403082 JUH37410.

1177/0096144211403082Aldebot-GreenJournal of Urban History

Articles
Journal of Urban History

Changelings: Transformative 37(4) 479­–496

© 2011 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0096144211403082
Street Children, 1965-1981 http://juh.sagepub.com

Scarlett Aldebot-Green1

Abstract
Between 1965 and 1981, Costa Ricans changed their perceptions of which characteristics they
thought defined appropriate urban childhoods. By 1981, the model of a modern, urban Costa
Rican child was that of a child who attended school, did not work on the streets, and played in
specifically designated places. Children who did not fit this mold began, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, to be viewed as dangerous to society and as evidencing social pathology. Whereas
children who worked on the streets during the 1960s were considered part of the urban
landscape, and their childhoods, though difficult, were not perceived as deviant, these same
children, two decades later, were viewed as marginal and problematic. To trace this change, this
article focuses on the changing perceptions about children on the streets that writers for and
public contributors to La Nación, one of the preeminent Costa Rican newspapers, show during
the sixteen-year period under analysis.

Keywords
Latin America, street children, urbanization

Children have been working in the streets of Costa Rica for a long time; this is not a recent histori-
cal phenomenon. In 1981, Paul Kutsche conducted life history interviews of a group of individu-
als in San José. Among them was El Tigre, a veteran shoe-shiner in the capital city. El Tigre grew
up for a significant part of his life on the streets.1 According to his reported life history, he began
to live on the streets as a young adolescent during the mid-1940s.2 Like many children, El Tigre
and his brother survived on the streets by shining shoes and doing other odd jobs.3 The two left
home because their father did not allow them to attend school, forced them to work on his small
garden, and used his money on prostitutes and alcohol rather than on providing for the children;
their mother left the family home after the two divorced, and she was raising their sister.4 Despite
working in the streets and spending a significant part of his time there, El Tigre and his brother
often slept in hotel rooms or abandoned buildings.5 El Tigre continued to make a living through
shoe shining and eventually married, had two daughters, bought a house, and lived a “good life.”6
El Tigre regretted how tough his youth had been but was grateful that the city offered him oppor-
tunities for survival and, later, to do quite well for his occupation.7 Despite spending much of his

1
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Scarlett Aldebot-Green
4832B Delridge Way SW Seattle, WA 98106
Email: saldebot@umail.ucsb.edu
480 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

youth on the streets, El Tigre claimed to have always known where his father resided and to have
maintained sporadic contact with his mother.8
To anyone who has spent time in Latin America, the sight of children washing car windows;
selling newspapers, lottery tickets, fruit, candy, flowers, or souvenirs; shining shoes; guarding
cars; begging; or engaging in a myriad of other economic activities is common. Especially in
larger cities, poor men, women, and children are ubiquitous as they weave in and out of traffic;
set up shop in front of commercial centers, markets, restaurants, museums, and parks; move
about with their wares on the sidewalks; or linger near churches and tourist attractions. Despite
extensive evidence related to the historical existence of “street children,” the majority of observers,
local and foreign, who encounter these sights are convinced of their recency. Furthermore, the
apparent vulnerability of working children in particular, as they dot our increasingly congested
and trafficked metropolises; their mounting numbers, which correlate to increases in popula-
tion and poverty; their growing visibility in the media; and the dramatic difference between the
childhood that these children seem to experience and the childhoods that most middle-class
people consider normative have resulted in the creation of untrue stereotypes regarding their
lives. In society’s collective consciousness, children working on the street, when no supervising
adult is clearly visible, are abandoned children in need of rescue. Frequently, these children are
imagined as lacking connections with their families, as being deprived of their childhoods, and
as evidencing and contributing to our societies’ pathologies; this perception of children on the
streets was not always so.
This article argues that between the years of 1965 and 1981, Costa Ricans, as a whole, changed
their perceptions of what characteristics they thought defined appropriate urban childhoods. By
1981, the model of a modern, urban Costa Rican child was one who attended school; did not
work on the streets; and played in specifically designated spaces, such as playgrounds, or indoors.
Children who did not fit this mold began, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, to be viewed as
dangerous to society and as evidencing social pathology. Whereas children who worked on the
streets during the 1960s were considered part of the urban landscape, and their childhoods,
though arguably difficult, were not considered deviant, these same children, two decades later,
were considered marginal and problematic. To trace this change, this article focuses on the chang-
ing perceptions about children on the streets that writers for and public contributors to La Nación,
one of the preeminent Costa Rican newspapers, show during the sixteen-year period under
analysis.
In addition to the urban history of the region, this article seeks to contribute to the history of
children in Latin America, a relatively new field of research.9 Bianca Premo attributes this nov-
elty in part to the condition under which studies about childhood emerged in the field of history
and the fact that the teleological narratives embedded in these studies “fit uneasily” into the his-
tories and present-day experiences of children in Latin America.10 Historians of Latin America
often have felt at odds with the field’s assumption of progress toward ideas about children and
societal practices related to children that would culminate in “modern” or “Western” notions of
childhood.11 According to Premo, once scholars of the region began to reconceptualize moder-
nity as “an ideology that [Latin Americans] have generated, experimented with, and sometimes
rejected at various junctures in the past,” they began to investigate how modernity was devel-
oped and deployed; this was an analytical framework that more readily accommodated the reali-
ties of childhood in the region.12
Despite the fact that the history of childhood in Latin America may appear as comparatively
underdeveloped because it, prior to the 1990s, ran “parallel, rather than intersecting, courses with
the approach taken by scholars of the U.S. and Northern Europe,” this is far from a comprehensive
characterization of the field.13 If we account for the incorporation of children in other research
fields including institutional, legal, family, slave family, women, and social histories, to name a
Aldebot-Green 481

few, we can easily see that Latin American historians have been piecing together the past lives
of children in the region for quite a long time.14 In doing so, they have often drawn connections
between the lives of children, politics, and broader economic processes.15
These connections have become even more evident for scholars who study childhood in the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Conceptual frameworks such as globalization have
enabled scholars to draw out the interconnectivity between homogenizing societal discourses
about childhood, underlying power dynamics, and the economic processes of the past century. It
is precisely the production of what Kuznesof terms a “global morality,” a process that really took
off since the United Nations Year of the Child in 1979 and that dictates a homogenized vision of
what a proper childhood should look like, that make studies like the present essential.16 In the
absence of a clear understanding about how false conceptual paradigms such as the decline of the
kinship system in Latin America or the increase in deviant childhoods are created and dissemi-
nated, we risk being bound by narratives that prevent useful investigation of the structural eco-
nomic sources of phenomena that are misinterpreted and demonized.17
To this end, scholars who focus on children who spend a significant amount of time on the
streets have begun to investigate the relationships between children and their environment, rec-
ognizing that “morally-powerful social constructions of family, home, domesticity, and child-
hood” cannot exist in the absence of an opposing dystopic construction.18 The form, time, and
manner in which the dystopic construction is created tells us much about the society constructing
it. Donna Guy, for example, links emergent ideas about dangerous children with the rise of the
welfare state in Argentina, the rapid growth of urban centers, and an ideology of modernity that
required state-spearheaded solutions to “child welfare issues.”19 Likewise, in “The Child-Saving
Movement in Brazil” Irene Rizzini characterizes state measures aimed at saving children, who
are sometimes characterized as having the potential to become monsters, as “essential to nation
building” and part of an effort, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to maintain
social control.20
Like these scholars, I argue that the existence and characterization of “street children” should
be understood in relation to the political and economic circumstances of the regions where they
are said to exist.21 The locus, both in time and space, where “improper” childhoods are created is
the key to rupturing the pernicious effect of the paradigm. As Connolly contends, it is the very
presence and visibility of certain types of children in certain streets of urban centers that has been
construed as problematic.22 It is my hope that this investigation into the transformation of the
perception of the Costa Rican street child between 1965 and 1981, a time of incredible political
and economic change, addresses the “pressing need to examine street children as they are socially
conceived in the urban environment,” such that the historicity of the phenomenon will help “dis-
pel the myths that have impeded proper planning with them for their welfare.”23

Children on the Street: Changing Notions about

Appropriate Spaces for Unaccompanied Children
Studies conducted with street child populations consistently abrogate the stereotypes about these
children that are the basis for societies’ negative perceptions. In Costa Rica, a study conducted
by Utah State University in conjunction with the University of Costa Rica found that the major-
ity of street children in San Jose in 1988, over 70 percent, lived at home and turned over the bulk
of their earnings to parents.24 Children who lived near very populated areas seemed to conduct
their activities closer to home, rather than in the San José city center, where their presence is
often interpreted as seriously problematic, and typically operated under the radar of observers,
concerned citizens, and social investigators.25 Three-quarters of the children in the study did not
habitually engage in activities that could be perceived as antisocial, such as the consumption of
482 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

alcohol or drugs, participation in prostitution, or delinquency.26 Thus, their behavior was not
consonant with the societal perception that their presence in the street would lead them to
“assimilate a group of habits or behaviors that the society perceives with disgust.”27 To be sure,
some of the children had participated in survival-motivated criminal activities at least once:
29 percent of the children interviewed stated that participating in a theft was their single most
traumatic experience on the streets.28 What, then, was the process through which Costa Rican
children who spent time working or living on the streets of San Jose began to be subsumed by
negative stereotypes?
A significant part of this answer rests on changing notions between 1965 and 1981 about who
should occupy specific urban spaces and the types of activities in which those people could
engage in on city-center streets. In Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader,
scholars analyze the anthropological theory of the divided city, which, in the case of Latin
America, has been understood by scholars to refer “to numbers of fortified residential enclaves
found in cities where walls, surveillance technologies, and armed guards separate the upper and
middle classes from the poor.”29 Some authors, such as Calderia, apply this concept to an analy-
sis of the effect of these segregated places on the quality of public life.30 The segregation of urban
space is “justified by an increasing fear of violence and street crime.”31 There is a converse effect
as well. When urban space becomes segregated, people who inappropriately occupy spaces are
increasingly perceived as deviant or threatening to the established or preferred societal order. In
Costa Rica, we can observe a shift in society’s perception of the urban spaces that children
should occupy: street children, who often did not adhere to these boundaries, became aberrant.

First Phase: Dangerous Streets

The streets of San José, Costa Rica in 1965 held a mixture of urban and rural characteristics.
Trucks and cars sped swiftly by, competing with pedestrians, who, due to their own inattentive-
ness or to that of the drivers, often met an unpleasant end. Among the many individuals on the
streets were children who played, worked, strolled, and ran errands both alone and accompanied
throughout the city. Children, like many adults, met tragic ends on the streets of San José. For
years, La Nación ran multiple public service announcements throughout the paper urging par-
ents to “make sure that [their] children not play on the public ways [in order to prevent] pain
and tragedies in their homes.”32 These announcements do not yet reflect a perception that chil-
dren on the streets are deviant but do evidence a growing belief that city streets are dangerous
places for children.
A survey of some of these accidents confirms this danger. Accidents range from somewhat
minor collisions between children and motorcycles to significantly larger collisions between
children and cars, trucks, or buses that caused instant death or hospitalization.33 More than
informing us about some of the street dangers of early urbanizing Costa Rica, articles about
accidents provide a glimpse into what the streets might have looked like to an observer, including
the prevalence and ages of children who may have appeared on Costa Rican urban streets during
this period. Though at times it is not clear whether an injured child was accompanied by an adult
or not, at other times the description is enough to rule out an adult companion. Thus, we find that
during the mid-1960s children of various ages spent time on the streets outside of the immediate
supervision of their families.
Thirteen-year-old Mario Molina Calderon, for example, was playing with a small bike on the
street when he was hit in a hit-and-run.34 A six-year-old girl who ran into the street from behind
a parked car was killed when a bus ran over her at 1:20 in the afternoon; there is no mention of
whether the girl was accompanied by an adult, but the circumstances of the accident indicate that
it is unlikely that she was.35 Young children, such as a five-year-old who ran out of her house
Aldebot-Green 483

before being struck by a truck, causing fatal injuries, were also alone in Heredia, an urban area
near San José.36 Though some of these children seem to be playing on the streets near their
homes and during daylight hours, this was not always the case.37 Ten-year-old Ingrid Alfaro
Avila, for example, was struck in the commercial center of San José between Calle Central and
10th Avenue; again, no adult companion is mentioned.38 Sometimes, the children are accompanied
by an older sibling.39 At other times, children as young as five appear alone, running or jumping
before being struck.40 Children were involved in collisions in the middle of the afternoon as well
as after dark.41 A minor crossing the street at nine at night, for example, was struck by a car on
February 16, 1968.42
No socioeconomic background seems to predominate, as kids from a wide range of back-
grounds fell victim to traffic dangers on the streets during the mid- to late 1960s. The sixteen-
year-old son of a police sergeant, for example, was hit by a bus at 9:45 in the morning while he
walked with a friend.43 Concerned by the prevalence of traffic injuries and deaths to children in
San José’s streets, a parent in 1968 wrote a letter to the editor of La Nación expressing his con-
cern that school officials for Escuela Garcia Monge had scheduled the school day to end at six in
the afternoon.44 The father complained that children who could not afford bus fair or who lived
in an area where there was no bus service might have to walk as far as three kilometers to their
homes after dark.45 The letter is instructive on two counts. First, like the accident accounts, it
provides evidence that children from various economic backgrounds were a common sight on
the streets of Costa Rica during daylight and after dark. Second, it shows that some parents were
growing concerned about the presence of their children on city streets after dark.
Increasingly, then, appropriate places for children were beginning to be conceptualized as off
the street or indoors. Other occurrences reported in La Nación shed light on the fact that vehicular
danger was not the only reason for or manifestation of this increasing correlation between street
and danger. In the nice suburb of Florida, for example, a fifteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old
who stood on the curb were shot by police in a case of mistaken identity.46
Though there was increased social anxiety regarding the presence of unaccompanied children
on the street during the mid- to late 1960s—whether they were walking, playing, or loitering—
the perceived dangers of the street had not yet been construed as extreme enough to require
absolute protection from the street for all children. Nor did the increased perception of street
danger fully translate yet to an increased perception of the dangerous child on the street. Particularly,
children who worked on the streets during this period were considered a commonplace, generally
accepted (though sometimes deserving of pity) occurrence of the urban landscape. As El Tigre’s
story from the beginning of this article illustrates, working children in the streets of San José
were not a new sight in this time.
Reliable information on children and work is difficult to obtain, especially when the informa-
tion we seek relates to children working in the informal economic sector. These are children who
would not have applied for a work permit for underage workers through Costa Rica’s Patronato
Nacional de la Infancia (PANI), the principal institution overseeing matters related to the welfare
of children and mothers, who did not pay taxes, and who had no benefits from social security or
other state programs through their work. However, our newspaper source does enable us to glean
some of the attitudes of the period regarding child workers in general and urban street child
workers in particular.
In 1965, children who were workers were neither idealized nor problematized. In 1965
UNICEF sponsored a rabbit husbandry project in Costa Rica that was featured in La Nación.47 A
photo of rural children with their rabbits in special cages provided by the organization accompa-
nied the featuring article.48 The children proudly smiled at the camera, and the article went on to
describe the benefits of the program for rural workers, including children.49 There is no evidence
in the article, the photograph, or the outlined goals of the program that those who worked and
484 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

contributed to the family economy were engaging in an activity that was inappropriate because
of their youth. Further evidence of the prevalence of child workers is a study published in 1965
that indicated that more than sixty thousand school-aged children in Costa Rica did not attend
school.50 It is not a stretch to suppose that, since the major obstacle to school attendance sited by
the Ministry of Public Education was financial, some, if not many, of these children worked in
some form.51 Even children who were engaged in the types of economic activities that we typi-
cally associate with street children elicited little disapproval during the mid-1960s.52 The story
of young R. Lerena is illustrative.
In 1968, a short article in La Nación describes the feat of a young boy, R. Lerena, who was
hired by a Dr. Ortiz to watch his car—a typical way that children make money on the streets.53
While Lerena was distracted, a man grabbed a briefcase of medical implements through the car’s
open window.54 Lerena is then described as heroically giving chase and recovering the briefcase:
“The small but valiant guardian soon noticed what was happening and followed the robber until
he threw the briefcase down.”55 Though the thief ultimately escaped, Lerena is credited for
denouncing the crime to the authorities.56 In addition to young Lerena’s antics, the article is
interesting for the way that it treats the topic of a child working on the streets of San José. At no
point does the article suggest that the very fact that Lerena was working on the street was inap-
propriate. Instead, Lerena’s working is described as a matter of course and his “valiant” feat is
lauded. The importance of the way Lerena was represented in the story cannot be overstated.
Though we do not have a picture of him and, thus, do not know his physical appearance, how he
was dressed, or his general disposition, his function, place, and behavior in society seems to
be accepted at this point in time. R. Lerena’s childhood in 1968 does not seem aberrant to anyone
connected with the story.
In fact, children on the street who were not working were even the target of government voca-
tional programs during this time.57 Stating that lower-class children whose families had not
emphasized education do not typically matriculate from school due to their “lack of interest in
the sciences and letters,” Costa Ricans set out to make them productive as the “new arms and
new hands of tomorrow’s Costa Rica.”58 In 1968, before the economic crisis led to the elimina-
tion of funding for these types of innovative programs, the National Institute of Education fore-
saw the building of two or three more schools in addition to a pilot vocational school, based on
the needs of the students and the availability of instructors, for children ages twelve to eighteen
years who roamed the streets without occupation.59 Thus, during this period, the government
wanted to harness these children as workers. But at no point in the discussion of these roaming,
nonworking groups of children did the authorities or the article’s author consider these children
threatening. Furthermore, incorporating these children into the workforce voluntarily did not
seem inappropriate.
Like Lerena and the loitering adolescent future trade workers, child street vendors seemed to
have been generally accepted in the 1960s, as they were afforded no special treatment because of
their minority. During this period, San José lawmakers began a process of urban segregation
between areas of informal commercial activity and areas of formal commercial activities. Street
vendors became the focus of initiatives to “clean up” the city’s main thoroughfares. In a 1968
session of the San José County Municipal Board, the issue of street vendors came to a head, lead-
ing to significant contentious opinions: some argued that street vendors had the right to make a
living, while others argued for the restriction of these activities to particular zones in the city.60
There is no evidence that, at any point in the discussion or in subsequent articles and letters to the
editor written on the topic, people were differentiating between adult street vendors and child
street vendors.61
Despite the fact that San José’s residents had begun to see the streets as potentially dangerous
to children by the late 1960s, they had not yet begun to conceive of children who spent time
Aldebot-Green 485

unaccompanied on the streets as dangerous themselves. Did children begin to behave differently
during the late 1970s and early 1980s? Could a change in the types of crimes committed by chil-
dren on the streets during the period under analysis help explain changing notions about proper
childhoods and the proper spaces for children? It is difficult to say, for similar crimes by chil-
dren, primarily theft, were reported throughout the sixteen-year period under analysis.
In April 1965, for example, two 13-year-old girls were caught stealing from the Central Library
in San José.62 Another minor was caught later that month stealing jewelry, two pairs of men’s
pants, and a woman’s woolen sweater from a parked car outside of a movie theater; the child was
apprehended as he ran back and forth from the car to his hiding place, each time with new bounty.63
Another set of minors were reported to have been induced to commit crimes by an adult ring-
leader. The youths, the oldest of which was twelve years old, were reported to have been stealing
goods from neighboring stands in the market in order to sell them at discounted prices to a nearby
vendor, who the police alleged was orchestrating the thefts.64 On the same day, three young girls
were indicted for robbing the offices of the newspaper El Acance earlier in the year.65
Children also participated in more organized robberies of residences, including the theft of
3,000 colones by a group of children from the home of Mrs. Chinchilla, the theft of goods from
a school by a twelve-year-old who the authorities believed was induced by family members to
commit the crime, and a more complicated home burglary by a nine- and eleven-year-old that
involved the use of a ladder for scaling in through a window.66 The residents of the home as well
as the detective in charge of the investigation for the latter burglary “did not like the idea” of the
crime having been committed by children but, when the evidence pointed in that direction,
resigned themselves to believing it.67 Though some articles claimed that youth delinquency was
on the rise in 1968, citing a theft against an ambulant kitchen-wares vendor, for which four chil-
dren between the ages of nine and twelve were arrested, society does not seem to have a height-
ened fear of victimization by criminal children.68 Furthermore, children on the street were not
targeted specifically as the culprits. Instead, time and time again detectives and victims in the
1960s seemed to want to deny that minors were committing crimes of their own accord and often
tried to reason that the crimes must have been induced by or perpetrated in collaboration with
adults. Regardless of this disbelief, the brazen nature of the crimes in some cases seems to indi-
cate some agency on the parts of the little thieves.
With regards to illicit drug use and possible prostitution, there is some evidence that children
were engaged in both during the 1960s. In January 1968, a raid of several locations in San José
that were reputed to be centers for illegal gambling, drug use, and “performing acts against
morality” yielded the discovery of two minors.69 The ages of the minors are not specified in the
report, but the reporter correlates part of the corruptive influence of these locales with their expo-
sure of minors to illicit activities.70 Again, minors engaged in criminal behavior are perceived as
victims, and the street or space, rather than the children themselves, are construed as problem-
atic. La Nación reported other incidents involving minors’ drug use in houses throughout the
city. On February 29, 1968, after observing groups of minors entering particular houses, remain-
ing for a while, and leaving while intoxicated, detectives raided the facility and found a thirteen-
year-old and two 15-year-olds completely intoxicated inside.71
Though the increasingly urbanized streets of San Jose in the 1960s were clearly riddled with
possible dangers to children, including vehicles, drugs, prostitution, and crime, the streets them-
selves rather than the children who occupied them were construed as problematic during this
period. Children who loitered, worked, and played on the street were not depicted as dangerous
to society. Rather, those who engaged in crime or who did not attend school were understood as
having been influenced or induced, by either familial-linked propensities or dangerous adults, to
behave inappropriately. In the 1960s children were perceived as having agency with regards to
their positive activities, as the example of R. Lerena illustrated, but in the event of their
486 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

misbehavior, authorities, victims, and observers were reticent to assign blame to the children them-
selves. The street, not the child, was the source of danger.

Economic Changes, Urbanization, and Terrorism

Though it is impossible to delve at length into all of the economic and social changes underscor-
ing shifting notions of children during this period, several factors bear mention. First, during the
latter half of the twentieth century, based in part on population growth and urbanization, San
José developed problems related to housing shortages, unemployment, roads, and other trans-
portation infrastructure.72 These problems became critical during the economic crisis of the late
1970s and early 1980s, which resulted in a weakening of the socioeconomic structure of the
country that was exacerbated in urban areas; “between 1980 and 1982 per capita buying power
declined 40 percent as annual inflation rose from 18 to 82 percent, and the public debt tripled.”73
Second, several events in the late 1970s and early 1980s challenged the Costa Rican myth of
egalitarianism and sparked fear in the upper classes. During the summer of 1979, the region of
Limon, where the banana industry is most active, experienced significant unrest.74 A one-month
labor strike that closed down the banana plantations was accompanied by a wave of violence, the
origin of which the government later blamed on “communist agitators.”75 Even after the expul-
sion of several Soviet diplomats who were alleged to be involved, the summer of 1980 ushered
in more strikes, and again the banana plantations were abandoned for several weeks.76 San José
saw unrest during this period as well. In March 1981, a vehicle in which three U.S. Marine Corps
guards were riding was attacked by a “Costa Rican ‘commando’ group identifying itself with the
Sandinista government.”77 When the nineteen members of the “the Family,” the terrorist group
responsible for the attack, were arrested, Costa Ricans were surprised to learn that all nineteen
were native Ticos.78 In fact, most of the group’s members “were young, middle-class or well-to-
do Costa Ricans” who had become politically active when organizing plantation workers and
had decided to embark on a “prolonged war” to install “a dictatorship of the proletariat.”79
Another terrorist attack, this time a shootout, produced the death of three Civil Guardsmen in San
José in June 1981.80 Public trust in the government headed by President Rodrigo Carazo (1978-1982)
began to wane, and crowds of demonstrators took to the streets demanding that Carazo resign.81
Again, there was a component of violence in these actions, as guards who tried to disperse the
crowd were stoned. Rumors of a coup surfaced in 1981 and 1982.82
The economic situation, which grew worse in 1981 with inflation rising above 50 percent and
unemployment hovering below 10 percent; clear signs of unrest, some of which was generated
by the country’s youth; and rising crime rates during this period created a climate ripe for reap-
praisal of society’s dangerous elements. Children working and begging on the streets of urban
centers, in which 50 percent of families were considered below the poverty line by 1982, were
concrete evidence of society’s transformation. As such, they were easy targets for the heightened
anxiety of the period.

Second Phase: Dangerous Children

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, the perception of danger shifted from the street to the
child. One element of this change was the transition of the streets and sidewalks of the city from
being places where middle-class and elite children played, hung out, or talked to friends, to being
places these types of children used only for the purpose of transportation. The only children left
on the streets during this period, then, were the working and poor children who were increasingly
characterized as marginal and problematic.
Aldebot-Green 487

One illustration of exodus of middle-class and elite children from the city streets is the vehic-
ular danger ad campaign. On the front page of La Nación’s January 8, 1980 issue, an ominous
photo of three small children on their bikes inches from the front bumper of a truck is captioned,
“Young children transit on bicycles through streets and highways in the country without worry.
They are having fun without measuring the possible consequences. . . .”83 This ad serves to warn
drivers to watch out for children on their bikes, but it also warns parents to keep their playing
children off the street. The children whose safety the La Nación seeks to safeguard seem to be
from a specific demographic. They are children who can afford bicycles, and they are children
who are using the streets for transportation. Though they may be playing on their way to and
from somewhere, they are no longer using the streets exclusively as a space of play in the way
that their predecessors did. Like the accident campaign, another article in January 1980 that
warns against the dangers of the street targets families of certain economic means. It prescribes
against giving children who are running errands for their families a high sum of money or a check
to pay for services or goods, because doing so places them at risk.84 The children involved are,
then, middle-class or elite children whose parents may have a high sum of money accessible and/
or a checking account.
By 1981, the inappropriateness of properly cared-for children playing in the streets and in
empty lots is clearly articulated in a letter to the editor in which the author demands that the first
lady follow through with promises to create youth parks where children can safely play.85 The
demand for safe, designated spaces for children is juxtaposed with the phenomenon observed by
another reader in an earlier letter that same year entitled “Scars of the Crisis,” in which the reader
describes the presence of children smoking marijuana, stealing, or sniffing shoe cement in the
streets of the marginal barrios.86 Along with blaming the economic crisis, the author of the letter
credits these developments to the “addictive tendencies of lower class people.”87
Together, these letters provide a lot of information about the shift in perceptions about appro-
priate spaces for children. Middle- and upper-class children who are adequately supervised are
children whose parents and guardians limit their contact with the street and its negative influ-
ences. These children are perceived as needing designated spaces away from streets and empty
lots to play in, safe spaces such as playgrounds built exclusively for this purpose. Deviant and
lower-class children, on the other hand, are perceived as children who commit crimes, use drugs,
and spend a significant amount of time on the streets of their marginal neighborhoods.
A letter dated August 8, 1981, shows an even more extreme form of the segregation of urban
spaces with regards to their appropriate occupation by children. In the letter, Martina Robles
writes of her concern that no children are playing outside at all in her neighborhood.88 After fif-
teen days of observation, she notes that the plazas are empty at all hours of the day and, upon
asking her neighbors, finds out that children are now playing inside and watching TV.89 Again,
there is a class component to this segregation, for only middle- and upper-class children have
homes equipped with the space, toys, and televisions necessary for them to make that their pri-
mary space of occupation and play. Mrs. Robles argues that children should play and use up
energy being around other children and labels the mothers of these neighborhood children irre-
sponsible for allowing them to be raised by the television set.90 Mrs. Robles’s complaints, however,
were, by the early 1980s, falling on deaf ears. Middle- and upper-class urban children almost
everywhere in the world had, by then, been moved into segregated play spaces during specific
times, and often were indoors. And really Mrs. Robles does not argue that children should have
free reign to roam the streets of the city but, rather, that they should play outside in the relative
“safety” of their neighborhood plaza.
If, by the early 1980s, proper, urban children were not supposed to play on or near the streets,
how did Costa Ricans view children who, by necessity, worked on these streets? Corresponding
to the shift in conceptions of appropriate spaces for children, the perception of working children
488 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

in San José’s streets changed. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, street child workers were per-
ceived as a reflection of society’s shortcomings.
The case of street child vendors is illustrative. In August 15, 1979, the legislature began to
implement a plan to significantly reduce street vending.91 The plan, allegedly aimed at overseeing
the activities of vendors rather than eliminating these activities altogether, had two stated objectives:
to educate those engaged in this type of enterprise and to eradicate the practice in prohibited
zones.92 Part of the plan included vocational classes for street vendors so that they could take up
different occupations.93 These classes were directed at adult street vendors, and little mention was
given to how the children engaged in street vending activities were to earn future remuneration.94
Unlike with previous attempts at zoning street vending areas, with this attempt, legislators set
out to enforce the new and previous related zoning regulations. On January 29, 1979 officials
removed vendors in violation of zoning regulations, leaving no “single stand in the prohibited
zone.”95 Again, these measures made no specific provision for children street vendors, and the
alternate training programs instituted to discourage street vending generally seem not to have
been available to children.96
Unlike the 1960s legislation, this later legislation’s differentiation between adult and child
street vendors evidences changes in the perception of acceptable street workers based on age.
The stricter October 1981 regulations regarding street vendors unequivocally demonstrate this
shift. On this date, government officials settled on a licensing requirement for all street ven-
dors.97 To legally operate a vending stand, sellers would have to apply for and be granted a
vendor license.98 To qualify, vendors had to be adult Costa Rican citizens by birth or nationality;
this legislation effectively vitiated the rights of minors, children and adolescents alike, to operate
legal vendor stands in San José.99 The government directive consciously made independent
vending ventures and childhood antithetical. Children, driven by necessity, continued to work as
assistants to adult vendors and as vendors without vending stands.100 These, however, were posi-
tions of greater marginality, smaller profits, and increased danger. Furthermore, in excluding
children workers from legal avenues for economic independence, Costa Rican lawmakers were
both reflecting and promulgating new and increasingly widespread ideas about appropriate
childhoods; proper children were not supposed to work on the streets.
Views of children and crime changed during this period as well. In response to a perceived
increase in criminal activities, particularly crimes committed by youths, a letter to the editor urged
authorities to create a youth correctional facility for children found guilty of committing crimes.
The letter’s author stated that by mid-1968, “it [was] impossible to transit in the capital without
tripping from corner to corner with one of these groups of people who corner you and who easily
rob you and, generally, they [were] youths from 10-15 years old.”101 It must, however, be noted that
anecdotal observations regarding increases in crime do not necessarily reflect reality. In 1978, La
Nación published the results of a 1977 survey of its readers that touched on precisely this topic.102
The majority of readers, 79.7 percent, reported a feeling that criminality, “robberies, crimes, and
general delinquency” in the country had risen since the previous year, 1976.103 Only 10.4 percent
of the group surveyed considered crime rates to have remained the same, and 2.7 percent perceived
them to have decreased.104 However, the same group yielded data that reflected no significant
increase in the number of survey takers who had been victims of crime in 1976 versus 1977.105
In 1981, groups of young people committing crimes were characterized differently than in the
1960s. Some of these characterizations may be rooted in the increase in comparably different
criminal behavior by children, including the carrying of weapons and the increased consumption
of drugs and alcohol in which some children were engaged.106 In the late 1970s and early 1980s,
associations of youths began to be called gangs (pandillas) more frequently, and youths were
understood as having greater agency in their decision making with regards to crime.107 In fact,
articles about children involved in crimes during these years sometimes included an explanation
Aldebot-Green 489

of the dynamics of criminal groups for La Nación’s readers. In the case of a band of children led
by “Galleta,” an adult, La Nación notes that money brought in by minor offenders was often used
to buy food, clothes, and bikes for the children under Galleta’s protection.108 Explanations of
these dynamics enabled La Nación’s readers to understand criminal children as more than
manipulated innocents. Instead, they were read as individuals with agency who made choices
based on a system of beliefs and specific needs.
The 1981 terrorist attacks committed by some of Costa Rica’s own young people solidified
fears about the dangerous potential of Costa Rica’s youth. In a 1981 letter to the editor entitled
“Derailed Youth,” reader Matilde Muge states,

Our youth has gradually lost its moral ground, without parents being at fault. For them,
the number of discothèques, the proliferation of gambling houses, and vagrancy is too
much temptation. The television is another school and it induces youth and children to
violence and to sexual indiscretion and drinking. The worst part is that when confronted
with any reprimand from a parent, they [the children] have no problem in just leaving
home. The past terrorist acts are a result of this rebellious youth that disparages even
human life. Hopefully, parents will be able to guide adequately our children in order to see
if we can cut out all of the social vices that are eating us away.109

Similarly, a 1981 editorial on youth and violence noted that the sudden wave of terrorism in
Costa Rica was leading many to question the potential causes of the attacks. The author, like
Matilde Muge, cites the malleability of young people as a great source of concern to 1981 Costa
Rican society: “Wherever terrorism presents itself it can be observed that, generally speaking, it
is not adults, it is young people, whose natural impulses are renovated and taken advantage off
by those who want to create chaos in democratic societies.”110
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, then, Costa Rica’s youth, as a whole, became perceived as
significantly more dangerous. The way crimes committed by children were understood, and the
degree of agency with which they were imputed in relation to these crimes, underscored this
shift. But more than anything, the 1981 terrorist attacks forced a shift in consciousness for
many Costa Ricans. The consequences of having disaffected children who could grow up to be
extremely dangerous young adults terrified the public.

Conclusions

The growing number of street children represents one of the most important contemporary
problems of child welfare in the world. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
estimates that there are at least 40 million street children in the world; and more than
25 million of them are found in the streets of Latin America. Perhaps, besides hunger,
there is no other problem so significant that reduces the human potential so much as the
experience of the millions of children that develop outside of social institutions in a
dangerous and harmful environment.111

Though it is difficult to argue with the contention that urban cities are dangerous and harmful
environments, and that the lives of children who work on the streets of Latin America are diffi-
cult, there is much here to argue with. In the first instance, this statement makes little distinction
between the various groups of children who spend time on these streets. Though all may look
similar, many, as this article has discussed, are not abandoned. Instead, they work out of eco-
nomic necessity but are not growing up completely outside of “social institutions,” as they are
490 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

often integrated into families, sometimes attend school, and frequently receive help from indi-
viduals and charities who aid in feeding and clothing them.112 The crucial problem with neglecting to
differentiate between different groups of children on the streets is that it blurs our understanding
of the social causes of the phenomenon and of the way societal perceptions about childhood have
aggravated these children’s circumstances.
Thus, while these children are homogenized into poor, hungry, and abandoned caricatures of
themselves and constantly paraded before the relatively affluent through a range of media includ-
ing the Internet, television, and newspaper, the true problems confronted by working children in
the streets of the “developing world” are obscured. As U.S. and Northern European ideas of what
constitutes a proper childhood for “the world’s children” becomes the normative childhood for the
middle and upper classes everywhere, children who work on the street are increasingly marginal-
ized and pathologized.113 Activities that were once considered acceptable for children to engage
in, in an effort to help their resource-strapped families etch out a living, have increasingly become
unacceptable, leaving children in these already vulnerable situations increasingly vulnerable.114
But the change has been more pervasive: the reconceptualization of proper childhoods in the
developing world has closed off certain spaces for children as well. Whereas children occupied a
myriad of public spaces only forty or fifty years ago, today they are relegated to relatively minor
spaces of “safety” and, increasingly, indoors. And children, now understood as having a greater
potential to threaten society through their actions, are treated with skepticism and suspicion when
they deviate from dictated norms. What, then, happens to the majority of the world’s children,
whose circumstances prohibit them from adhering to new standards of childhood?115
One response has been a great international focus on eradicating the existence of these “mal-
adjusted children” whose condition has been frequently blamed on “family indigence and disor-
ganization, [the] fruit of sudden transformations with which humanity has to contend in its
passage from one civilization to another.”116 “First-world” nations such as the United States have
invested significantly in child-saving programs with mixed results.117 Few of these programs
directly address the underlying inequity in the world economic system that scholars credit with
creating the conditions that have given rise to the economic disparity between the multiplicities
of childhoods existing today.118 Instead, criticisms and programs have primarily focused on the
family, and more specifically mothers, as the key to raising children who conform to an idealized
Western childhood and grow up to be proper citizens.119
This article has attempted to begin piecing together the process through which one society,
Cost Rica, has arrived at a new definition of proper childhoods. It has sought to investigate,
through careful analysis of one source, how perceptions about children shifted over a time of
economic change, enabling a preliminary understanding of attitudes regarding children who do
not conform to developing ideas of normative childhoods. The article has noted three distinct
shifts for the period between 1965 and 1981. First, whereas in the mid-1960s children of all vari-
ous ages and socioeconomic classes occupied the street, by the late 1970s and early 1980s the
street was considered an inappropriate space for proper, modern, affluent children. Second, while
the presence of children who worked on the streets in the mid-1960s was considered benevolent,
the presence of children working on the streets by the end of this period was considered a sign of
social pathology. Third, while children who committed crimes were understood as lost or manipu-
lated in the 1960s, by the 1980s, spurred in part by the rise of terrorism, they began to be under-
stood as genuinely threatening to society. Thus, street children, who tended to be “inappropriately”
present on the streets, doing “inappropriate” work, and suspected of participating in or being more
vulnerable to criminal behavior, became slowly vilified in the eyes of some Costa Ricans.
An opinion article written in La Nación in 2003 shows how this process has culminated into
more recent perceptions of street children in Costa Rica. In the article, Cecilia Valverde
Barrenchea laments the existence of street children, stating that “the method through which we
Aldebot-Green 491

can diminish responsibly and conscientiously the continued daily augmentation of human cru-
elty and social tragedy that represent the street children, a growing demonstration of anti-life” is
to eradicate these children.120 She refers to street children as being anti-life due to her argument
that human beings need education, protection, love, comprehension, and special care during
infancy.121 The existence of street children, then, is anti-life because “their infancies are destroyed
and they are subjected to a process of abandonment, rape and exploitation, and cruel inhuman-
ity.”122 Not only is the treatment of street children perverse according to Barrenchea, but their
very existence arises out of inhuman circumstances and threatens to pervert society as a whole:
“Street children, many of them children of rape and incest, are the maximum contradiction of
humanity and the original cause of a major part of social problems.”123 Blaming a variety of
social ills on the existence of street children, including the bitterness and frustration of youth in
general as well as delinquency, Barranchea rejects any socioeconomic reasons for the existence
of children on the street. Instead, she states that the origin for street children is “hate and irre-
sponsibility.” Citing the clear existence of honesty among poor people and delinquency among
the rich, she rejects the notion that necessity causes children to be on the streets.124 The irregular
and improper genesis of the phenomena becomes, for Barranchea, entangled with the impropri-
ety of the children themselves. Of course, Barranchea is only one in a cacophony of voices, but
her article illustrates one possible application of the shift in perceptions of liminal childhoods
that this article describes for the period from 1965 to 1981. And in the midst of this shift, we are
left to wonder whether the street children of today—ignored, beaten, threatened, and despised—
will have the chance to become fulfilled, hardworking, self-reliant individuals like El Tigre.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this
article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

Notes
   1. Paul Kutsche, Voices of Migrants: Rural-Urban Migration in Costa Rica (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 1994), 42.
   2. Ibid., 49.
   3. Ibid., 49-51.
   4. Ibid.
   5. Ibid.
   6. Ibid.
   7. Ibid.
   8. Ibid.
   9. Sonya Lipsett-Riviera, “Introduction: Children in the History of Latin America,” Journal of Family
History 23 (1998): 221.
10. Bianca Premo, “How Latin America’s History of Childhood Came of Age,” Journal of the History
of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2008): 64.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 69. See for example Ann S. Blum, “Public Welfare and Child Circulation: Mexico City, 1877-
1925,” Journal of Family History 23, no. 3 (1998): 240-71; Asuncion Lavrin, “Mexico,” in
Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective, ed. J. H. Hawes and R. Hiner (New York, NY:
Greendwood, 1991); and Tobias Hecht, ed. Minor Omissions: Children in Latin America and Iberian
History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
492 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

13. Bianca, “How Latin America’s History of Childhood Came of Age,” 64.
14. Ibid., 67-68.
15. Richard Trexler, “From the Mouths of Babes: Christianization of Children in 16th c. New Spain,” in
Religious Organizations and Religious Experience (London: Academic Press, 1982); Robert
Haskett, “Dying for Conversion: Faith, Obedience, and the Tlaxcalan Boy Martyrs in New Spain,”
Colonial Latin American Review 17, no. 2 (2008); Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “The Puzzling
Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment, and Education,” Journal of Family History 23, no. 3
(1998); John L. Kessell, “The Ways and Words of the Others: Diego de Vargas and Cultural
Brokers in Late Seventeenth- Century New Mexico,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The
Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994);
Odina E. Gonzalez, “Consuming Interests: The Response to Abandoned Children in Colonial
Havana,” in Raising an Empire: Children Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007).
16. Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, “The House, the Street, Global Society: Latin American Families and
Childhood in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 4 (2005): 860.
17. Ibid., 864-66.
18. Judith Ennew and Jill Swart-Kruger, “Introduction: Homes, Places and Spaces in the Construction
of Street Children and Street Youth,” Children, Youth and Environments 13, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 3.
19. Donna J. Guy, “The State, the Family, and Marginal Children in Latin America,” in Minor
Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 140, 160.
20. Irene Rizzini, “The Child-Saving Movement in Brazil: Ideology in the Late 19th and Early 20th
Centuries,” in Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 165-68.
21. Mark Connolly and Judith Ennew, “Introduction: Children out of Place,” Childhood: A Global
Journal of Child Research 3, no. 2 (1996): 131, advocating a “political economy approach to under-
standing the essential relations behind” the street child problem and stating that the modern street
child emerged out of a “process of social change, poverty, and development” (p. 21). Guy notes that
there is a connection between economic, geographic, and social conditions leading to homeless kids
in LA, not a continuous phenomenon. Guy, “The State, the Family, and Marginal Children,” 160.
22. Connolly and Ennew, “Introduction,” 136.
23. Ibid., 19.
24. Luis A. Valverde Obando and Mark W. Lusk, Los Niños de la Calle de San José, Costa Rica (Logan:
Utah State University Press, 1988), 47, 52, and 65. Some of the children, as has been reported in
other studies, were not allowed to return home without their daily quota, and others reported being
forced to work on the streets. Obando and Lusk, Los Niños de la Calle, 65, 84.
25. Ibid., 53.
26. Ibid., 70.
27. Ibid., 20.
28. Ibid., 73.
29. Setha M. Low, ed., “Introduction,” in Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader
(Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 9.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. Teresa P. R. Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,” in Theorizing the
City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 83-84.
32. La Nación, “Sres. Padres de Familia” [Parents], January 1, 1965, pp. 5, 8, and 11; La Nación, “Sres.
Padres de Familia,” January 6, 1965, p. 22; La Nación, “Sres. Padres de Familia,” January 7, 1965,
p. 15; La Nación, “Sres. Padres de Familia,” January 8, 1965, p. 36; La Nación, “Sres. Padres de
Aldebot-Green 493

Familia,” April 5, 1968, p. 37; and La Nación, “Sres. Padres de Familia,” May 3, 1968, p. 6, among
many others in the late 1960s.
33. La Nación, “Sucesos” [Happenings], January 9, 1965, p. 10; La Nación, “Menor Fue Atropellado en
Carretera a Miramar” [Minor Was Run Over on the Highway to Miaramar], January 12, 1965, p. 12;
La Nación, “Sucesos,” January 21, 1965, p. 12; La Nación, “Atropellados dos Niños que Fueron
Internados” [Two Trampled Children Interned], January 17, 1968, p. 10, among many.
34. La Nación, “Niño Arrollado por Auto Desconocido” [Boy Thrown by Unknown Car], March 12,
1965, p. 10.
35. La Nación, “Niña de Seis Anos Atropellada por Autobus” [Six-Year-Old Girl Hit by Bus], April 4,
1965, p. 10.
36. La Nación, “Niña Murio en Heridia Despuse de Pegar Contra Vehiculo” [Girl Died in Heridia after
Collision with a Car,” April 30, 1965, p. 10.
37. La Nación, “Niño de Cinco Anos Murio Ayer en Cartago como Consecuencia de Atropello de
Vehiculo” [Five-Year-Old Boy Died Yesterday in Cartago as a Consequence of Collision with a
Vehicle], August 1, 1967, p. 10. Note that the incident in reference here occurred in Cartago, which
is close to San Jose and a growing urban center during this period as well.
38. La Nación, “Pequena de Diez Anos Seriamente Lesionada en Accidente de Transito” [Young Ten-
Year-Old Girl Seriously Injured in Car Accident]” April 30, 1965, p. 10.
39. La Nación, “Muerte Tragica de una Ninita en Barrio Mexico” [Trajic Death of a Little Girl in Mexico
Neighborhood], January 3, 1968, p. 10.
40. La Nación, “Niño de Cinco Anos Herido en Accidente” [Five-Year-Old Boy Injured in Accident],
10, January 8, 1968, p. 10; and La Nación, “Succesos,” February 6, 1968, p. 10.
41. La Nación, “Niña Victima de Grande Atropello” [Girl Victim of Severe Collision], February 23,
1968, p. 10.
42. La Nación, “Menor Atropellado por Auto” [Minor Hit by a Car], February 16, 1968, p. 10.
43. La Nación, “Otro Niño Atropellado” [Another Child Trampled], February 23, 1968, p. 10.
44. La Nación, “Orario Inconveniente en Escuelas de Desamparados” [Inconvenient School Schedule
for Helpless Children], April 16, 1968, p. 10.
45. Ibid.
46. La Nación, “Dos Jovenes Muertos por Error de la Policia” [Two Dead Youths due to Police Error],
January 30, 1968, p. 10.
47. La Nación, “Proyecto de Crianza de Conejos” [Rabbit Breeding Project], January 8, 1965, p. 28.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. La Nación, “Mas de 60 Mil Niños No Asisten a la Escuela” [More Than 60,000 Children Do Not
Attend School], January 24, 1965, pp. 1, 78.
51. Ibid.
52. La Nación, “Menor Persiguio a un Hampon y Recupero lo Robado” [Minor Gave Chase to a Thief
and Recuperated the Loot], February 15, 1968, p. 10.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. La Nación, “Niños de 12 Anos a Jovenes de 18 se Benificiaran con Programas de Aprendizaje que
Prepara INA” [Children and Youth from 12 to 18-Years-Old Will Benefit from Educational
Programs Prepared by INA], April 3, 1968, p. 29.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
494 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

60. La Nación, “Sin Solucion el Problema de los Vendedores Ambulantes” [Without Solution: The
Problem of Ambulant Vendors], February 9, 1968, pp. 9, 18. These arguments were repeated later
when more stringent initiatives were implemented as well.
61. Ibid.
62. La Nación, “Dos Niñas Sorprendidas Robando” [Two Girls Caught Stealing], April 6, 1965, p. 10.
63. La Nación, “Menor de Edad Hurto Prendas de Vestir” [Minor Stole Articles of Clothing], April 19,
1965, p. 10.
64. La Nación, “Menores Lanzados al Delite por un Sujeto Detenido por la Policia” [Minors Induced
into Crime by an Individual in Police Custody], April 9, 1968, p. 10.
65. Ibid.
66. La Nación, “C 3000 Hurto una Pandilla de Menores” [Band of Minors Stole 3000 Colones], April
21, 1968, p. 10; La Nación, “Con Producto del Robo a Una Escuela Fue Capturado Menor” [With
the Goods Stolen from a School Minor Was Captured], April 20, 1968, p. 12; La Nación, “Comlicado
Robo con Escalamiento Cometieron Niños de 9 y 11 Anos” [Comples Robbery with Scaling
Committed by Children 9 and 11-Years-Old], April 29, 1968, p. 12.
67. La Nación, “C 3000 Hurto una Pandilla de Menores” [Band of Minors Stole 3000 Colones], April
21, 1968, p. 10.
68. La Nación, “En Forma Alarmante Aumenta Delinquencia Infantil” [Youth Delinquency is
Alarmingly on the Rise], April 20, 1968, p. 10.
69. La Nación, “En Redada de Drogadictos Capturan a Menores” [In Drug Raid Minors Are Captured],
January 14, 1968, p. 12.
70. Ibid.
71. La Nación, “Menores Drogados en Fumadero de Marihuana” [Drugged Minors in Marihuana Den],
February 29, 1968, p. 10.
72. Gary S. Elbow, “Costa Rica,” in Latin American Urbanization: Historical Profiles of Major Cities,
ed. Gerald Michael Greenfield (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994), 171.
73. Mavis Hiltunen Biesanz, Richard Biesanz, and Karen Zubris Bieasanz, The Ticos: Culture and
Social Change in Costa Rica (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 34.
74. Harold D. Nelson, Costa Rica: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1984), 67.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., 253. La Nación, “La Juventud y La Violencia” [Youth and Violence], July 31, 1981, p. 14A; La
Nación, “Capturan a Lideres del Movimiento Terrorista” [Leaders of the Terrorist Movement
Captured], July 9, 1981, p. 8A.
79. Nelson, Costa Rica, 253.
80. Ibid., 67-68.
81. Ibid., 68.
82. Ibid.
83. La Nación, “Peligro” [Danger], January 8, 1980, p. 1.
84. La Nación, “Prevencion del Delito: Para los Niños, Poco Dinero” [Crime Prevention: For Children,
Little Money], January 5, 1980, p. 3C.
85. La Nación, “Parques Infantiles” [Youth Parks], July 26, 1981, p. 16A.
86. La Nación, “Huellas de la Crisis” [Scars of the Crisis], July 17, 1981, p. 16A.
87. Ibid.
88. La Nación, “Juego de Niños” [Childsplay], August 8, 1981, p. 16A.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
Aldebot-Green 495

91. La Nación, “Gobierno Mantiene Acciones para Reducir las Ventas Callejeras” [The Government
Maintains Actions to Reduce Street Vending], January 24, 1980, p. 4A.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid.
97. La Nación, “Aprobado el Reglamento Para Ventas Ambulantes” [Approved: The New Law for
Ambulant Selling], October 29, 1981, p. 6A.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. See generally Obando and Lusk, Los Niños de la Calle.
101. La Nación, “Urge un Correccional Para Menores” [Correctional Facility for Minors Urged], May 14,
1968, p. 8.
102. La Nación, “Tercera Encuesta Periodistica de Opinion Publica” [Third Newspaper Inquiry into
Public Opinion], February 19, 1978, p. 4D.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. La Nación, “Pandillero Juvenile en Manos de la DIC” [Youth Gang Leader in the Custody of DIC],
January 17, 1980, p. 12A.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. La Nación, “Juventud Descarriada” [Derailed Youth], July 30, 1981, p. 16A.
110. Ibid.
111. Obando and Lusk, Los Niños de la Calle, 1. Citing UNICEF.
112. Ibid., 95-103.
113. “Street children in the developing world are currently the focus of tremendous attention in both
fields of social policy and academic research. This is not just a consequence of their rapidly escalat-
ing numbers and of the resources necessary to alleviate poverty in the urban landscape. It also
results from a concern to adequately portray street children—as young people with particular social
and economic behaviors in urban centers The ‘characteristics’ of street children—their tenuous
links with families and independent activity—are the hallmark of a childhood distinct from the
‘proper’ childhood portrayals of street children as vulnerable, abandoned, delinquent, deviant, or
marginal youth rests on a particular representation of children in contemporary Western thought a
given conceptual and normative discourse of childhood.” Noting “despite a growing number of
innovative studies on children’s diverse childhood experiences, socialization theory and the belief
in a universal model of childhood continue to exert a strong influence.” Catherine Panter-Brick,
“Street Children and Their Peers: Perspectives on Homelessness, Poverty, and Health,” in Children
in Anthropology, ed. Helen B. Schwartzman (London: Praeger, 2001), 83. Joachim Theis,
“Participatory Research with Children in Vietnam,” in Children in Anthropology, ed. Helen B.
Schwartzman (London: Praeger, 2001), 99.
114. Kristen E. Cheney, Pillars of the Nation: Child Citizens and Ugandan National Development
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 11.
115. Sharon Stephens, “Introduction,” in Children and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7.
116. Helena Iracy Junqueira, “The Social Consequences of Urbanization to Children—Summary of
Working Paper,” in UNICEF, compiler, Children and Youth in National Development in Latin
496 Journal of Urban History 37(4)

America: Report of Conference, 28 November–11 December 1965, Santiago, Chile (New York, NY:
United Nations, 1966).
117. See listing of children-related programs on USAID website, for example.
118. Tobias Hecht, “Introduction,” in Hecht, Minor Omissions.
119. “The family was the first group to affect the physical, mental and emotional needs of children and
adolescents. The child’s development was dependent upon its parents’ health and economic circum-
stances, and upon the care and acceptance surrounding it. Accordingly, the economic, social and politi-
cal acceptance of the parents by the community was of vital importance, as also was the parents’ level
of education. Thus, the effort to overcome, through mass communication media (radio, cinema, etc.),
the adults’ traditional ignorance and superstition, particularly in rural areas, has had the effect of
improving children’s mental development and adaptation to the circumstances of modern living.
Hence those activities should be continued and increased.” UNICEF, Children and Youth in National
Development in Latin America, 11. Also noting the disappearance of the extended family, the inability
of mothers to earn a living, and irresponsible fathers. Ibid., 77.
120. La Nación, “Los Niños de la Calle the Costa Rica (The Street Children of Costa Rica), September 13,
2003. Available at http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2003/septiembre/13/opinion4.html.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid.

Bio

Scarlett Aldebot-Green is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a BA
from Wake Forest University and a JD from California Western School of Law. She studies Latin American
history while enjoying life with her partner, August, and daughter, Neve. She thanks her committee members
for their comments.