Book Reviews

Oft, Thomas A. (2008) Conquistadores de la Calle: Child Street Labor in Guatemala City, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), ix + 228 pp. 36.00 hbk. Conquistadores de la Calle is a well-researched, engaging, and honest account of anthropologist Thomas Ofts work with child labourers in Guatemala City. Although Ofts work there dates to 1990, the bulk of his research took place over eighteen months between 1997 and 1999 in two of the citys busiest commercial sectors: the Eighteenth Street area of Zone 1 and the El Guarda Market of Zone 11. As an independent researcher and under the auspices of a local, education-focused non-governmental organization (NGO), Oft engaged hundreds of children living in a variety of family situations and carrying out a wide range of work from shining shoes, parking cars and carrying bundles, to selling and delivering food, drink and myriad household wares. Oft centres his study on 108 child labourers who, he explains, typically receive pay for their efforts. Child workers, on the other hand, carry out similar tasks for their family members but tend not to receive compensation (other than pocket money). Comprising this subgroup were boys and girls aged 617 some from two-parent households, and others who never met their parents. The majority, however, were self-employed boys (80 per cent) between the ages of 10 and 17 (91 per cent), who worked full-time, lived with a parent or close relative (70 per cent), and had migrated to Guatemala City from the countryside (85 per cent) (pp. 74, 9798). These individuals represent both the typical child labourer (p. 12) in the zones under consideration and the hardworking nonpathological poor (p. 18) whose lives are so seldom studied. Oft situates his subjects in the context of child labour across Latin America and (briey) in the global capitalist order that makes possible their exploitation while feeding off it to lower wages and maximise prots. He walks a difcult line between lamenting a system in and by which state and society fail generation after generation of poor children by making it structurally impossible for them to rise above marginalised
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Book Reviews
survivability, and on the other hand, espousing the realist position that, as he puts it, child labour works (pp. 35, 168169). Oft is careful to qualify this assertion and warns against any celebratory stance on the difcult life of the child labourer, riddled with injustice of every kind. Yet he portrays the children not as victims, but as astute, resilient, creative entrepreneurs who manage against great odds to help provide decent lives for themselves and their families. Refusing to paint this picture in black and white, Oft insists on a palette of grey in which the reader detects undertones of ambiguity and discomfort. He wants, seemingly, to put a positive nal spin on the story, but ultimately cannot: As the world in which these children would not have to work slips into oblivion, child labour is a necessary evil through which survival and, occasionally, a modicum of good fortune are made possible. Ofts work provides a glimpse of daily victories and struggles that remain largely invisible both inside and outside academia. As such, the study contributes to our understanding of the social and economic realities of working children and the growing interdisciplinary eld of Childhood Studies. Chapters 1 and 2 dene key terms and provide a succinct but valuable history of commercial growth and labour in the studied zones. Here Oft contextualises his research within anthropologys evolving self-consciousness and desire to present marginalised peoples as agents rather than objects of study. In Chapters 35, Oft begins with a handful of children, and extrapolates from their stories broader observations on the majority of his subjects who work in street sales, personal services, small-scale transport, and security services (p. 72). He offers a typology of child labour and shows that, with few exceptions, girl labourers perform inferior tasks and earn signicantly less than their male counterparts, even for the same work. Girls are more likely to suffer abuse in addition to the violence of poverty, oftentimes with the complicity of their caretakers. Oft nonetheless dispels the notion that children working the streets are necessarily from broken, abusive or exploitative homes. His subjects frequently occupy positions of relative power and adeptly manipulate adults for their own benet. Chapters 6 and 7 detonate the myth of public education and return to the narrative of child labour as the least-worst option for poor children living in dire circumstances. Readers encounter a sampling of childrens voices, which are peppered throughout the narrative and provide a valuable contrast to the authors careful quantication of their opinions. Oft underscores the racialisation of child street labour, which appears as a subtext to the study but also points to its primary condition of possibility: a 36-year-long civil war that cost more than 200,000 lives the vast majority, those of indigenous peasants and led hundreds of thousands to the city in search of (relative) safety and prosperity. Tracy Devine Guzman University of Miami

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2012 The Authors. Bulletin of Latin American Research 2012 Society for Latin American Studies Bulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 31, No. 2