Working Children and Global Processes

Childhood
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Reproducing Life And Labor: Global processes and working children in Tijuana, Mexico
Stuart Aitken, Silvia Lpez Estrada, Joel Jennings and Lina Mara Aguirre
Childhood 2006; 13; 365
DOI: 10.1177/0907568206066356
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REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

Global processes and working children in
Tijuana, Mexico
STUART AITKEN
San Diego State University
SILVIA LPEZ ESTRADA
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
(COLEF), Tijuana
JOEL JENNINGS
University of Cambridge
LINA MARA AGUIRRE
El Colegio de la Frontera Norte
(COLEF), Tijuana
Key words:
childrens work, globalization, local
geographies, Tijuana
Mailing address:
Stuart C. Aitken, Professor
Director, Center for Interdisciplinary
Studies of Youth and Space (ISYS),
Department of Geography, 5500
Campanile Drive, San Diego State
University, San Diego,
CA 92182-4493, USA.
[email: saitken@mail.sdsu.edu]
The issue of child labor continues to challenge

thinking on the nature of work, play, schooling and
apprenticeship. New wisdom from some
contemporary academic writing places children
closer to the center of our understanding of
consumption, production and reproduction, and at
the heart of inequities generated by globalization.
Child labor comes in many forms and intersects
with local life and global processes in a myriad of
ways. The child laborers in this study work as
volunteer checkout packers in Tijuana
supermarkets. By highlighting aspects of their
complex daily lives, this article develops new ways
of thinking about childrens work socially and
spatially, while acknowledging the global contexts
of this work.
Childhood Copyright 2006

SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi, Vol 13(3): 365387.
www.sagepublications.com
10.1177/0907568206066356
Evoking processes of globalization as part of an analysis or as an explanation for anything is a risky business these days (Rizzini and Bush, 2002). At
one level, it may divert attention from the important task of eradicating the
abuse and oppression of children, and yet we believe that solutions require
an understanding of the broader contexts from which the lives of children
are elaborated. Further, we believe that many contexts of child abuse and
oppression arise from a connected world of flexible capital and instantaneous market adjustments. Local geographies are increasingly important for
understanding these contexts of childrens well-being, and childrens work
figures hugely in these contexts. Certainly, one of the most egregious forms
of exploitation is to build the values of goods on the bodies and spirits of
young people. And yet, we believe that child labor is too often raised as a
scapegoat, and advocating its wholesale ban is risky in terms of unintended
365

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
consequences when policies are applied without attention to context and

local complexities.
This article elaborates aspects of the contexts and local complexities of
the lives of working children in Tijuana, Mexico. Our intent is to broaden
the discussion of childrens work to encompass the complexities of local
geographies that embrace among other things education and family change
in a rapidly transforming regional economy. The focus is on how children
under the legal working age learn to labor as checkout baggers within the
context of a city tied into circuits of global labor that do not recognize officially their work as labor. Forty years ago there was no globally focused
maquiladora (make-up/assembly) industry in Tijuana (Carrillo and
Hernndez, 1986), and 20 years ago the city had no supermarkets. 1
Neighborhood mercados, a variety of specialized stores and trips to San
Diego satisfied most peoples consumption needs. Today there are more than
65 Tijuana supermarkets engaged in a government-sponsored program that
enlists the volunteer help of children between 9 and 14 years as los
empacadores (checkout packers). The children are not paid, but on average
they earn over twice the minimum wage in tips. This article highlights
aspects of the stories of these young men and women, with an emphasis on
the changing family and labor contexts in Mexico, and the domestic and
workplace responsibilities borne by children. We interviewed 48 children
either in focus groups or one-on-one and asked them to talk about what they
did at home and at work.
The article begins with our general argument for placing children at
the heart of globalization. This is followed by a discussion of the context of
Mexican child labor broadly and then, specifically, with a focus on the
Tijuana supermarket program. We end with a return to considering the
supermarket packers as global workers.
Globalization and childrens work
A focus on how children learn to labor highlights an important part of social
reproduction and is key to understanding current processes of globalization.
And yet, to date, social reproduction remains a neglected aspect of globalization debates (Katz, 2001, 2004).2 For the most part, discussions about
globalization focus upon productive, political and cultural dimensions with
little consideration of reproduction. Reproduction is not just about biological
reproduction; it is also about the daily health and welfare of people. And
social reproduction is in large part about the differentiation and skill of a
labor force. Childrens geographies are integrally linked to social reproduction but the places and practices of childrens everyday lives are rarely considered a dynamic context for understanding historical change, geographic
variation and social differentation (Aitken, 2004). Caught up in a web of
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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR
flexible accumulation with the associated local economic uncertainty of the

global marketplace, and attendant unemployment and decreasing public services, the lives of children are drastically affected. Marx (1976: 3723)
argued that childrens and womens labor is a large part of incipient capitalism in any particular place because it is flexible, cheap and undermines
mens labor. In noting this, Katz (2004: 143) goes on to suggest that:
Neither history, nor geography seems to have altered this situation. While the
continued importance of child labor in urban and industrial areas of the third
world is well recognized, . . . research [indicates] that capitalist development
[brings] about an intensification and expansion of childrens work.
We show in this article how true this is of Tijuanas supermarket packers, and how it is derived in a quintessentially geographic way that accounts
for the intertwined connections between the local and the global. This intensification and expansion of work during childhood and adolescence is
important because it is during these formative years that the principles of
society are mapped onto the consciousness and unconsciousness (see
Vygotsky, 1987). Concomitantly, this is also when some portion of social
reproduction is contested and negotiated in all spheres of childrens lives
(see Aitken, 2001).
Our assumption is that interpretative lenses focusing simultaneously
on local and global representations and lived experiences enable a relatively
comprehensive analysis. For social scientists, this focus is an important
extension of earlier work on the place of children and spaces of childhood
(see Aitken, 1994, 2001; Matthews and Smith, 2000). By taking this
local/global perspective, traditional notions of childhood as a separate developmental and social class are radically undermined, leaving views that valorize difference. A focus on difference produces work that is about the play,
education and the labor practices of young people (Hyams, 2000), their families and communities (Aitken, 1998; Bauder, 2001), and the institutions that
shape and are shaped by their lives (Fielding, 2000). Sassen (2003: 3) points
out that studying the global entails not only a focus on that which is explicitly global in scale, but also a focus on locally scaled practices and conditions . . . and a focus on the multiplication of cross border connections
among various localities. With the increasing academic concern about the
machinations of globalization, an understanding of local childhoods requires
a focus on local areas.
In sum, the implications for children of current globalization suggest,
first, a focus on the transformation of children and their labor as familial,
community and governmental institutions change and, second, a focus on the
ways that children are seen as flexible in the ways they learn to labor. From
this, a focus on where reproduction is constructed suggests that childhood is
differentiated not only through time but also between places.
367

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
Learning to labor in Mexico

The place of children in Tijuana is complicated by a border that is witnessing a realignment of international and domestic politics. The culture of this
borderland/la frontera is inevitably and intimately woven into this fabric of
change. In understanding the contexts of working children aged between 8
and 14 in Tijuana it is vital to consider the impermeability of the border,
migration, changing consumption patterns, labor opportunities and the
maquiladora industries that currently make up a substantial part of the areas
economy. Global restructuring processes that undergird changes in these
specific economic sectors force many children in Tijuana out of educational
institutions, onto streets and into work. In attempts to offset the worst of this
exploitation in a time of rapid economic restructuring, government officials
in Tijuana set up programs to protect young people. Before discussing
specifics of childrens labor under one of these programs, we briefly outline
the changing contexts through which children in Mexico learn to labor.
In Mexico, as elsewhere, there is very little agreement on what constitutes child labor. Influential international institutions such as the
International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Programme
on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) articulate a distinction between
child work and child labor in order to classify what is harmful:
Economic activity is a broad concept that encompasses most productive activities undertaken by children, whether for the market or not, paid or unpaid, for a
few hours or full time, on a casual or regular basis, legal or illegal; it excludes
chores undertaken in the childs own household and schooling. To be counted
as economically active, a child must have worked for at least one hour on any
day during a seven-day reference period. Economically active children is a
statistical, rather than a legal, definition. It is not the same as the child labor
referred to with regard to abolition. (ILO, 2002)
This argument comes from Fyfe (1993: 4), whose definition of child labor
permeates much of the ILO literature. He argues that child labor is defined
as work that impairs the health and development of children whereas child
work constitutes all work that detracts from the essential activities of children, namely leisure, play and education. Both, he implies, are detrimental
to the development of children and the concomitant development of a nation.
With a cost/benefit analysis using their own surveys and those conducted by
the World Bank, a recent IPEC (2004) report argues that eliminating child
labor and replacing it with education will result in a 22.2 percent net economic benefit globally by 2020, as much as a 54 percent net economic benefit to Sub-Saharan Africa, a 9 percent benefit for Latin America and a 5.1
percent benefit for transitional countries such as Mexico. IPECs consummate focus is that the elimination of child labor and its replacement by universal education will yield enormous economic benefits to countries of the
global South in addition to other social and intrinsic benefits (IPEC, 2004:
4). Our Mexican study joins those of Katz (2004) in Sudan, Punch (2004) in
368

Bolivia and Nieuwenhuys (1994) in India to suggest that child labor is complexly contextualized in local areas to the extent that its replacement with
universal education would be problematic.
For the most part of last century, the vast majority of children in
Mexico learned to labor through the family and this local education, which
began at an early age, was mixed with play and leisure. Marguerite Bey
(2003: 290) points out that rural Mexican children today continue to learn by
copying their parents: Girls do this by looking after their younger brothers
and sisters, boys by working in the fields with tools scaled down to their
size. On this fabric of social reproduction, a school-based universal education imposes a rhythm that is incompatible with rural activities. Childrens
work is indelibly linked to family reproductive strategies. In addition, Bey
(2003: 296) points out that in rural Mexican society young children derive
considerable pride and well-being from working alongside their parents or in
other jobs offered by the community.
The rural Mexican context of child labor brings to light the problematic nature of many international definitions which come from countries of the
minority global North.3 These definitions establish universal standards for
local geographies. The ILO (2002) and IPEC (2004) are intent upon eradicating the worst forms of child labor, defined in part as labor performed by
a child who is under a minimum age specified in national legislation for that
kind of work. And while most countries, including Mexico, define the minimum age for work as under 15 years of age, of the 245 million child laborers
globally, the majority (180 million) are aged between 4 and 15. For example,
in San Quintn, a rural community south of Tijuana, 24.6 percent of the child
workers questioned began work between 5 and 9 years old, and the rest
(75.3 percent) started between 10 and 14 years (UNICEF, 1994). Globally,
Mexico has the highest rates of child agricultural labor. And, importantly,
agricultural work here differs from other places in the world because it
remains a family affair (Bey, 2003). This rural context has implications for
urban young people whose parents learned to labor in the fields.
In a crude characterization of the global economic map, Mexico might
take its place among what Ruddick (2003: 339) calls the convergence club
of countries whose GDP per capita is converging on those of the minority
global North. These are nations with sufficient capital and human resources
to take advantage of changes in technology and the restructuring of labor.
This convergence in Mexico is limited to certain regions, including the border with the US, and gives rise to what Perez-Bustillo and Cervantes (1997)
call growth without equity (cited in Ruddick, 2003). For Mexico, this
regional growth has resulted in a significant movement of people to urban
areas and to the northern frontera. As a consequence, in Tijuana today, youth
and childhood is being restructured in distinct ways. Prior to this era of convergence, Mexican rural and urban children were part of the home and family for most of their earlier years, and it is in this environment that they
369

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
learned to labor. Today, in an increasingly urban Mexico, childhood is categorized as a stage strongly determined by institutionalized, universal education.
Formal education transforms childrens activities within the family,
structuring their lives differently in time and space. Outside the family and
domestic responsibilities, work joins schools as part of childrens increasingly complex daily round. Studies at the national level suggest that in the last
decades many Mexican children are entering the labor market without leaving school (Camarena, 2000; Giorguli, 2002; Mier y Tern and Rabell,
2000). For instance, Mier y Tern and Rabell (2000) state that in the 1980s
the combination of work and education was raised and initiated at earlier
years; the percentage of youth that work increased from 16 percent at 15
years old to 27 percent at 16 years old. Childrens labor is still part of a collective family strategy of income generation, in order for families to make
ends meet, but increasingly it is monitored by welfare-based government
institutions. This monitoring suggests that working children often have a
lower school attainment than those children who do not work (Taracena,
2003). In addition, the kind of work that is afforded young people is usually
flexible, and as a consequence the labor of young people is increasingly
thought of as surplus. Although it is impossible to delineate direct relationships, we suggest that it is at the confluence of these global economic, political and cultural projects that notions of childhood and youth are transformed.
Family interventions and childrens work
In studies on family and work in Mexico, households are conceived as sites
where individuals organize, in harmony or conflict, activities needed for
social reproduction (Garca et al., 1982). Although most of the literature is
critical about traditional concepts of Mexican family homework relations, it
recognizes that much of the complexity of family arrangements is predicated
upon complex internal differences among members and differential power
relations between men, women and children (Del Castillo, 1993; Salles and
Tuirn, 1998). And, from this perspective, the notion of the family-home as a
place for childrens socialization is prevalent. Gendered and generationally
assigned family roles in Mexico suggest traditional divisions of labor
(Garca and Oliveira, 1999; Selby, 1994).
The separation of education and play from the familial context was
never appropriate for Mexico, and yet dependency found form when childrens productive and reproductive activities were monitored by family
members (Del Castillo, 1993; Salles and Tuirn, 1998; Schiavoni, 1998;
Sheridan, 1991; Stromkist, 1998). Unfortunately, this unique notion of
dependency fails in contemporary Mexican contexts with the rise of childrens work beyond familial spaces. Children continue to work in order to
contribute to their familys economy but Mexican families are increasingly
370

less likely to monitor the ways their children learn to labor because children
increasingly divide the day among different spaces and away from other
family members. While immigrant parents from rural areas learned to labor
around family members, their urban children are learning to labor under the
eye of educational and welfare institutions.
State interventions and childrens voluntary labor
The Paidimeta Program (Program of Support for the Full Development of
Children Packers at Tijuanas Supermarkets) represents a state intervention
for regulating childrens work as packers in Tijuanas supermarkets. The program intends to contribute to childrens formacin (translated as
training/integration skills) both as workers and as family members. In preparation for their future integration to the labor force, children learn a culture
of work discipline, a responsible management of money. As family members, the program promotes children dedication to study, childrens personal
achievement, family integration, and childrens non-participation in antisocial activities (Paidimeta documentation, 2002). The latter part of the intent
speaks to the older Mexican discourse described earlier that honors the intervention of families in how children learn to labor. It also elaborates concerns
of the family welfare system that children are schooled in the dangers of
antisocial activities with specific reference to drugs and prostitution.4
The first part of Paidimetas intent is to teach work ethics among the
packers. The focus on producing good workers is elaborated through the
Labor Ministrys desire not only to protect the packers but also to train them
for future integration into the labor market. The Labor Ministry and the
supermarket chains consider the children as volunteers who are learning
requisite skills. This intent suggests a deliberate move by government institutions to wrestle away from families the function of labor formacin.
The Paidimeta program is formulated to not oppose federal labor regulations. In Mexico, Federal Labor Law Article 22 prohibits the use of childrens labor if they are under 14 years old, and if they are older than 16 but
have not completed elementary school. In addition, Article 23 establishes
that children between 14 and 16 years old require their parents permission
to work (these young people may be paid their salary directly). According to
the Paidimeta program, children from 9 to 14 years old can participate as
packers in supermarkets only as volunteers. In practice, we found some children packers as young as 8 years old. That said, supermarkets took care to
not allow children older than 14 to participate as packers, because to do so
requires recognition of their labor rights; including a regular salary, benefits
and the right to join a union. The only health benefit for packers that the
Paidimeta program insists upon is emergency medical aid. Supermarket personnel offices constantly check that children are under 14 years old, and
when children reach this age they are let go.
Other program rules are broken constantly. While the program estab371

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
lishes that children cannot work more than 4 hours a day, and no more than 6
days per week on a schedule from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night, in
fieldwork we found that some children work 6 to 8 hours, and often until
10:00 at night. According to program rules, the night shift is allowed for
children if their parents agree to pick them up from the supermarket.
The dual intentions of the Paidimeta program focus on family and
work ethics, intimating a coalescence of older and modern notions of learning to labor, and they join together to suggest formacin integral, a training
that is, as the literal translation suggests, essential and whole. There is an
important geography to this integration that alludes to global processes and
local commitments.
Childrens formacin integral
The supermarkets were unwilling to give us access to their child packers, so
we began contacting them through their schools and, on one occasion,
through a doctors office.5 As the project progressed, we used snowball techniques to gain further access. We were successful in interviewing children
employed in both large and smaller supermarket chains. Between January
and December 2004, we conducted in-depth interviews with 30 young men
and women and, in addition, we ran three focus groups of between five and
eight packers, spending the day with them and having them take part in
games and drawing. We asked them to draw sketches of their neighborhoods
and their work at the supermarkets. Our questions focused on the childrens
local geographies and their responsibilities at home, at school and at work.
Sometimes we interviewed children at their schools or at their homes. When
invited, we visited the homes of the children and met with siblings, parents,
aunts and uncles. We also interviewed teachers and youth-oriented NGO
workers as opportunities arose. The data were analyzed using NVivo, which
enabled simultaneous management and interpretation of government documentation, transcribed interviews, maps and the childrens drawings (Figure
1). The software aided interpretation of the data by allowing documentation
of emerging and recurring themes (called nodes) through on-screen coding
and data exploration capacities (called model explorer). We used the program to facilitate the development of themes that elaborated local geographies.
The French social scientist Michel Bonnet noted in 1999 that one
shouldnt be hypnotised by the problem of child labour, but instead should
open ones eyes and ears to working children and listen to what they have to
say to us (quoted in Liebel, 2003: 265). In what follows, we use the words
(translated directly) and the images of the child packers to help illustrate our
discussion.6 Where appropriate, we make our arguments through retelling the
stories of the child packers and their families as we observed them and as we
372

Figure 1 Screen shot of NVivo analysis of a focus group with child packers including
transcribed interviews, pictures and the model explorer that brings them together and
facilitates interpretation
heard them through the interviews and focus groups. In other cases, we
focus on the themes that arose from a majority of the packers and illustrate
these themes through quotes from individual children.
Trials by space at home and in the community
Children packers live at the interplay between home, school and work, and
as social actors they transform these different spaces, appropriating them by
their social practices, and many times resisting and challenging definitions
of child, childhood, work and worker (Figure 2). With the intensification of
childrens daily round comes a tighter packing of daily time budgets.
Packers also experience an expansion of their local geography beyond the
confines of family and neighborhood/colonia. Drawing on the work of
French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, we suggest that these children are in the
process of going through a trial by space, the endpoint of which means not
just social acknowledgment but also spatial reification; that is rights and
acknowledgment in space. The trial is a space, on a world-wide scale,
[where] each idea of value acquires or loses its distinctiveness through
confrontation with other values and ideas it encounters there . . . groups,
373

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
Figure 2 Intensification of the daily round between school, home and work in an
expanded local geography facilitated through calafias (minibus taxis)
classes or factions cannot constitute themselves . . . as subjects unless they

generate (or produce) a space (LeFebvre, 1991: 416). The child packers
trial by space is not just about overcoming physical distance and time constraints in their daily rounds, it is about resisting and reworking their place in
society.
As noted earlier, in Latin American countries the economic role of
children within the family is not new. With global restructuring and economic recession, children are increasingly participating in the labor force, mostly
in agriculture in rural areas, and in the so-called informal economy in cities
like Tijuana. In our study, most child packers work in order to contribute to
the family income, and they give their tips to their mothers, who are usually
considered the familys manager.
Three children work as packers in Pedros family. His mother, Maria,
374

Figure 3 This view from Pedros house suggests the difficulty of the terrain in a
typical colonia. (Source: S. Aitken)
is a single parent earning 650 pesos a week working full-time at a local

maquiladora factory.
Interviewer: Pedro, on average how much you earn a week?
Pedro: Umm . . . 800 pesos [US$80] a week!
Interviewer: And what do you do with the money that you earn?
Pedro: Well, I give it to my mother.
Interviewer: Do you give her all or do you keep a part?
Pedro: Well . . . I keep some.
Interviewer: What do you do with the money that you keep?
Pedro: I spend it on cards.
Interviewer: Which ones are your favorites?
Pedro: I like the DragnBall Z ones!
DragnBall Z ties Pedro expansively to larger global circuits of youth consumption and he is also intensely connected to his local environment
through the complex local transit circuits that he negotiates through his daily
round (see Figures 2 and 3):
Interviewer: When you start your day do you go to school first or work?
Pedro: I go to work first from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 and then I go to school which
starts at 1:15 and I get out of school at 7:20 p.m.
Interviewer: Good! How do you go to work and school?
Pedro: Well I take the calafia [minibus] then I walk a little bit . . . like a block
and then I when I get off from work I walk again a block, take the calafia and
375

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
when I get out of school I go take the calafia and walk to my house . . . about a
block . . .
Interviewer: How long does it takes to go from your work to school?
Pedro: Like 20 minutes and then from my school to my house about 3540
minutes.
Childrens work in the supermarket often obtains an expansive mobility and a chance to move beyond the colonia and the community. This expansion is not only important in the global commodity context of, for example,
DragnBall Z, it is also important in the context of a very difficult urban
environment with a disorderly, relatively unplanned structure, a topography
characterized by hills and canyons, and an inefficient transportation system.
While the experience of moving between home, school and the supermarket
may give children better spatial control over the city, at the same time they
may be exposed to the risks of an insecure urban environment. This is particularly true for girls, who usually walk to the supermarket accompanied by an
adult.
Maria talks about the needs of her family and, with regard to her oldest
daughter, suggests just how intimately her children and their labor are tied to
the familys economic and social welfare. Importantly, she intimates the
responsibility that Elena shoulders for the rest of the family (emphasis
added):
That is why you can see the need that Elena understands . . . she doesnt need to
work now but with the economic situation at home she decides to work. . . . I
have children, I am a widow, and when my husband died in an accident before
my boy was born Well, I stay on my own with my two children . . . What I
earn is not enough to make them succeed. We live near my mother-in-law, and
she is sick so we need to take care of her and buy her medicine, we take her to
the private doctor and to cover the costs in a private hospital is very expensive
so we take her to the public hospital. Elena notices all, and we dont have the
support of Dad. Moreover, we are living in a difficult situation plus the health
insurance is not good . . . that is the thing, where Elena can support us with her
work.
This suggests a different kind of trial by space, one that is intimately connected to the social and spatial contexts of the family and emotional geographies that elaborate spaces of economic resourcefulness and caring.
Like Pedro and Elena, most of the children we interviewed live in lowincome colonias populares (Figure 3) and worked as packers because of
economic need, as a part of their familys survival strategy. Convergence
with childhoods of the global North is suggested by the minority of middleclass children in the study whose families do not need the money, but who
chose to participate because they wanted to do something different, and to be
away from their homes. Nonetheless, older issues of patriarchal dominance
and traditional values are suggested by Carmen:
Interviewer: Did your family support you to get this job?
Carmen: Yes, I told them I wanted to work, and my dad said no, because we
376

do not need the money, and I said that I did not want to be at home, and he said
ok.
Interviewer: What do your brothers and sisters think about your work?
Carmen: My little brother wants to be a packer, he likes to wear my cap and
apron.
Interviewer: Do you think that children must work?
Carmen: Yes, no . . . let me see. If they have a money problem at home Id say
that their fathers have to resolve it and children must study. For me working is
something wonderful, I get some fun, I do my own thing.
Interviewer: How much do you earn a week?
Carmen: 1000 pesos, today I made 100 pesos; I think 1000 pesos a week is ok.
Interviewer: What do you do with the money?
Carmen: I give it to my mom, she saves it for me, and when I need something
she has to buy it for me.
Interviewer: What does your mother do with the money?
Carmen: Sometimes my mom borrows my money because my dad forgets to
give her the money when he rushes to work. Then I give her money from my little can and she pays me back the following day, but I tell her to keep the money.
The Paidimeta program is not in opposition to children packers

either boys or girls engaging in domestic responsibilities at home such as
making beds, washing dishes, preparing meals and taking care of small siblings. What often happens is that as a consequence of their participation in
the Paidimeta program, children do not have time to do domestic tasks at
home. In addition, childrens participation in these activities often reflects
traditional gender divisions of labor within the family; while boys are more
involved in tasks like making beds and cleaning their rooms, girls wash
dishes, prepare meals and take care of their brothers and sisters.
There are important contextual differences that suggest participation in
domestic work is related in large part to the structure of households (see
Aguirre, 2004). For example, domestic chores are less for children in families where there are adult women:
Interviewer: What kind of tasks do you do at home, besides studying and working?
Teresa: Eh, well I have to take out the water that is leaking in the bathroom.
Interviewer: And what else?
Teresa: [I have] to make my bed, and do my school duties, and I read the Bible
in my free time.
Interviewer: Do you do these tasks everyday or only on weekends?
Teresa: Only on Saturdays and Sundays.
Interviewer: Dont you help at home during the week days?
Teresa: No because I am going to school and I am also working.
These findings confirm the work of Mexican authors such as Giourguli

(2002), who argue that the effects of family structures on childrens work
and education are gender based. For instance, boys are under pressure to fulfill a provider role, while girls may have a chance to combine work and
domestic tasks.
We want to develop new ways of thinking about childrens work and
377

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
space within the context of a rapidly modernizing Tijuana, while acknowledging gender biases and the risks of this work to the children and their families. So what precisely is meant by rights and acknowledgement? From our
interviews it is clear that dignity for these young people is about taking on
economic responsibility and contributing to their familys well-being, but
what of their place in a larger societal/global structure? As suggested in this
section, the kind of trial by space with which these young workers engage
relate in important ways to home and community environments that precipitate their reasons for working and the spatial efforts that encompass that
work. Other trials by space emanate from the shop floor.
Trials by space on the shop floor
Childrens work results in a myriad of different experiences that reveal the
new sociospatial dynamics of the supermarket floor. For the most part the
packers enjoy the shop floor space. Even though it disciplines them, at the
same time it gives them some freedom and distance from family dynamics.
While waiting their turn at the counter, seated on a bench or making a line
by height, children chat, play and laugh, and generally horse around.
Childrens work organization at the supermarkets follows two different
patterns. On the one hand, large chains like Calimax and Gigante let children
organize teams by themselves. These stores have a large number of children
working in three different shifts:
Pedro: Like I . . . mmm I am in charge of the cashier and yes we are a lot of
empacadores [packers]. We organize in teams of two or three for each cashier.
If it happens to be that there are not many of us packers in that day, well then
one will take a cashier each.
Interviewer: When you have the groceries packed on the cart, do you take the
cart outside the store to the customers car?
Pedro: Yes, then the other packer will stay packing the groceries by the cashier!
...
Pedro: Well. . . like I am the kids manager/mediator . . . everyone goes to me!
So if they have a problem related to money they go and ask me. Sometimes they
fight because they say that it was their turn just because the other person got a
good tip from the customer . . . then they start to fight and then they go with me
to complain! So I tell them that they need to divide the money depending on the
case . . . some others just cry for their space then start to fight! And it is not that
easy!!!
Interviewer: So you are in charge of all the kids in the supermarket?
Pedro: I am in charge of all the [boys] in the supermarket and then a girl will be
in charge of all the girls in the supermarket!
Interviewer: If there are children who are bad-behaved at the supermarket, what
happens?
Carmen: Well, I tell them off, I tell them not to behave in that way, otherwise I
will send them home, or report them to the supervisor who also tells them off or
sends them home. I have been on charge of a lot of children. I have the right to
send them home. Once, there was a boy named Christian who was rebellious. I
told him you cannot do what you want. He was rude to the cashiers and used
378

to fight with them. So, I sent him home for a week. He apologized but I asked
him for his apron and cap. He never came back.
At smaller chains, such as Comercial Mexicana and Casa Ley, supervisors are in charge of organizing children into teams. Children sometimes
face difficult relationships with supervisors and customers, and with other
children. According to the Paidimeta program, store managers should mentor and take care of children packers. However, the relationship between
children and managers is frequently one of conflict. As one young man put
it:
Well, in the morning, I have a short woman as a supervisor . . . she is from
Veracruz and she treats us really bad! And she was always telling us off plus we
always had to greet her and say good afternoon and then she would tick us off!
Well if we were playing she would tell us off again! There are some cool supervisors that would let us go out to eat and everything . . . normal, also let us talk
with our friends but there are other supervisors that would not!
To deal with tensions and conflicts, some children resist, some argue,
some break rules and some consent to the social order of the supermarket
floor:
Interviewer: How are the customers with you?
Pedro: Well . . . there are some occasions . . . when you will find a seora that
will be really picky because they want their merchandise to be well packed and
organized! Other seoras want you to take the merchandise to their car . . . and
oh . . . oh! . . . if you do not pack the groceries right! . . . they get really angry
then they will scold you and tell you to do the things right and oh boy if you are
not paying attention or if you are playing around!
Interviewer: How are you treated by customers?
Pedro: Once, we were packing [shopping] into small plastic bags, and I apologized to a customer because we did not have big bags, but he did not want small
bags, and he started telling me off about things. I said that it was not my fault,
but I prefer him telling me off rather than arguing back at him.
Interviewer: Do you think he was right?
Pedro: No, he had no right to treat me like that, they should treat me in the
same way I treat them.
Child packers are employed by the supermarket to do only one thing:

pack groceries at the checkouts. In actuality, these working children know
more than how to pack merchandise; they learn product codes and they
know where products are located. Managers take advantage of this knowledge in different ways, asking children to check prices and look for products
inside the store. In addition, children will often wheel customers carts out to
their cars and help them unload (see Figures 4 and 5).
The resilience of these young people to the disciplining of the shop
floor is often countered in their play, which is also monitored and disciplined. Most play occurs off the shop floor:
Interviewer: Besides working, what else do you do with your friends at the
supermarket?
379

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
Figure 4 Packers learn product codes, learn where products are located and wheel
customers carts out of the store
Elena: Sometimes I ask permission to the supervisor to play a game. Girls start
chatting about soap operas and we pretend that we are part of the soap opera.
Interviewer: What do they do?
Elena: They give themselves the actresses names; for instance they are now
playing Mariana de la Noche.
Interviewer: Do you play inside the supermarket?
Elena: No, No, we play outside, sometimes when we finish our shift.
With this the children expand into an immensely popular national Mexican
television soap opera. The plot of this soap follows the trials and tribulations
of a young rich Mexican girl who is in love with a poor boy.
While children are officially considered non-workers, some managers
treat them in a disciplinary fashion, as if they were subordinated employees.
The supermarkets keep records of children packers with information about
them and their families. We noticed that these records were used to cite children who did not conform to the rules established for formal workers.
Discipline reports were written when children laughed, ran and or played in
the supermarket.
Reproducing capitals needs: global children in local contexts
A premise of this article is that it is remiss not to consider childrens work,
play and education within global discourses of social reproduction that
include an understanding of family transformations, community changes and
380

Figure 5 Packers drawing depicting conflict and receiving tips at the checkouts
local and regional development. These are considerable issues that go well
beyond the purview of what we have done here, and yet we are able to draw
three substantial implications from our focus on Tijuanas supermarket packers. First, the minds and bodies of children, how they are constructed and
how they are taught to labor are a crucial part of describing the distinctive
shape of larger material transformations. Focus on children and social reproduction is important then, insofar as it break[s] the frames of dominant
models of transformations in the world system (Stephens, 1995: 8). On this
point, we note the ease with which young people in Tijuana grow into
responsibilities at home and at work, and the ways they incorporate play and
creativity into these responsibilities. Walter Benjamin (1978) talks about a
revolutionary imagination in childrens play and creativity that for the most
part remains dormant (coiled like a spring) or is disciplined out of adult life.
In noting this, Katz (2004: 257) argues that revolutionary imagination of this
kind may be the key to halting, or at least transforming capitalisms rapacious trajectory.
Following this, the second implication of the globalization debates for
children is that they are marked as flexible perhaps the most flexible
consumers and producers of capital. This suggests the notion that children
381

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
are pivotal artifacts of contemporary globalization. The so-called nature of

children changes as the objects around them social practices and institutions, family and community structures and labor relations change. Of
course, young people are not a simple tabla rasa upon which the will of capital is etched. Children not only become through the influences of these
changing objects, they also bring something of themselves into cultural life
as they actively participate in the day-to-day workings of places. In several
supermarkets, packers negotiate the responsibility to supervise themselves;
from organizing themselves into teams to enabling child-like behavior
(laughter and playing) on the shop floor.
And this brings us to a third implication of globalization for childrens
lives: issues of disequilibrium and inequality are very much manifest at the
local level. Over the last four decades Tijuana has been uniquely positioned
in the global economy by rapid modernization and continued dependence on
the global minority North. Commentators suggest that globalization, with its
focus on the homogenization of cultures and rapid dissemination of information through communication technologies, heralds the death of geography
through processes of delocalization (Gray, 1998; Reich, 2001). Conversely,
we believe that globalization is multi-scalar, emanating from, and effecting,
a variety of spatial levels (see Martin, 2004). Pointedly, Amin (2002) argues
that the global is not simply out there but also in here. The local focus of
globalization suggests a complex web of processes that impinge upon the
lives of workers in a myriad of ways, and it is young workers who flex most
under pressures to adjust.
The packers in Tijuana experience spacetime expansion as they play
soaps, collect DragnBall Z cards and journey daily between home, school
and work negotiating various modes of transportation while securing their
own safety in a chaotic urban environment. They also negotiate spacetime
compression as their worlds collapse into a stringent daily routine. This, of
course, is a problematic generalization. In the same way that the processes of
globalization are neither unidirectional nor even, so is it impossible to characterize or position a uniform context for childhood because the local conditions of global children are so varied. In short, geographical studies argue
that childhood is not only constructed in different ways at different times but
also varies depending upon where it is constructed (Holloway and Valentine,
2000). The compression and expansion of child labor is about Tijuana at a
particular global moment.
Concluding comments
The issue of child labor is not a new one for policy-makers or academics,
and yet it continues to challenge our thinking about how local geographies
contextualize definitions of childhood and youth, and the nature of work,
play, schooling and apprenticeship. Child labor comes in many forms and
382

intersects with these issues in a myriad of ways. Protests against the abuses
of child labor are important and laudable. And yet, Ruddick (2003: 345) cautions that there are risky unintended consequences when policies such as the
wholesale ban on child labor are applied without attention to context and the
complexities of local geographies.
Given the seeming peripheral and yet converging status of Mexico in a
rapidly polarizing global economy, the rise of institutionalized child-work in
Tijuana suggests many things, not least of which is the context of children as
having a significant place in a peripheral capitalist society. The specific
characteristics and forms of action of the children emerge under the influence of traditional and modern cultures and approaches to life as well as the
things shared with childrens work globally. Questions of quintessential constructions of regional childhoods and trials by space that connect with local
processes are raised here as is the possibility of a new kind of childhood that
is no longer compatible with an original bourgeois or western construction.
Nor does it appear that it is possible to generalize about how children learn
to labor across generations. Children are social actors whose lives are shaped
by their local working and living environments, and the times of those environments, and in turn they also shape those times and environments. We
have to investigate the ways in which children interact at the interplay of
their different roles and how they are placed in society; as well as the transformations, continuities and resistances that may result from their everyday
social and spatial interaction. If we agree with the decade-old admonition of
Jens Qvortrup et al. (1994) that childhood matters then surely in this agenda
of ongoing importance we must add that childrens geographies matter also.
What this article suggests is that Tijuanas local geography its physical and social landscape is intimately entwined with global processes and
children are caught up in, voluntarily participate in, and inform larger transformations. As economic changes over the last two decades have transformed grocery consumption in Tijuana, then so too have the lives of child
packers at the supermarkets expanded spatially and intensified temporally.
The spatial expansion is suggested by the ways children get around and get
to know their city. The temporal intensification is suggested by the ways
children juggle schoolwork, domestic chores and supermarket employment.
The child packers daily rounds suggest a complex web of social and contractual relations between home, school and work, but they also articulate
trials by space that suggest changing contexts of responsibility and identity.
These changes are manifest on the shop floor and at home to the extent that
the work of these young people bears little resemblance to ways their parents
learned to labor. At times their responsibilities highlight a resistance to capitalisms rapacious trajectory, and at times they suggest complicity. And then
again, at other times and in certain spaces, they reflect an imaginative revolution that suggests hope in the difference and transformative power of
young people.
383

CHILDHOOD 13(3)
Notes
Special thanks to Adriana Fernandez and Kristin Sverson from San Diego State University for
help with interviews and translation. Thanks also to Professor Nancy Postero from the
University of California at San Diego for her support of this project at its initial stages. The
study was supported financially by a grant from UC-MEXUS/CONACYT.
1.
The conditions that established the supermarkets were the ongoing process of industrialization and federal policies that in the 1980s created new highways connecting border cities
such as Tijuana and Ciudad Jurez to the rest of the country. The introduction of national products in the border markets occurred through the establishment of large supermarket firms
(Gonzlez and Alonso, 1990). Nowadays, the growth of the commercial sector is reflected in
the proliferation of supermarket branches in Tijuana with the expansion of the urban area, and
major retail chains entering into joint ventures with US warehouses such as Costco, Smart and
Final, Office Depot and others, as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA).
2.
Even though a large proportion of discussion on globalization comes from the discipline of geography, in a recent special issue on this topic in the Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers (2004, Vol. 29, No. 2), nothing is mentioned about children or their work.
3.
Samantha Punch (2003) uses the terms minority global North and majority global
South in place of Developing Third World and Developed First World to suggest a more precise categorization of difference.
4.
Although we have no evidence from our discussions with children, their parents and
their teachers that packers are involved in these activities, an NGO worker from La Fundacin
de Proteccin a la Niez pointed out that a clear danger exists when children earn in tips over
twice the mininum wage:
I believe that we need to be very careful about it. Because yes the kids are earning good! . . . I believe that sometimes when we are young we do not have the
capacity to know how we are going to invest our money. . . . Sometimes [it] is
good when the family asks for the money, because the child might say: [Talking
as if child] Oh no, I need to buy this thing first. . . . It would be easy for him to
buy tobacco, it would be easy to buy beer, drugs; because he can afford it.
Therefore, it is something with [a] high risk.
5.
The supermarkets suspicion of our study presented an ethical dilemma. Although
Paidimeta supported our research they were concerned that if we found and documented abuses the supermarkets would withdraw from the program, as they had in Mexico City when organized labor got involved, thus removing any possibility of overseeing childrens welfare.
6.
Names are changed in order to protect identities.
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Childhood

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REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

The issue of child labor continues to challenge

Childhood Copyright 2006

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consequences when policies are applied without attention to context and

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

flexible accumulation with the associated local economic uncertainty of the

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Learning to labor in Mexico

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

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classes or factions cannot constitute themselves . . . as subjects unless they

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

is a single parent earning 650 pesos a week working full-time at a local

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

The Paidimeta program is not in opposition to children packers

These findings confirm the work of Mexican authors such as Giourguli

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

Child packers are employed by the supermarket to do only one thing:

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

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are pivotal artifacts of contemporary globalization. The so-called nature of

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

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Liebel, M. (2003) Working Children as Social Subjects: The Contribution of Working

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AITKEN ET AL.: REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABOR

(ed.) Familias y relaciones de gnero en transformacin. Mexico City: Edamex.

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