Poor Adolescent Girls and

Social Transformations in
Cuenca, Ecuador
ANN MILES

ABSTRACT This paper, based on eight years of observation and

interviewing in southern Ecuador, examines how the processes
of modernization affect the lives of poor adolescent girls growing
up in the city. Focusing exclusively on the daughters of rural-to-
urban migrants, this paper discusses how both Hispanic gender
models and a rigid class system ultimately serve to undermine
the state-sponsored rhetoric promoting girls'full participation
in the modernizing economy. The disjuncture between the imag-
ined world of professional success and the real one ofurban pov-
erty is described. Using a theoretical framework that views
culture and ideology as contestable domains, the author argues
that consideration of the responses of adolescent girls is impor-
tant for understanding future social transformations.

When I was a baby, baby, baby When I was a youth, youth, youth
I suckled, suckled, suckled. I teased, teased, teased.

When I was a girl, girl, girl When I was a bride, bride, bride
I was beaten, beaten, beaten. I was kissed, kissed, kissed.
—Ecuadorian Children's Rhyme

W
hen I began doing fieldwork in the southern Ecuadorian
city of Guenca in 1988, Jenny, the eldest daughter of a ru-
ral-to-urban migrant couple, was eight years old. She told
me then that she liked to write and was a good speller, and
so she wanted to be a world-traveling journalist when she
grew up. When she was 12, Jenny liked the sophisticated uniforms, mani-
cured nails, and high heels of the bank tellers, and she decided she would

Ethos 28(1):54-74. Copyright © 2000, American Anthropological Association.

 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 55

study accounting and work in a bank. At 14, Jenny wanted to learn English
and become a travel agent working in Guenca's booming tourist industry.
When last I saw her at age 16, Jenny didn't really believe that she, the dark-
skinned daughter of peasants, had any chance of a good job and that, so far
anyway, she has seen no reason to plan for a future of any kind. "I simply
want to live until I die," she said, with an aggressively dismissive shake of her
hand.
In this article I will explore the circumstances under which girls like
Jenny, the adolescent daughters of rural-to-urban migrants, mature to
adulthood. While the descriptions of the girls' common attitudes of frus-
tration and longing presented here are vaguely reminiscent of much of the
recent literature on the transitions that girls in North America make in
early adolescence (Gilligan 1982) the specific contradictions faced by poor
adolescent girls in urban Ecuador, and their responses to them, are con-
textualised within local historical and cultural transformations. Similar to
young people in other modernizing settings such as Kathmandu (Lietchy
1995) and Morocco (Davis and Davis 1989) these girls are coming of age
at a time when the expectations of modern life promoted by the media and
in the schools is in sharp contrast to their own lived experiences and their
understanding of their future.
Central to this discussion is the argument that, because of the mod-
ernizing influences of urban life, such as education and television, girls in
Guenca have been encouraged to construct an image of their future iden-
tity that is patently unattainable (see Lietchy 1995; Schlegel 1995). While
their lives as poor children are filled with insults and slights that fore-
shadow the impossibility of this imagined modern future, it is during ado-
lescence the chasm between reality and imagination is fully realized. But,
in fact, it is not quite that simple. While issues of class and ethnicity do
uniformly circumscribe the social opportunities for poor, dark-skinned
girls in Guenca, these young women are also members of households that
are fundamentally authoritarian and deeply patriarchal (Miles 1994). In
other words, these girls are attempting to construct an adult identity for
themselves that is framed by relations of inequality both at home and in
the street. Identity acquires meaning for poor Guencana girls only through
local configurations of gender, class, and race as they are articulated in
relations within the household and with the state (See Ennew 1986; Folbre
1986; Phillips 1990). Positioned in a double bind of subordination as fe-
males and as the descendants of peasants, the adolescent daughters of
rural-to-urban migrants in this region are frustrated and angered by their
lack of voice in their own homes and pessimistic about what the future
holds both personally and professionally.
The fact that these girls come from families with rural roots is not
insignificant to the story that unfolds here. As the daughters of migrants,
56 • ETHOS

they have been raised in the city by parents who have little urban experi-
ence, but who have selected city life precisely because they believed in its
potential. When they chose to migrate, parents expected that through edu-
cation, hard work, perseverence, and respect for the dominant values their
children would one day move towards a middle-class lifestyle. As I will
demonstrate however, the lived reality has been much less positive. De-
spite their parents' best efforts, in Guenca, the children of migrants have
been stymied both socially and economically. How girls make sense of
their lives as they navigate between their parents' understanding of gen-
der, family, and urban life, and their own aspirations, desires, and stigma-
tized social status is the focus of this article.
Anthropological study of adolescence has recently been re-invigo-
rated by the publication of several important manuscripts and articles
(Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995; Davis and Davis 1989; Schlegel and Barry
1991). Some of the new work has been broadly comparative (Schlegel and
Barry 1991) while other authors such as Condon (1987, 1990, 1995) and
Lietchy (1995) provide contextualised descriptions of adolescents in par-
ticular ethnographic settings. Modernity and the social position of adoles-
cents, as well as their construction of personal identity within changing
cultural contexts, the simultaneous enculturation to adulthood and accul-
turation to a changing world, as Condon (1995:50) describes it, is an im-
portant theme of much of the recent literature. This article will expand
our ethnographic knowledge of adolescence cross-culturally by looking at
how class relations and gender constructs mutually impact a "modern"
poor girl's existence in Cuenca, Ecuador, and how she responds to them.
I argue that the experiences of these girls may ultimately be a means of
developing a political consciousness that could one day become a means
for transforming the meanings of gender in this region.
There has been some discussion in the recent literature that encour-
ages scholars to view children and youths as "producers" of culture, not
just as unfinished, or imperfect reproducers of adult culture (Caputo
1995). While I agree with the idea that children and youth do create and
construct aspects of culture, I question the analytic usefulness of dichoto-
mizing the concepts of cultural producer and reproducer. My position is
that culture is both reproduced and produced continuously and can be
found, not just in the obvious areas of art, style, or expression, but also in
the mundanities of life that are increasingly linked to consumerism. In the
urban context of Ecuador, this may include such behaviors as switching
from a bar of soap to a powder to wash clothes, eating rice and plantains
instead of hominy and potatoes, and watching television instead of listen-
ing to the radio. As Garcia Canclini (1993) reminds us, consumption, and
in particular, what and when something is valued, is itself a part of the
process of cultural production. This article's obvious focus is on the ways
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 57

that adolescents girls in one city respond and react to the constraints of
"adult culture," specifically, the class/race and gender ideologies rein-
forced in the mass media, the nation, the city, and the household. How-
ever, implicit is the notion that the processes of accommodation,
collusion, and resistance that teens engage in are culturally "productive,"
and therefore of short- and long-term significance. To quote Bordo, para-
phrasing Foucault, "power relations are never seamless but are always
spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new opportunities for
transformation" (1993:27). However, as Bourdieu points out in his discus-
sion of habitus, the spawning of new cultural meaning by individuals is not
always intentional or apparent. "It is," he writes, "because subjects do not,
strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more
meaning than they know" (1977:79).
This research is based primarily on participant-observation and infor-
mal interviews with a small sample of young people in Guenca, most of
whom I have known for almost a decade. During initial field research in
1988, I interviewed about 40 rural-to-urban migrant families. A smaller
sub-group of families formed part of an in-depth exploration of the ways
in which issues of identity are negotiated by migrant women. Along the
way, I met and, and in some cases, became good friends with these
women's daughters, I have watched some pass from childhood into adoles-
cence and others from adolescence to adulthood. Over the years, I have
talked with these girls over failed attempts to make "American" pizza,
laughed with them at parties, eaten meals in their homes. I have hired
them to transcribe tapes for me and watch my baby. I have traveled with
them to their mothers' rural homes and tried to help them with their
schoolwork. I often found the candor of these adolescent girls in sharp
contrast to the reticence so common in the Andes.
This article explores in some detail the public and private ideologies
that frame the lives of poor adolescent girls in Guenca.1 First I discuss how
the modern-state discourses of ethnic inclusion, promoted especially in
schools, are in sharp contrast to locally salient power configurations.
School girls are encouraged to see their lives as filled with modern poten-
tial in a multi-ethnic state, only to be faced with a reality that excludes
them in no small part because of their peasant heritage. Second, I discuss
the ways in which understandings of gender on the level of the household
places girls in subordinate positions and threatens their realization of the
independence and autonomy promised by the state. Finally, I turn to an
examination of the "politics of appearance" (Bordo 1993:27) on the public
level and how the media, and especially television preferentially values
"European" or Hispanic standards of beauty and female comportment.
Interestingly, while overt discrimination and subordination on the local
and household levels is openly discussed and resisted by girls, the
58 • ETHOS

media-sustained images of female appearance are far more seductive and

girls appear to be in collusion with them.

NATIONAL DISCOURSE AND LOCAL ARTICULATION

The role of different ethnic groups in official Ecuadorian state dis-
course has changed radically in the past 150 years, shifting from ideologies
of exclusion to those of assimilation (Stutzman 1981), and then, since the
1980s, to the construction of a multi-ethnic ideology and the "official"
re-valuing of indigenous culture (Grain 1990; Meisch 1992). Long viewed
as ignoble savages and impediments to progress, the indigenous people of
Ecuador are now considered to be an important part of the nation's rich
cultural "patrimony." Ecuador's official state rhetoric has shifted to in-
clude the acceptance of ethnic plurality, and indigenous movements have
gained official state recognition. Today, this recognition is used as a
benchmark of Ecuador's democratic success. One of the most significant
accomplishments of Ecuador's indigenous movement is the establishment
of bilingual education programs for indigenous groups and the adoption of
a bicultural educational curriculum content nationally (Meisch 1992;
Selverston 1994).
While there certainly has been progress in the establishment of a po-
litical voice in Ecuador for indigenous groups, little has really changed
from the assimilationist days in the relationship of marginalized groups to
real political and economic power. In fact, modernization in Ecuador has,
for the most part, resulted in the increasing accommodation of indigenous
groups to cosmopolitan and commercial values (Grain 1990). It has not
really altered the configuration of state power. Indigenous people are ap-
preciated in Ecuador only when they are perceived, like the Otavalans for
example, to be constructive participants in a modern-state capitalist econ-
omy. Ecuadorians of all classes admire the "traditionally" clad Otavalans
for their commercial savvy and ability to market music and handicrafts
worldwide (Meisch 1995). Indians who stand in the way of "development"
like the Amazonian Huarani, face censure and physical intimidation.
Given the fragile nature of the Ecuadorian democracy, inclusion of "differ-
ence" is, in fact, only permitted and celebrated if it furthers the goals of
the state (Selverston 1994). Despite changes in the curriculum, Ecuadorians
are still taught that they are a mestizo (Indian and Spanish mixture) na-
tion, an effort to erase potential ethnic divisiveness (see Stutzman 1981).
The official state rhetoric is, of course, a fundamental part of the ex-
perience of urban school girls in Ecuador. Under the multi-cultural man-
date, school curriculums now include a civics section in which students
learn the major struggles of the Ecuadorian state and how the various eth-
nic groups have contributed to the national patrimony. Text books contain
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 59

pictures of the different "native" costumes of Ecuador's indigenous popu-

lations, and children learn the names, locations, and sometimes musical
preferences of each group (see Meisch 1992). School pageants, where eth-
nic differences are displayed by children wearing store-bought, polyester,
"traditional" outfits, are popular annual events. Yet, children in Guenca
wear uniforms to school, effectively erasing any cultural differences their
own clothing choices might suggest. In Guenca, school children are pri-
marily mestizo. They are tacitly associated with modern (that is, Western-
ized) Ecuador, as they are taught to gaze (in the Foucaultian sense) 2
appreciatively (yet, inevitably, censoriously) on Ecuador's rich folkloric
heritage.
Guenca stands in a unique position in relation to the efforts of ethnic
inclusion in state rhetoric. Isolated from much of the national political
discourse and economic fluctuations until well into the 1950s, Guenca has
constructed its own unique system of prestige and subordination. Azuay,
the province of which Guenca is the capital (population around 200,000),
has long been associated with the minifundia (small land-holding), which
encouraged the early mestizoization of the rural population. In contrast to
other areas of Ecuador, peasants in Azuay managed to maintain small per-
sonal plots of land, even while acting as workers in local haciendas. Arti-
sanry was well developed very early in Guenca, which helped to
consolidate the independence of the rural worker. In other words, rather
than being isolated on rural haciendas (like much of Ecuador's northern
indigenous populations) the peasant in Guenca was a small land-holder,
who early on supplemented his income through wage labor or artisan pro-
duction. Today, the rural peasant of Guenca is commonly called a chola,
a designation, particularly for women, that is not wholly derogatory. The
chola of Guenca, similar to those of Bolivia, are costumed peasants (who
wear a pollera, or skirt, an embroidered blouse, and a Panama hat); they
are often associated with commerce and marketing (Brownrigg 1972). The
rural peasants of Azuay however, do not consider themselves "Indian."
They have not participated in national-level indigenous movements, nor
have they been able to tap their "folkloric" qualities to attain any mean-
ingful political advantage (see Goldstein 1998).
Nevertheless, although the province is monolingual in Spanish and is
thoroughly mestizo, Guenca is a city in which a rigid and firmly established
hierarchy is deeply embedded in the social system. This hierarchy, which
is based both on class and race, permeates and circumscribes all dimen-
sions of life in Guenca. In this system, social position is reckoned primarily
by ancestry and secondarily through a combination of race and class char-
acteristics (Brownrigg 1972). At the top of the social hierarchy are a small
number of "noble" families who can trace their descent from Spain. The
rural peasants and rural-to-urban migrants, who are more "Indian" in
60 • ETHOS

appearance, are typically at the bottom (Brownrigg 1972; Hirschkind

1980; Miles 1994). Even though rural-to-urban migrants often abandon
obvious "traditional" rural cultural characteristics like dress and hair style
when they come to the city, they are, nonetheless, easily type-cast be-
cause of characteristics such as short stature, darker skin, poor clothing,
surname, manner of address, and, increasingly, occupation (Brownrigg 1972;
Hirschkind 1980).
Perhaps because of its small size and relative isolation for so long,
Guenca is deeply entrenched in a paternalistic tradition in which almost
every activity, from finding housing to securing a job, is more easily ac-
complished through palanca, that is, literally, a lever (Stark 1981). To have
palanca means that a person is linked through kinship, compadrazgo, or
friendship to socially influential individuals or families. Those in the upper
social stratum have a great deal of leverage and a dense social network that
can be accessed, while those at the bottom are without access to influential
individuals (Stark 1981). Having palanca ensures that bureaucratic has-
sles will be minimized and opportunities for advancement enhanced.
Everything from phone service to school enrollment is facilitated by pal-
anca. In Guenca, palanca is still most commonly acquired through ex-
tended cognatic and affinal kinship links, a dynamic that operates to bar
the poor from access (Hirschkind 1980).
While Guenca officially prides itself on its tranquility and regional
folklore, there is increasing local tension, as the established social hierar-
chy is threatened by recent migration trends. Rural-to-urban migration is
a source of local anxiety, with migrants portrayed by officials as threats to
the city's integrity and charm, especially as they stress housing and public
services to their limits. Of even greater concern to many elites however is
international emigration from the region, primarily to New York City. This
migration, which intensified in the late 1980s has altered the face of
Guenca's physical and social landscape (Miles 1997). The rural and urban
migrant poor who have no palanca, and therefore previously had no means
of real material advancement have found a way to circumvent the system
by sending a family member, usually a male, to the United States. Over
time some of these families, admittedly the most fortunate and successful
ones, 3 have used remittances to build beautiful homes in middle-class
neighborhoods. The elite response to the wealth accrued through migration
is a decidedly negative one. They resent the ways that migrants spend
their money and express paternalistic concern about their perceived ex-
ploitation in the United States. They are alternately indignant that peas-
ants are buying land and constructing very large homes (while the local
economy stagnates their own buying power) and believe that the migrants
are too ignorant to be in control of such wealth.
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 61

Yet, despite the fact that the emigration of a son to New York City can
provide a family with increased buying power, it has not really advanced
social opportunities for people at the bottom of the hierarchy in Cuenca.
For example, admissions to the best elementary and high schools, which
result in the strengthening of relationships of reciprocity and palanca, are
closely guarded; the children of migrants rarely, if ever, mingle with those
of the upper classes. The teenage daughter of one U.S. migrant who was
attending a solidly middle-class high school told me in 1989 that, despite
her "good" education, she does not think she will be able to get a job that
commands a high salary because "we don't know anyone, it's all about who
you know." In 1972, Brownrigg wrote "social origins are remembered. Ori-
gin is the key to class ascription in Cuenca," a sentiment that still reso-
nates today (1972:157).
As the economic conditions worsen in Ecuador under recent neolib-
eral reforms (Gonaghan and Malloy 1994; Estes 1996), the opportunities
for social and economic betterment in Guenca are shrinking. Migration to
the United States provides one of the few seemingly viable alternatives to
what is an essentially closed system. Therefore, migration to the United
States is a major topic of discussion, and pressure is put on men and boys
to make the arduous journey. Today, poor boys in Guenca grow up with
the understanding that immigration to the United States is a desirable
possibility for them, should they find themselves frustrated in their
attempts to make a good living in Guenca. In contrast, even though the
consequences of a poor economy disproportionately affect female employ-
ment opportunities,4 the illegal trip to the United States is considered far
too dangerous for girls, and they are very rarely supported, and never en-
couraged, to migrate. Girls and women who do immigrate to the United
States are often stigmatized, are thought to be poorly connected to their
families, and are invariably described as duro (tough) and hardhearted.
For girls without palanca then, the opportunities for attaining good
employment in Guenca are poor, and there are few possibilities for cir-
cumventing the system. In conversations with adolescent girls, especially
those older than 15 or 16, it was clear that they fully understood their
limited career options. Some had given up school, since they considered
it a waste of money, while others, like Jenny, had abandoned their earlier
dreams of professional employment. "It doesn't matter if I finish school or
not," said one girl of 17, "there's still no job for me." "I would do anything
to leave here," said one girl, "I'd go to the United States and be a maid."
"This place [Guenca] is frustrating (fregado). There's no way to improve
oneself. Good jobs always go to people's friends or family." Even those who
do manage to "succeed" in finding a job rarely use the skills they went to
school to study. For example, Maria, who is now 22 and has two years of
college accounting admits she got her low-paying job as a rural health
62 • ETHOS

inspector (in a cheese factory in her parents' home community) only be-
cause a relative retired, freeing up a position for her.
Much of the unhappiness expressed by adolescent girls in Guenca is
generated by the uneasy juxtaposition of official state rhetoric about the
inclusion of all Ecuadorians in the modernization of a multi-ethnic state,
and the local power configurations that all but prohibits their meaningful
participation. For example, school girls are encouraged both officially and
unofficially to learn occupational skills such as accounting, computing
and, increasingly, English, so that they may fully participate in the modern
economy. But high unemployment, inferior schooling in many cases, and
the pervasive system of palanca favoring the upper classes combine to
circumscribe, if not wholly exclude, poor girls. By participating in the edu-
cational process, girls are signaling their readiness to take part in the mod-
ern, consumer economy. The problem, however, is that there really is no
place for them. The dissonance between the imagined world of modern
professional success and the realities of growing up poor in Guenca with-
out palanca is one that seriously challenges a girl's construction of iden-
tity and presents a problem for which there is little resolution (see Schlegel
1995). By the time they are 16 or 17, most of the girls I knew were vocal
critics of a social system from which they felt increasingly excluded.

GROWING UP AS A GIRl
Erika, who was 14 years old in 1997, is thought by her parents to have
a very bright future. She is tall (by Guencan standards), light-skinned and
has large green eyes. She was conceived when her biological mother was
raped at 13 years old and she has been raised to consider her grandmother
and grandfather as her parents. After school she sometimes takes piano
lessons and regularly works in her mother's restaurant serving platos tipi-
cos to market women, manual workers, and rural folk who have come to
the open-air market. She is watched very closely by her parents who be-
grudgingly allow her to lighten her hair and wear lipstick, but do not allow
her to leave the house unaccompanied unless she is on her way to school
or to lessons.
Erika's virtue is of paramount concern to her family and all efforts are
made to assure her good reputation and virginity. For about 18 months,
Erika's half sister Alexandra (her grandfather's illegitimate daughter), who
is three years older than Erika, lived with the family. Alexandra was then
abruptly returned to her mother. It was explained to me by her father that
Alexandra had to leave the house because she was spending far too much
time "in the street," was involved with boys the family did not know, and
was, most importantly, a very bad example for Erika. Erika, it is hoped,
will graduate from high school, get a job in a bank and, because she is so
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 63

pretty by Western standards, marry well. As her uncle once summed it up,
"She will grow up to be a pretty professional with green eyes."
As in much of mestizoised Latin America (Gill 1993; Glass-Coffin
1998; LeVine 1993), as girls mature in Ecuador they are increasingly con-
strained by their parents who believe that, other than going to school, girls
have no business "in the street" unchaperoned. This is in contrast to re-
ports about Indian women in the Andes who can have both physical and
financial independence at a young age (Buechler and Buechler 1996). In
both rural (Stolen 1991) and urban (Weiss 1990) mestizo settings in Ecua-
dor the concern for a daughter's chastity has been linked to issues of male
pride, control, and authority. A daughter's sexuality is closely monitored
by her parents, especially her father, and an out-of wedlock pregnancy is
interpreted as a symbol of female promiscuity and a lack of male (paternal)
control (Stolen 1991). In Guenca, much of the discussion about female
chastity is in fact framed in terms that emphasize relations between men
and not those between men and women. A young man who seeks to seduce
an older man's daughter is not demonstrating his lack of respect for the
girl, but rather, for her father. As one father explained to me, "If a boy is
interested in my daughter, he must show his respect to me. He should
come and see me." Given the low status that peasant men have in the city,
respect from young men who wish to court their daughters, and who are
probably of the same social class, may take on increased importance.
For the most part, peasant families in Guenca have accommodated to
"Hispanic" models of gender behavior, which for women stress submis-
siveness and acceptance of male domination, a devotion to family, and
sexual modesty (Gill 1993; Miles and Buechler 1997). While I do not wish
to resort to easy stereotypes about machismo and male authority (Stevens
1973), there is ample evidence from the families I came to know that poor
men in Guenca are, in fact, privileged in ways that women are not. Men
are expected to be the "heads of the household" and "good providers"
(McKee 1980) and while the latter role is often undermined by the local
economic conditions, men continue to exercise the privileges of being the
heads of the household. These privileges include controlling access to
money, asserting authority in family decisions, taking a leading role in the
children's discipline as well as being allowed to have extra-marital affairs,
and having drunkenness and wife beating tolerated (McKee 1980; Stolen
1991). I found that poor city girls had few illusions about men or the
possibilities of future romantic love. "Men are all abusive," said one girl,
and another declared, "Men order women around all the time. I don't want
to be married." Girls learn early that male peccadillos are to be tolerated,
but they do not like it. "Men drink and are ugly," said one 13-year-old.
Jenny's family story, for example, is not atypical. In 1989 Jenny's par-
ents seemed to have a reasonably happy marriage although her father
64 • ETHOS

"embarrassed" her mother continuously by joking about having another

woman. There was always more tension in the house when Manuel was
home, he issued orders and everyone listened, but it was, in general, a
peaceful time for the family. In 1993 when I came to visit, Jenny's mother
was recovering from the birth of her sixth child, a child Jenny helped de-
liver and one that her mother did not want. After watching her mother
through a difficult pregnancy and a home birth (something a girl of 12
would not witness in the countryside where older women are present)
Jenny declared that pregnancy and childbirth are "disgusting" and she has
no desire to have children. By 1995 the family was in a great deal of tur-
moil. Manuel had demolished his taxi in an accident, gotten drunk, and
beaten Jenny's mother. Relations between husband and wife were obvi-
ously strained and Jenny's older brother was in the final stages of planning
his illegal immigration to the United States. Because I am her godmother,
during this visit I gave Jenny money to take an English class only to find
out later the money was taken from her and spent on general household
expenses. In 1996 Jenny's father had a brief but very open affair with an-
other woman, a relationship that further strained the family budget. By
1997 the affair was over but they were badly in debt. Daily fights were now
the household norm.
While money was a major source of family discord, many of the fights
in 1997 also concerned Jenny. Despite the very vocal objections of her
parents, as well as threats of violence, Jenny has started wearing make-up
and cut her hair to shoulder length. To make matters worse, she has been
"seen" by a reliable source "on the streets" with a neighborhood boy of ill
repute. Her parents, however, were most shocked by her attitude when
they confronted her. Rather than apologizing for her associations with this
boy, denying it, or justifying her attachment (all responses her parents
could relate to), Jenny has been defiant. She has told her parents that she
has no interest in marriage or a family and that her reputation means
nothing to her. Despite these strong words, a few weeks later, Jenny's
mother reported that Jenny had, in fact, stopped seeing the boy.
Girls, of course, have witnessed their mothers' often unhappy mar-
riages, and as they mature, they personally experience the constraints of
being female in this society. Within their own homes they see their
brothers being trained to assume the roles of male authority (Stolen
1991), while they find their own lives are increasingly confined within the
household. Boys often hold jobs on the weekends and after school and,
while they are encouraged to give some money to their mothers, they are
also allowed to keep some for themselves. Jenny's brothers, for example,
(one older than she, and one younger) have both been allowed to travel
freely between Guenca and her mother's rural town, selling bread after
school. Jenny, like most girls, is not allowed to work outside of the home
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 65

while she is still in school; any money she obtains, such as my gift, is not
hers to control and manage. Now that her older brother has left for the
United States, she no longer has a chaperon, and, given recent events, her
social life has been sharply curtailed.
To be sure, many of the adolescent boys I met were also unhappy in
their parents' homes and resented parental intrusions into their personal
lives, but they knew that this was a temporary condition. After graduation
from high school some boys leave home to go into the army for their years
of compulsory service; some go to Quito, Guayaquil, or the lowlands to
look for work; and others immigrate illegally to the United States. When,
and if, boys return from this time away from their parents, they are treated
as adult men and their daily activities are not monitored. One young man
"disappeared" for four days, and while his parents worried about him, they
welcomed him lovingly when he returned. As they mature, boys can exert
more control in their households. Several women reported that their hus-
band's violence ended when their sons were old enough to challenge and
often physically restrain the father.
In contrast, a girl can expect to move directly from the domination of
her parents to her husband's home, where she assumes the duties of a wife,
and usually soon after, a mother. It is considered improper for a young
unmarried woman to move away from her parent's home (or that of an
equally vigilant relative) unless she is married. One young woman of 18
who worked in a store complained bitterly to me of how her parents for-
bade her to move in with some girlfriends, even though her wages were
sufficient to cover expenses. Like most unmarried working young women,
she was expected to give a significant portion of her pay to her mother for
general household expenses.
Interestingly, the patterns described here are themselves relatively
new ones for these families, and they are linked to changes associated with
urban living. In fact, the lives of adolescent girls in the city today differ in
many ways from their own mothers' experiences as young women. While
their adolescence was often shortened by early marriage it was less con-
fining. Based on the interviews I conducted with migrant women in 1989,
the mean years of education for migrant women is three years of primary
school; most were married by the time they were 15 or 16 years old. In
contrast, today's urban 16-year-old is probably still in school and may
be for several more years. Girls are marrying later today, extending
adolescence, and creating a life-stage in which their mothers have only
limited experience (Lietchy 1995).
Furthermore, life histories indicate that the mothers of today's ado-
lescent girls were more independent in their own, albeit shortened, youth
than they allow their daughters to be. Most of these women left school
when they were about 10 or 12 years old, and as young teenagers they were
66 • ETHOS

frequently involved in income-generating activities outside of their house-

holds. Several women described this as a happy time in their lives, when
they had money over which they had personal control (see Buechler and
Buechler 1996). During a conversation with one woman about her youth,
she brought out a worn cardboard box and showed me three very elegant
polleras. She described how she bought them when she was a teenager and
how she "danced and danced" during the festivals in her town. Migrant
women describe having had lots of friends of both sexes in their youth, but
explain that they socialized primarily in public settings where family,
friends, and neighbors were present. It is marriage and children, they
claim, that wear a woman out and makes her physically and emotionally
"used up."
However, for migrant families today the city is a far more isolating and
threatening environment than rural towns of 20 years ago. Vigilance,
therefore, is absolutely essential. Parents often do not know their chil-
dren's school friends, and since they do not trust their neighbors, they do
not let their adolescent girls out to socialize. "This neighborhood is filled
with bad people (mala gente)" Jenny's mother told me. "No one would
tell me if they saw Jenny in the street." Furthermore, 20 years ago, if a
rural girl found herself pregnant, the father of the baby was usually well-
known, and both families would make sure the couple was quickly, if not
quietly, wed. However, in the city an unplanned pregnancy means that a
girl must give up any hope of graduating from secondary school, and there
are fewer guarantees that the baby's father will marry her. In other words,
the consequences of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy are more dire than they
have been in the past.
Interestingly, it appears that wealthy teens are not faced with quite
the same degree of parental control, probably because their children's
peers are from "known" families. In ice cream shops and hamburger
stands, wealthier teens congregate and socialize openly in mixed sex
groups. Well-groomed with ironed blue jeans, leather jackets, and Troop-
ers parked at the curb, these affluent young people are not invisible to poor
girls. They are sources of both intense shame and deep longing. While the
behaviors and styles of wealthy girls are certainly admired by poor girls,
given the social constraints of life in Guenca, they are only able to watch
them, somewhat surreptitiously, from afar.5

DESIRE, LONGING, AMD THE MEDIA

Interviews with migrants that I conducted in 1988 indicated that the
primary reason that families left rural areas for the city was to improve
the educational—and therefore occupational—opportunities for their
children, both boys and girls (Miles 1994). Indeed, families make real
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 67

sacrifices to keep their children in school, and anything less than gradu-
ation from high school is perceived as something of a failure. Not infre-
quently, however, the lessons that children, and especially girls, learn in
school and in the urban environment contrast starkly with the behaviors
that are acceptable to their parents. While some parents, like Jenny's, have
resisted their daughter's attempts at independence, and others, like
Erika's, have made some accommodations to urban standards, most fami-
lies are not willing to allow their daughters any measure of real inde-
pendence.
Confined to the house for the greater part of every day, girls spend
much of their time occupied in household chores such as caring for
younger siblings, cooking, and doing laundry. Whereas boys may spend
many hours in the afternoon playing pick-up soccer or visiting friends,
girls are rarely allowed to pursue friendships outside of school. Children
in Cuenca do not attend neighborhood schools but rather public and pri-
vate ones scattered throughout the city. There is little chance in these
rapidly changing neighborhoods that girls will find school friends living in
their neighborhoods. As a consequence, the primary leisure-time activity
for poor adolescent girls is television. In 1989 there were only two televi-
sion channels that had daytime programming; most of that was cartoons
and North American action-adventure re-runs. Today there are four chan-
nels (excluding satellite television, which these families cannot afford).
Daytime viewers can choose from programs such as the Show de Cristina, a
Spanish-language talk show from Miami whose topics can include male strip-
per contests or interviews with porn stars and racy music videos that over-
whelmingly feature money (often in the portrayal of lavish lifestyles) and sex
as central themes. Most of these videos, as well as the evening soap operas
feature glamorous European-looking women as protagonists.
However, what is troubling is that these programs have little ability to
positively reflect the lives of poor girls. It was never clear to me whether
the incongruousness of the television images and real life concerned or
dismayed adolescent girls or their families, but I suspect not. I was often
jolted by the contrasts of watching a buxom, gorgeous blond describing the
trials of her television career on The Cristina Show or seeing a commercial
with a toothy housewife pouring powdered laundry soap in her washing
machine while sitting six abed in a room with one dim light bulb and
cracked and dirty walls. In fact, there was a distinct lack of critical com-
mentary about television programming and even some of the most racy
and outrageous programs were universally described to me simply as
bonita (nice, pretty).
I would like to think that television could provide girls with some
sense of the contestability of gender models (see Miller 1998) or that it
encourages girls to become "more confident in their personal qualifications
68 • ETHOS

to look for 'a better life' " (Reis 1998:304). Notwithstanding Miller and
Reis, whose studies of television's impacts on rural communities in Mexico
and Brazil indicate some positive changes for poor youths, urban girls in
Guenca already know the limitations of urban life, and they want more.
Therefore, I suspect that television's impact in Guenca is ultimately more
troubling than reinforcing, creating desire and longing, but few models for
action. Unfortunately, as Bordo explains, "It is the created image that has
the hold on our most vibrant, immediate sense of what is, of what matters,
of what we must pursue for ourselves" (1993:104 emphasis added). It is,
of course, precisely within this disjuncture between what is, in the real,
not the imagined sense, and what matters, that adolescent girls are strug-
gling. While they may not view television as a source of their discomfiture,
and in fact see it as the arbiter of what matters most, television, like school,
cannot fulfill its promises. When the television is turned off, they still must
face a world in which men are abusive, adolescent girls are not trusted,
and peasants experience discrimination. Even though some girls under-
stand full well the world of television is a constructed one that is not to be
taken as a true representation of the world, what remains with them is the
desire and longing for a lifestyle that is probably not attainable for them,
a lifestyle lived by those who actively scorn them.

WHEN GIRLS BECOME WOMEN

In 1989 when I first met Blanca, Erika's biological mother, Blanca was
18 years old. Unmarried and, as her mother feared, perhaps unmarriage-
able because of a badly disfigured face caused in a childhood accident, she
was working selling clothes in the Feria Libre (open market). Despite her
disfigurement, Blanca cared a great deal about her appearance; she light-
ened her hair and wore very fashionable and often revealing clothing.
Blanca was a deeply unhappy young woman, who at the time had given up
hope of having a professional job, and talked a great deal about her distrust
of men and her deep desire to go to the United States. She was enamored
of the United States, the freedom she believed women have there, and the
consumer lifestyle she saw in television and movies. She told me that
Guenca was a "hopeless" place where doors were "closed." She talked of
going to Quito or Quevedo, two northern cities, where she heard there
were better commercial opportunities.
In 1993 Blanca was married to a man that her parents liked a great
deal and who I thought appeared to be a kind and gentle person. Blanca,
however, was not happy with Carlos because, she said, he didn't make
enough money and he was "ugly." In particular, she thought his skin was
too dark. In 1995 they had one daughter and had moved from her parent's
house to a rather nice little house in a new neighborhood. Blanca and
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 69

Carlos were both working in a joint business of buying clothes in Ibarra (a

far north province on the Colombian border) and selling them in Cuenca.
By 1997, however, the business had perished. One afternoon while coming
out of the bank Carlos was robbed at gunpoint of all of their capital. Blanca
was frustrated that she was unable to work because they had a second
child who was still an infant, and they had to rely on odd jobs. Blanca was
terribly unhappy. "Everything we do fails," she lamented to me over lunch.
"Just when we were getting ahead, we were robbed. This place is impossi-
ble!" Ten days later things got much worse. Her infant daughter died sud-
denly of diarrheal disease.
Although Blanca's life is particularly brutal, it is typical in many ways.
When I first met her, she was 18 and not at all interested in marriage and
a family (claiming women suffer too much in marriage, as her own mother
did). Her primary goal was to go to the United States. She liked all things
North American, but spoke especially of how she wanted the chance to
make her own way "without everyone watching me." Today she makes no
bones about the fact that she resents that her younger brother was given
family assistance to go to the United States, and that she was denied all
help. In the end, much of her expressed dissatisfaction centers on the gap
between what she thought she should have in her life, and what she does
have. Importantly, however, when her daughter died she responded very
differently than did her own mother and aunt. Rather than blaming God,
as they did, or herself (as I did myself for not having visited sooner), she
blamed the system. When I asked her what had been done for the child
during her all-too-brief illness she explained through her very heart-felt
tears that she took her "too late" to a clinic that was "horrible," but was
all that the poor and unfortunate (los desgraciados) could afford.
While Blanca may seem an unsympathetic figure in some ways for
failing to recognize her decent husband, I have told Blanca's story not so
that we may judge her, but as a means of drawing some connections be-
tween the sentiments expressed by adolescent girls and the adult women
they may become. As a girl, Blanca was raped and watched her own father
philander and spend money he did not earn while she was denied the
opportunities that were given to her brothers. Today she resents being
forced by child-rearing to rely on her husband for financial security and
she is often brutally honest with Carlos and her parents, letting them
know in no uncertain terms just what she finds objectionable. Blanca has
internalized the messages of the state, which promote modernization, and
those of television and the media, which tell her that North American
standards of consumerism and beauty are desirable. These messages ren-
der her own life, even its good parts, less than adequate. She longs for
material possessions, a glamorous lifestyle, and social position; she meas-
ures her own success by impossible standards. She does, in fact, live a good
70 • ETHOS

deal better than her parents do, but that is not the standard by which she
was encouraged to assess her life. But, it is crucial to note that inherent in
Blanca's frustrations and anger is an unwillingness to accept conditions
that she finds untenable.
By using Blanca's story, what I am suggesting here, in a speculative
way, is that the unhappiness and frustrations expressed by adolescent girls
in Guenca is, in contrast to popular perceptions of adolescence, not a
wholly transitory condition. Adolescence is often portrayed as a life-stage
that is situated between childhood and adulthood, the worries, interests,
and angst of which will one day be replaced by more adult concerns. While
that may indeed be true insofar as the concerns of all our lives change
through the life-cycle, what I am suggesting is that there need not be such
a divergence in our scholarly understanding between "youth culture"
(Wulff 1995) and adult culture, and that ultimately the study of childhood
and youth should be a more integral part of the anthropological agenda.
Adolescents provoke their parents towards change at the same time that
they eventually grow up to be adults, carrying with them some of the atti-
tudes, ideals, and emotions that were forged in adolescence. It is very clear
that Blanca's youthful decisions and longings still matter in her adult life.
For poor girls in Guenca, the transition to modernity in an age of
neoliberal reforms has resulted in a number of important contradictions
for which they are finding little resolution. They are encouraged by their
parents and schools to become professionals in a social environment
where real opportunity is limited and reserved for the upper classes, and
they are told by their parents that good women are demure and conserva-
tive at the same time that they see that their own mothers have gained
little advantage from this. Furthermore, they are, quite literally, shown
every day that society values physical and social attributes that, under
current conditions, they can never achieve. Yet, I do not think the story
ends there.
Let me return briefly to Bordo's re-statement of Foucault, presented
earlier in this text, arguing that "power relations are never seamless, but
are always spawning new forms of culture and subjectivity, new opportu-
nities for transformation" (1993:27). While it is apparent that poor girls in
Guenca are suffering under the yoke of relations of inequality, both within
the home and by the state, their ability to launch critiques at these sys-
tems is, in fact, new. These girls may be controlled more rigidly than were
their mothers, but they are also far more astute and vocal about the struc-
tural causes of their personal and social distresses. They articulate very
clearly that relations in the home are oppressive, they reject Hispanic
models of submissiveness and modesty, and they frequently discuss how
local power configurations discriminate against them. Their ability to look
beyond their individual selves and even in most cases their individual
 Poor Adolescent Girls and Social Transformations • 71

families as the locus of blame demonstrates a degree of political conscious-

ness that their own mothers cannot articulate.
These girls may be in the process of transforming the idea of what it
means to be a woman, particularly a poor woman, in Guenca. When their
own mothers sought change for their families, they did so by incorporating
the orthodox Hispanic views of women's roles. They accepted class differ-
ences and privileges as natural, and they openly admired the upper
classes. In other words, they rarely challenged the status quo, but worked
hard and hoped that their own families would somehow succeed within
the system. When they were discriminated against because of their cloth-
ing, they simply changed it. While they certainly have fought with their
husbands, they have also accommodated to Hispanic models of female
submissiveness and followed accepted Guencan models of proper com-
portment for poor women. They have often had to support their families
when their husbands were unable or unwilling, but they did so always on
the margins of the economy with little expectation that they should be able
to do better. If they have ever been truly angry, it has been directed in
personal ways at individuals whom they perceive have negatively affected
their lives.
Their daughters, on the other hand, are not so acquiescent. They
openly reject the Hispanic model of gender by refusing to be submissive,
and they shock both their parents and the upper classes by wearing reveal-
ing clothing and makeup. They are much less willing to quietly accept
male privilege and aspire to hold men to different standards than did their
mothers. Because these girls have gone to school where they were told
they could be part of the modernizing economy, they can no longer accept
being relegated to the margins of the economic system. They are angry
that palanca still is the dominant mechanism for economic advancement,
and that few alternatives are open to them as poor females (of peasant
origins). They value North American standards for female comportment
over local elite ones, and they long for more material goods and for the
independence and autonomy they see represented on television. In the
end, what these girls have, and often bring into adulthood, is a longing for
real social transformation. How successful they will be at creating change
however, remains to be seen.

ANN MILES is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan University.

72 • ETHOS

NOTES
1. I use the term ideologies here similar to the Comaroffs definition (Comaroff and
Comaroff 1992). That is, I wish to indicate the contested and contestable nature of these
systems of ideas.
2. I think here of Foucault's gaze—associated with hegemonic power—a gaze that obvi-
ates actual physical restraint and coerces to conformity and self policing (Foucault 1977).
3. Male migrants who went in the early years (early-to-mid 1980s) when the costs were
much lower, seem to be more successful than those in the later waves, who have increas-
ingly high debts. Those who have desirable skills, such as making jewelry (Cuenca is known
nationally as a center of jewelry production) or to a lesser degree sewing clothing have fared
substantially better in New York than those without such valued skills.
4. A study by the "Institute of Social Investigations" and the University of Cuenca in 1989
(as reported in the newspaper El Tiempo) showed that the annual rate of increase in unem-
ployment for women age 20 to 24 was 136 percent.
5. A common way for the rich and poor to be in close contact with one another in Latin
America is through domestic service. However, in Cuenca, the daughters of rural-to-urban
migrants do not engage in domestic service. Not only is it perceived to be a step backwards
for these girls, rich families do not want them as they are thought not to be "humble"
enough. Maids are recruited directly from the rural areas, often as young as eight or ten
years old.

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