‘ No somos los pobrecitos ’: Negotiating stigma,identity,and need in constructions of childhood poverty in Cusco,Peru

Abstract

In Cusco, Peru, children participating as informal vendors in the tourism industry are often stigmatized as pobrecitos – poor children who are in positions of economic and psychological vulnerability. Stereotypes about childhood poverty inform how these children can access aid or be successful vendors. Yet children also respond to such perceptions by strategically rejecting and reworking circulating ideas about their poverty. Demonstrating that there are tensions between how children are expected to display poverty to obtain resources – both revenue through the sale of souvenirs and social assistance through volunteer tourism – and how they are criticized for capitalizing on such positionality, this article argues that children creatively negotiate the meanings attached to performances and experiences of poverty. Children participate in the work of categorization, even as they must take into account the powerful emotional currency of conceptions of poverty and childhood, and the ways in which such ideas travel.