they are so often mediated or even undercut by adults. Luttrell-Rowland developed an approach she calls relational listening, which invests time in the research relationships and requires conscious reflexivity on the part of the ethnographer (8). She quotes lengthy exchanges held with the children, allowing the reader to hear their ways of speaking. She invites them to draw, and to talk about what’s outside the margins of their drawings. She also worked closely with a local colleague and research collaborator in Lomas (whom she gives a pseudonym at his request). And with the kids of MANTHOC, she deliberately takes them in the way they ask to be heard: as representatives of a collective and organized social movement and not primarily as children but rather as workers (153). But this reflexivity and relationality also extends to her dialogical relationship with the scholarship she engages with. It is easy to dismiss critically the work of those who have gone before, who wrote in a different time and in response to different imperatives. But Luttrell-Rowland never takes that path. She consistently reads others with generosity and grace, citing an impressively wide range of research and incorporating a significant number of Peruvian and other Spanish-speaking authors into the conversation, and in all this offers a valuable model for how to do scholarship constructively.
The one piece I felt to be missing in the book’s analysis was to apply that same reflexivity more consistently to translation. For Spanish-speaking readers, the relative absence of Spanish words leaves some uncertainty about how key terms are being translated. Though in general a translational gloss is appropriate and works well, for central terms some discussion would be welcome, building on an interpretive method that promises it “moves beyond solely content and attends to affect, word choice, and sentiment” (54). One example is to offer clarity on how “politics” was translated—if young people are being “asked about politics” (53) and respond dismissively, knowing what they were asked might have some bearing on the interpretation of their one-word answers. In Spanish, política can mean both politics and policy, and the nuance might matter in a situation like this one. Another example is “apology for terrorism,” a common phrase and indeed a criminal offense in Peru (64–65). The Spanish word apologia in this case could be more effectively translated as “defense of” or “justification for,” almost the opposite of an apology. (We have the word apologist in English for the person who participates in this, but not the word for what they are doing.) “Tenderness” is one last example—clearly central to the political orientation of MANTHOC, the word is an unusual one in English (I had to turn to the bibliography entry for Alejandro Cussiánovich to find the Spanish original: ternura). Alternate possibilities for translation—for example, affect, care, “mutuality of being” (Sahlins Reference Sahlins2011), or even love—might have opened up interesting routes for theoretical exploration.
This book could be profitably added to the syllabi of courses in Latin American studies, political anthropology, and childhood studies. But where I would most love to see it taught is in a political science course on the state, labor, or activism, or as part of a master’s of public policy. Those are the sites where, as Luttrell-Rowland argues, children’s perspectives are so seldom considered that this book could be truly revelatory. She shows that political knowledge can contain “longing, hope, contradiction, desire, and even distrust” (55), and that data like children’s views on what school means for them are in fact evaluations of the work of the state (59). The Lomas children understand politics inductively, and the MANTHOC children understand it deductively (182), but all of them are knowledgeable political subjects with much to say about the state, its reach, and its absences.
