‘ No somos los pobrecitos ’: Negotiating stigma,identity,and need in constructions of childhood poverty in Cusco,Peru

Circulating ideas about childhood poverty in the context of touristic Cusco

Any discussion of circulating notions of child poverty must be considered against the backdrop of debates about what constitutes poverty itself (see Escobar, 1994; Montgomery et al., 2003: 47; Rahnema, 1992; Tilly, 2007: 46), what constitutes child labor (see Fyfe, 1989; Green, 1998; Nieuwenhuys, 2005; Salazar, 2001), the relationship of child labor to poverty (see Lieten, 2001), and the perspectives of children who engage in child labor (for the case of Cusco in particular, see Bromley and Mackie, 2008). Scholarly discussions about the circulation of children and childhood frequently focus on the physical movement of children, and the causes and consequences of such mobility. Children in Cusco do circulate: rural-to-urban mass migrations have been characteristic in the region since years of economic reform and violence in the late 20th century (see Drake and Hershberg, 2006; Poole and Rénique, 1992; Stern, 1998). Gaining current attention are the movements of child street vendors as they navigate the city looking for tourist clients. These vendors – some as young as four years old – offer souvenirs, clothing, and postcards. Other children wear Andean clothing and lead pastoral animals and pets, offering tourists the opportunity to take photographs of them posing as icons of Cusqueño childhood. Traversing urban spaces from their homes on the city’s outskirts, to their schools for part-day instruction, to the city center to meet vending parents and conduct their work, to nearby after-school centers, such children play vital roles in their household economies. Even though tourists are the more obvious globally mobile actors here, both tourists and children engage with widespread stereotypes about childhood, poverty, wealth, and development that influence their interactions. Here, I highlight the limits of thinking about physical circulation by instead concentrating on the consequences of, and responses to, the metaphorical, emotional, and tactical circulation of ideas about childhood poverty.

Focus groups, interviews, and surveys that I conducted with tourists ³ indicate that they believe child labor and childhood poverty are intrinsically related, leading to assumptions about the economic and familial situations of child vendors. To many tourists, child labor automatically equates with conditions of underdevelopment, and indicates the inability of adults to make a sufficient living through existent wage options (see Lieten, 2001). Tourists have similar impressions of the children they meet in assistance programs, taking at face value a project’s claim to be working with the ‘poor child’ demographic.

Tourists that I spoke with often remarked on viewing childhood as a time of innocence and vulnerability, and expressed discomfort with the presence of children alone in the streets (see Hecht, 1998; Tilton, 2010 for discussions on the global coexistence of concerns for children as vulnerable and about children as potentially dangerous agents). Many opined that Cusqueño children are being denied their childhoods (see Bourdillon et al., 2010; Zelizer, 1985 for critical evaluations of the effects of working life on the ‘disappearance of childhood’), and admitted surprise and admiration that poor working children could be as happy as they appear. Tourists also specified more willingness to buy from a child with whom they sympathize but also admire, even if they do not want the product in question. Trends in my survey and interview data indicate that tourists were unlikely to buy products if they were too uncomfortable with the poverty being displayed, or felt like they were encouraged to feel guilty or obligated because of their own wealth. From the tourists’ point of view then, there is clearly a fine line between appearing poor but industrious, friendly and happy, and appearing poor and morally suspect or devious.

While children must therefore shape their own frameworks of childhood poverty with regard to globally circulating expectations, they also must work within the political and economic setting of Cusco as international tourism destination. The centrality of the industry creates diverse livelihood options for all sectors of the local population, although only some pathways are legal, legitimatized, and generate wealth. Though the nation’s official poverty rate stands at 45%, with even higher childhood poverty levels depending on age (UNICEF, 2008), the state has withdrawn support for many social services that might help Peru’s poorest to cope with widespread job insecurity, rising food prices, and significant inequality. Federal and regional governments have celebrated tourism as the main pathway to economic development, yet locals in Cusco frequently express a belief that much of industry revenue goes to national ministries and thus becomes concentrated in the capital of Lima. Scholars have similarly argued that instead of alleviating conditions of economic vulnerability, tourism has created new wealth disparities (Hill, 2007; Silverman, 2002). Tourism revenue is distributed selectively and the prevalence of tourists has created new barriers to economic participation, as the city’s international image has taken precedence over citizens’ material needs. For example, in order to promote cleanliness, order, and foreigner safety, ambulante vending has been banned from the historic city center (see Seligmann, 2004; Steel, 2009; Strehl, 2010). Despite official sanctions and harsh reprisals, informal vending does continue.

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have become a ubiquitous means for alleviating economic hardship and replacing previous government services such as communal dining rooms and supplemental nutrition programs for children. The majority of Cusco’s NGOs are funded by foreigners, many of whom come to the city to volunteer with poor children. Children are therefore well positioned to benefit from incoming monies, even though they do so through the prohibited and morally debated channels of ambulante vending and child labor, and through the equally contentious and sometimes demeaning route of social assistance. ⁴ Children are also susceptible to the economic and social desires that tourism helps to produce, which include dreams of prosperity, mobility, and connection. In many cases, children are as eager for the social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1990) gleaned from exchanges with foreigners as they are for the economic capital. Many children perceive their future careers to be in the tourism industry, and therefore vending and participating in NGO programming confers long-term as well as immediate advantages.

Interactions between children and tourists are conditioned by the contexts of tourism and poverty in Cusco; however, they are also productive of these same contexts. When tourists buy from children, they assist in both alleviating economic insecurity and generating expectations about equitable exchanges, personhood, and relational positionality. So-called ‘poor children’ sell products or receive aid, and find themselves less materially in need yet more deeply marked as poor. Tourism thus produces legibly poor subjects, even as it responds to, and mitigates, such poverty.

Finally, children must contend with their positionality vis-a-vis locals, particularly aid workers, who are concerned with the legal and moral dimensions of child labor and children’s assistance. The most prevalent framing for a poor child in Cusco is that of a pobrecito (poor little one). Locals – aid workers, business owners, teachers, and middle-class residents alike – accuse children of acting like pobrecitos by exaggerating their need and enhancing the reputation of Peru as an underdeveloped country where child labor is encouraged because children are more affective – and therefore more effective – vendors. Pobrecito is a derogatory position: a pobrecito is at once someone who flaunts their need, perhaps falsely, in order to obtain resources through sympathy, and someone who internalizes such need and uses it to justify a beggar mentality. On the other hand, children also occasionally find themselves having to defend their economic need to local adults who are gatekeepers to the aid that their family counts on for daily survival. Children must embody poverty, even as they cannot appear to be either performing or negating their need.

Walking the line of a pobrecito: Strategic performance and self-esteem

Children negotiate these contradictions especially in contexts where they are seeking aid. While volunteering at an after-school center in 2006, I participated in the weekly distribution of milk supplements. Two different Peruvian women, Matilda and Sara, were working as staff during this time, but only one of them worked on a given day. On the first distribution day I witnessed, Matilda called all the children into the front room and announced that only those who are documented attendees would receive milk. Moreover, the purpose of the after-school center is to provide aid for children who work in the streets, she reiterated, so they would need to declare their occupations in order to qualify.

The next week, when it was Sara’s turn, she discarded the list of qualified children that Matilda had made, and began her own evaluation process. She surveyed the children and said that one boy did not need free milk because his family owns two stores, so they clearly are not poor. The boy glared at her and retorted that she was wrong. Sara replied in turn that he always wears nice clothing anyway – name brands, new-looking and clean – so why is he trying to pretend to be poor. A little girl chimed in that her mother has no money so of course she needs to receive her milk allotment. Sara pointed to two young girls who she sees vending at night, and declared that they surely needed milk. ‘This milk is for poor children,’ she emphasized, ‘and we will give a portion to each child who is poor.’

While Matilda acknowledged children’s legitimate claim to aid based on whether they work, Sara emphasized that children must be poor in order to receive milk. Aid workers are prone to using certain types of data to classify children as in need (see Bornstein, 2005), regardless of how children position themselves. For example, Sara used markers like clothing, parental assets, as well as the visibility of their work (to her) to judge each child’s deservingness for assistance. Matilda was willing to respond to the children’s narratives, but she required them to frame their center attendance based on her own perceptions of their deservingness as working children.

On the other hand, while children are not given the opportunity to categorize themselves, they, nonetheless, are expected to present a certain portrait of need: a visible worker, with less than nice clothing, who consistently attends the program (perhaps relies on it) for help and therefore consents to – and actively pursues – formal affiliation. Childhood poverty for Matilda and Sara is a supposedly obvious typology whereby work, appearance, and attitude create entitlement to support. Children receive milk based on ‘need’ and willingness to negotiate the complexities of how others use labels like ‘poor’ and ‘worker.’

The tendency to classify the poor into groups of ‘deserving’ and ‘unworthy’ is long-standing in policy interventions for handling the needy (see, for example, Allahyari, 2000; Morgen and Maskovsky, 2003). This kind of dichotomous portrayal is also common amongst aid organizations that must decide how to distribute a finite amount of resources equitably. Problematically, constructions of deservingness tend to dehumanize the poor (Biehl, 2005) and perpetuate stereotypes that depict them as responsible for their own condition, and therefore able to do something to better themselves and improve ‘worthiness’ (Bourgois, 1995; Goode and Maskovsky, 2001). Such connotations might even paradoxically promote kindness or dignity as charitable responses in lieu of driving the pursuit for social justice and entitlement (Poppendieck, 1998).

In contrast to Sara and Matilda’s imperative to emphasize one’s poverty (and worker status) in order to receive assistance, Marietta, a psychologist employed at the same after-school center two years later, told me about her series of workshops to enhance children’s self-esteem and get them out of their assumed pobrecito mindset. She elaborated:

The children do not value themselves. They think that because they are poor, they don’t have worth and they cannot do things for themselves. This is what causes them to be in a mindset to receive things from others. Their parents tell them that they are worthless and do not give them affection. But I am trying to teach the children that they have lots of talents and skills and they can use these to feel good about themselves.

In this construction of pobrecito, children supposedly internalize a negative identity that limits their ability to work toward attaining things for themselves. In essence, children’s agency is limited by the all-encompassing and pervasive stereotypes of their subject-position. Moreover, Marietta articulates pobrecito as a construction of self-worth – a mental roadblock – rather than as connected to everyday subsistence or as a status linked to political economy.

Many local and foreign adults criticize children when they enact or conform to the pobrecito stereotype, yet children are expected to showcase their poverty in order to receive aid. These expectations and stigmas are common in children’s interactions with tourists as well. Tourists wrestled with the contradictions of wanting to help poor children, yet not be ‘guilted’ into buying and giving, or duped by false performances of poverty. This tension was marked by a sense that children too easily associate tourists with money. Amanda, a foreign volunteer coordinator at an international language school, told me about her frequent weekend biking trips outside of the city. As she rides through the Sacred Valley, children call to her ‘¡Mi propina! ¿Mi propina?’ ⁵ Amanda told me that she wonders, ‘What for? Because you are poor?’ Critiquing their sense of entitlement, Amanda bemoaned that children see a foreigner and assume that a monetary gift is forthcoming. Tourists similarly complained of feeling targeted to provide tips, requested for performed subjectivities, not earned services. They did not recognize that child vendors often discuss their income generating activities in terms of their economic independence – their ability to earn their own allowance and spending money (see Leinaweaver, 2008 for a discussion about the complexity of the propina as ‘voluntary’ compensation in the Peruvian Andes).

Amanda’s comments point to an uneasiness that Swanson (2007) also notes in the case of street vendors and beggars in Ecuador. Children are accused of,

… selling a false image of poverty. … One social worker explained: ‘If they try to provoke pity and people buy their product because of this pity, then they’re begging. … The complaint is that they do not market their products per se but, rather, market their poverty.’ (Swanson, 2007: 710)

While Swanson cites her informants’ perceptions of children exploiting the ‘emotional side,’ by encouraging their clients to make ‘a moral decision rather than a commercial one,’ she also critiques the turn away from a confrontation with market inequality toward an emphasis on the depravities of the poor. In the case of Cusco, children are suspected of playing on foreigners’ emotions in this same way; and emphasizing the affectivity of their poor and young subject-position does seem to problematically steer tourists toward reactions to a supposed performance rather than encourage them to wrestle with their own privilege in a system of touristic consumption.

In contrast to the ways that adults narrate their identities, children regularly left Marietta’s workshops confused, wondering why she stressed that self-esteem is both about accepting and working to improve yourself. In the classroom, they occasionally challenged her authority by talking back, yet their often exaggerated responses to her questions seemed to reinforce her image of them. Children accepted the label of poor child in order to take advantage of resources targeted to such a demographic, highly aware that their participation in center activities such as the workshops would enable them to also receive food and school supplies, directly meeting material needs.

This strategic performance of the subject-position of ‘poor child’ was discussed in my interviews with children, where they invoked a distinction between appearing poor and feeling poor. On the other hand, they rejected distinctions between appearing poor and being poor. That is to say, children did not articulate self-esteem qualms, nor did they see a moral dilemma in the blurring between displays of poverty and lived economic realities. They recognized the existence of unmet material needs, and that emphasizing those needs might facilitate their fulfillment. Yet children also eschewed the social stigma of being poor – as evidenced in the case of Manuel – and likewise tried to avoid being critiqued as a pobrecito.

Earlier tourism studies perspectives developed a ‘front-stage/back-stage’ idea of performativity (MacCannell, 1976; Urry, 1990), arguing that the commodification of culture for a touristic audience caused a bifurcation between what tourists saw and how locals lived. Recent tourism scholars have questioned this performance–authenticity distinction, arguing that more complex negotiations between locals and foreigners are occurring – mediations that mutually inform how representation happens, and is processed, on both sides of the encounter (Ebron, 2002; Stronza, 2001). Similarly, when I argue that children do not see clear distinctions between how they present and experience their poverty, I aim to emphasize that ‘strategy’ is not a ‘lie,’ nor is there a necessary distinction between ‘presentation’ and ‘reality.’

I contend that even while poverty is performed, children’s experiences of economic need may not necessarily be lessened:

Whether or not child vendors are self-consciously performing makes little difference, as their ‘acts’ and motives are both part of the commodified exchange. … Children are able to gain sympathy and earn money through such scripted displays, so in essence, the ‘act’ shapes the ‘reality,’ and vice versa. (Sinervo and Hill, 2011: 133)

Children’s experiences of poverty are directly informed by their performances, since the ability to make money depends on appearing in need of such money. However, in not paying close attention to this interrelation, we risk assuming low self-esteem and a pobrecito mentality when they do not exist.

Returning to Manuel’s comments, we see that he firmly challenges how aid workers might read appearance as indicative of economic status. Likewise, he shows that rather than thinking of himself as a pobrecito, as posited by Marietta, he is acutely in tune with the stereotypes that he and other children must respond to if they want to receive aid. To Manuel and his peers, poverty is a relative classification, one that makes sense in some contexts, along some indices of comparison, yet which can be stigmatizing, insulting, or inaccurate in other situations. Since children are flexible in how they use, reject, and rework the term ‘poor’ to suit their own purposes, Marietta’s workshops seemed to misread the relationship between psychological state of mind, material resources, and intersectional identities. The line between performing poverty to receive things, and internalizing an identity of worthlessness – or the line between performing poverty, and experiencing lack – is reconstructed by the children in order to gain the most from a system designed to expect certain (variable) displays of deservingness.

This approach to strategic performance is in line with new scholarship on childhood – particularly on street children (see Kovats-Bernat, 2006; Márquez, 1999) – that reminds us that while children are sometimes typecast as ‘innocent’ or ‘violent’ beyond their own control, children are very active in deciding how to present themselves, either in line with those expectations or pushing against them. For example, Leinaweaver discusses the conscious decision of orphans on how to self-define: some choose to ‘strategically mobilize’ the identity of orphanhood by ‘calling on tropes of victimhood,’ whereas others are in favor of ‘the silencing of the stigmatized past as a conscious strategy for surviving with dignity in the present’ (2008: 71–72). The symbolic loading of childhood and poverty enables child vendors and aid recipients in Cusco to be particularly emotion-evoking subjects, but also helps to obscure the ways that children might be actively involved in shaping circulating perceptions of their need.

Children are stigmatized when they put forward their needs, yet are further marginalized and denied assistance or a sale when they do not conform to the expectations that adults have of how a ‘poor child’ is supposed to look and act. The pobrecito framing thus catches children in a three-way bind of adults’ wishes to rigidly define poverty, respond empathetically to the needs of poor children, yet also triage resources based on deservingness. Not only is there a requirement to be poor, but aid workers and tourists are prone to assume that children such as vendors and center participants are automatically poor, even as they remain skeptical of this poverty. Children do not dispute the necessity that drives their vending or entanglement in relationships of assistance. They find themselves required to defend their entitlement to such sources of income, strategically harnessing the sentiments generated by childhood poverty in order to earn meaningful and necessary income for their families. Still, children do not want to be looked down upon as pobrecitos: people who are begging or taking handouts without working, people who are expecting or taking advantage of foreigner generosity.

Children experiencing economic vulnerability and constructing their identities

The comments by Manuel and his peers highlight that children are extremely cognizant of the circulating frameworks used to determine the existence and composition of childhood poverty. Children must respond to these constructs carefully, to walk the line between appearing to be a pobrecito with no self-worth, and having real need for working and receiving assistance. Yet to understand how children approach these contradictions, we need to delve further into how they might conceive of their identities as ‘poor children’ or ‘working children.’ Identity is as much tied up in localized experiences of economic vulnerability as it is in comparative perceptions of global prosperity and need.

Just as Manuel framed his identity as ‘not the most poor,’ other children approached their identities as highly contextualized – based on to whom they were comparing themselves. Still others were aware of how geographic location might constrain their livelihood options. Over tea one afternoon, 14-year-old Ricardo – who lives with his elder brother on the outskirts of Cusco – told me that he was excited to soon be returning to his village located a few hours away, where his parents still live on their land. While Ricardo and his brother work in Cusco to pay for their education and daily food, their parents subsist off a range of agricultural assets, as well as revenue from the chicha (corn beer) his mother sells out of their two-story home. Yet Ricardo’s family also receives a supplement from the government – 100 soles/month – to buy other food when they travel to Cusco. ‘We are part of this program because we are poor,’ Ricardo explained. ‘We do not have any other money, so this money helps us.’ When asked to clarify, Ricardo elaborated that the label of ‘poor’ makes sense because his family does not live in the city: they live in the campo (countryside), and they are ‘of the campo because they were born there, both [my] parents as well as [my] parent’s parents. [We] are poor because [we] do not have work.’

When I asked if Ricardo also considers himself del campo, he accepted this classification, explaining that people in the city have money, unlike people del campo. Ricardo prefers life in his village because he ‘eats more naturally’ there, however in order to achieve his dream of becoming a chef, he must stay in the city to study and work. ‘There is no work in the campo,’ he concluded. ‘My parents just take care of their chakra [land-holding]. But they don’t earn money and they don’t have security. When there is no rain, they don’t know if they will have anything.’

This conversation is full of diverse typologies that Ricardo uses to understand his economic role within his family, his family’s position within a larger regional and national demography of poverty, and kinds of wealth and ways of obtaining it. Ricardo evoked categories of campo and city to make a statement about different experiences of poverty. While not conceived of as a strict binary, this contrast situates notions of work alongside a sense of personhood, as he couples dependence on one’s own land with a subject-position of campesino, and therefore poor, Peruvian. Ricardo denies that his parents ‘work’ in the countryside, instead using the verb cuidar (to take care) to discuss their relationship to their property. Work, more specifically an activity that leads to a wage, is connected with the city, and enables a career, for example as a chef. His own dependence on vending for economic survival is elevated over what his parents do in the campo. Additionally, while he prefers living at home, Ricardo perceives this as a non-option because he can’t live there and still have the job he wants. As he positioned his family as vulnerable because of weather indeterminacy and a lack of wage-labor opportunities, Ricardo located this particular kind of insecurity within the space of the countryside, implying that poverty emerges from such a location because of the absence of career-orienting and currency-generating work there.

Development indicators that prioritize material assets and access to services closely mirror Ricardo’s perception of the intertwined nature of rurality and economic vulnerability. In turn, his positioning as a rural-to-urban migrant, entangled in relations of kinship, power, and social and economic production is illustrative of a commonly noted tension between these two spheres across the Andes, one that exists as people try to locate themselves within spaces seen as contrasting even as they are deeply co-constituted (see Paerregaard, 1997; Van Vleet, 2008). However, other children might locate Ricardo differently, reconfiguring his linking of value, personhood, and location. Divergent readings of Ricardo as ‘poor child’ because of being a ‘rural migrant’ are based on how children see the relationship between the rural and the urban, which also stems from how they experience their own vulnerabilities.

I sat one day with a family of vendors – 10-year-old Mariana, her 15-year-old sister Sandra, and their mother, Luisa – as they explained to me that everyone in the city is really del campo. Within their discussion was an implicit rejection of ‘pure’ categories of race and class (see Colloredo-Mansfeld, 1999; De La Cadena, 2000; Weismantel, 2001 in regard to the hinging of race, class, occupation, and geographic markers in the Andes), as they claimed that everyone is mixed and has roots in multiple places. Yet they also explained that this makes spatially locating poverty difficult. While Ricardo had defined his poverty as connected to his campo location, Mariana emphasized that someone like Ricardo is actually more economically secure than her family, because they can always eat their own products.

From her city positionality, Mariana felt more vulnerable to the waxing and waning of tourism revenue than she would if she could grow her own food. Likewise, when 12-year-old vendor Lucia commented on poverty in Peru, she carefully replied:

There are poor people in the campo, but they have a cow and a big field to grow things, which the rich [of the city] don’t have. And having a cow and a big field are more important than money because these things will help you when you are in need, and money one day may not help you.

Although both Mariana and Lucia have access to the tourist market that Ricardo laments that his parents need, they are acutely aware of their reliance on an indeterminate flow of tourist clients in order to make enough money to afford food. Poverty for them, and many of their other urban friends, is ‘una falta de comida’ (a lack of food), not a sense of geographic isolation. The assets that they long for, value, and connect to economic security (such as land and livestock) are things that Ricardo, in contrast, sees as perpetuating his family’s poverty.

These conversations about livelihood options were taking place in 2008, when global economic recession was causing prices of rice, oil, and other basic necessities to rise, triggering children’s fears about spending priorities and the reliability of tourism revenue. Children used awareness of these broader trends to situate their shifting perspectives of their families’ financial precariousness, drawing on personal experience as well as knowledge of international political economies – discussed in school, the streets, and their households. For example, when Lucia comments that ‘money one day may not help you,’ she is gesturing to the decreasing value of the US dollar, and her family’s decreasing ability to purchase what they need. Ricardo’s worries about his family’s current food security were influenced by global anxieties about climate change and pollution. Sandra, similarly reflective about global economic trends, wrote about national debt in an essay for me, hypothesizing that Peru would never escape poverty if other countries would not forgive this debt.

This sense of national disparities informed how children positioned themselves vis-a-vis tourists as well. For example, Mariana often asked me to buy her new clothing, food, or toys, citing my ability to afford such items. Similarly, eight- and seven-year-old vendors Andrea and Yanira recounted stories about all the rich tourists they had met, elaborating with long summaries of their clothing and accessories. It was through these constant references to the wealth of foreigners that I learned that while children are quick to position themselves as ‘not the most poor’ when juxtaposing themselves to their friends, in comparison to tourists they do see themselves as economically destitute.

Approaching childhood poverty as one large catch-all category obscures the nuances behind Ricardo’s and Mariana’s different narrations of how they experience economic vulnerability. Their positionality is informed by global discourses of economy and development but also emerges from how they relate to foreigners (and each other), earn their livings, and therefore view themselves economically and socially: not as pobrecitos, but sometimes as poor.

Blurring the lines between performance and experience: Revisiting circulation

The circulation of ideas about childhood and poverty are entangled in contradictory frameworks of vulnerability that children must respond to, but can also transform. Tourists and aid workers contribute to circulating ideas about childhood poverty as they attempt to fix what it means to be poor and thereby deserving of aid or revenue; moreover, they challenge the ways that children evoke their need. We see this process at work in the comments of Sara, Matilda, and Marietta, the aid workers struggling to allocate too few resources and instill self-esteem in children they perceive as emotionally endangered by their poverty.

Children also blur the lines between performance and experience, taking advantage of the pobrecito framing when necessary and expedient, and rejecting such a framing when it comes to their self-perception. Consider again the ways that children like Manuel, Ricardo, and Mariana narrate their understanding of their subject-position, and the ways that children in the after-school center negotiate how they are positioned by others. A closer look at how children define poverty, and themselves as within or outside of it depending on context and interaction, sheds light on the relativity of poverty and how the strategic performance of ‘poor child’ articulates with, and unhinges from, lived economic insecurity. The performance of poverty helps to alleviate the experience of poverty, since (the right kinds of) displays of need in touristic Cusco are met with aid and commercial transaction.

I have focused on the circulation of ideas about childhood poverty – rather than the circulation of physical children – to show how the currency of stereotypes and expectations can affect children’s everyday lives. Moreover, I aim to emphasize that prioritizing children’s agency and perspectives can help us to construct alternative models for thinking about childhood poverty in terms of not only economic livelihood, but also identity and everyday kinds of marginalization. The data presented here illustrate that children do not passively cope with how they are positioned, or how stereotypes about their poverty circulate; instead children help to shape and challenge perceptions of vulnerability and the very ways in which these circulations have the potential to better their socioeconomic opportunities in Cusco’s growing tourism industry. I suggest that to take children seriously as ‘meaning makers’ (Bluebond-Langner and Korbin, 2007) – especially in instances where they are approached as doubly disenfranchised due to poverty – we must highlight how children work within, and sometimes outright reject, adult analytical models of their well-being and relative power.