Focus on Child Vendors?
I began this study with a personal interest in the subject of children and work. As a young girl, I worked with my parents in both México and the United States. I saw working with my family as something normal and as my responsibility to help my parents. When I lived in México, during my formative years, I worked at a small, family-owned grocery store, or tienda de abarrotes. While I helped my mother run the store as she taught at a local academy, my father worked as a parking attendant in Los Angeles, California. Later, when I turned seventeen, my father unexpectedly passed away from a stroke. My mother, along with my brothers and me, decided to move to the United States due to our financial dependence on my father’s remittances. Ironically, my father earned more as a parking attendant in the United States than my mother did as a teacher in México. Once in the United States, I also worked with my mother temporarily when she cleaned houses before she landed steady employment at a factory, where she worked for almost eighteen years. Aside from working with my mother, I always held other jobs, and sold my own artwork to help cover some of the household costs as well as my own educational expenses.9
Furthermore, when I was a college student at Long Beach City College and later at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I became interested in topics related to immigrant families. Yet my story was conspicuously absent from the many books assigned in my sociology and Chicana/o studies courses. Some readings, however, did stand out as important correctives to this oversight. Doméstica, by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, allowed me to see the experiences of women like my mother who worked in informal low-wage work.10 Later, the work by Marjorie F. Orellana on the role of children of immigrants as language brokers began to highlight the contributions of children in immigrant families as translators.11 Reading their scholarship made me feel as if I also had a place in academia. I fantasized about the day that I too would also share the story of children who work with la familia just like I did.
Now I have a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Southern California and I teach courses on immigration at Arizona State University in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. I have spent my educational career studying Latinx families with a specific focus on children and their role in the family, including their economic role. My profession as a university professor also allows me to meet students from diverse socioeconomic classes and racial and ethnic backgrounds; I enjoy learning about their childhood experiences when I teach about children and work. During these lessons, I learn that many of my students have worked when they were young. Some worked as babysitters, tutors, and lifeguards, and some interned with their professional parents. For example, in one of my classes, when I asked my students to share about their work experience growing up, James, a White male student from the Midwest, shared how he worked at his family’s farm and how he now owns his own business and helps provide for his dying mother.12 Holding back tears, he confided with the class that after his mother was diagnosed with cancer, he took on more responsibilities related to the household expenses. Although this was difficult for him, it was most difficult for his mom because she had been accustomed to being the one who cared for her son and not the other way around. James left class early that day, almost immediately after sharing his experience with the class.
Jordan told us that he worked as a lifeguard when he was younger. Jordan recognized that the connections he had with his coaches helped him land this fun and well-remunerated summer job. Similarly, Kathy was very proud of the work she did at a law firm. She too found this job through a personal recommendation from her father. Yet not all students in my classes had these same types of social networks.
Other students cleaned houses with their parents, did farm work, worked in family-owned businesses, helped maintain manicured lawns with their fathers, and sold merchandise at local swap meets; others, such as the children interviewed for this book, sold food and other goods on the streets. These were typically the experiences of my Latinx students. One semester, my student César, who is visually impaired, stood up to share his experience working as a little kid. He told us that he grew up selling mops and brooms with his parents. From a young age, he learned how to sell. He is now married, has children of his own, and is furthering his education at Arizona State. As he works toward his degree, he continues to sell mops and brooms to help support his family.
My student Isabel, who had recently graduated high school, told the class that she used to clean houses with her mother prior to moving for college. She told us about a time she bumped into her classmate one day she and her mother were cleaning a house in the nice side of town. Isabel and her mother were each carrying a bucket full of cleaning supplies when Isabel’s classmate dashed out of her house with her friends. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday morning, Isabel remembered. A nice day to enjoy out with her friends, but she had to work with her mother instead. “She didn’t even recognize me,” she murmured. “I mean, it’s great that she didn’t”—Isabel laughed and so did the class—“but I felt so embarrassed,” she continued in a low voice, “to know that I was my classmate’s maid and she didn’t even recognize me.” The class’s laughter quickly came to a stop as people recognized the seriousness in Isabel’s voice. Later, Isabel shared with me that she was one of just two Latinas in her Advanced Placement history class, and throughout high school she continued helping her mother. She graduated from high school with honors and wants to become a professor one day. Another student, Reina, waited for me after class to tell me that she used to street vend with her mom and was planning on studying law after finishing her bachelor’s degree. I usually hear these types of stories from my Latinx students, many of whom grew up poor. I assume that they feel comfortable with me because I am also Latina, but perhaps it is the fact that I am open about my childhood work experience when I teach on this subject.
These may seem like polar examples of childhood work. To some degree they are. However, when we list on the whiteboard lessons from their work, the lists from these two groups are very similar. Students say that they learn time management skills and the value of the dollar, and some say that work keeps them out of trouble. A major difference comes when I ask students what they do with their earnings. Students in my first category usually worked to have extra spending money, while the students in the second category usually worked to help with the family household expenses. Another difference is deeply rooted in the nature of the work they do. Often, students in the second category do not define the work they do as “real” work; rather, they see it as helping the family. Others, such as Isabel and Reina, see it as stigmatized work that they seldom chose to talk about in public, especially not in a school setting where they take a subordinate class position among their more affluent classmates.
I highlight these personal classroom observations because they mirror the literature that points to one type of work experience as normative in the United States while the other is not.13 It is more acceptable when children work to gain experience and earn a little bit of pocket money and less so when they do it to help with the family’s economic survival. In the United States, the association of children and work has been paradoxical since the turn of the twentieth century. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer analyzed the transformation of childhood that took place in the United States between 1870 and 1930.14 She used the term useful child to refer to the nineteenth-century child who actively contributed to the family’s economic survival through labor.15 She notes the emergence in the twentieth century of the productively “useless” yet emotionally “priceless” child.16 The dominant view is that school and work are antithetical spheres. The notion of childhood that prevails in most postindustrial societies is that children must be educated, “developed,” and “raised.”17 You might recall my student James and his mother, and how uncomfortable she felt receiving financial help from her son, even though he was already a young adult. In fact, children’s protected, sacred status defines modernity, an era characteristic of order and structure and a movement away from tradition.18 As one scholar has observed, “The dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is considered a yardstick of modernity.”19
However, divergent meanings of childhood also coexist in a given time period and in the same location.20 Academic researchers confirm this observation. Antonella Invernizzi found that in Andean rural communities in Peru, the “work done by children is much valued and seen as a means of taking an active part in family and community life.”21 In contrast, the middle classes in the urban regions “see the child’s daily life as being