See It Through My Eyes

Abstract

Andrea Román Alfaro on seeing a Peruvian shantytown through the lens(es) of its children.

If you had to show your life through images, what would you take pictures of? Images let us tell and see stories we could never access otherwise. For people living at the urban margins, whose lives are usually portrayed through the crime section of the evening news, photos can be a powerful tool to make sense of place and assert autonomy amidst the constraints of poverty and violence. With this in mind, I embarked on a journey to narrate a different story of one of Peru’s oldest and most criminalized shantytowns, Puerto Nuevo.

Puerto Nuevo is located in Callao, the second deadliest district in Peru. In the Peruvian social imagination, it is a place you cannot “just” visit. Several times during my 16-month ethnographic fieldwork in the neighborhood, police, politicians, and public-sector workers I interviewed asked me, “How did you get in? It is a zona picante [dangerous area].” To crack down on the violence in Puerto Nuevo and other barrios, the Peruvian government declared an 8-month state of emergency in December 2015. To a certain extent, it worked. Puerto Nuevo residents can now walk around at any time of day without being caught in a shooting. However, as the men who had been actively involved in organized crime or gangs told me, “The people who had to die, died, and the rest went to prison. That’s what happened.” Although many young people remember growing up under such violent circumstances, most children hardly recall those shootings. Still, they live through the consequences, with their relatives in prison or dead. These are the kids we worked with.

Together with a local youth team and with the support of two professional photographers, we organized a series of photography workshops. We invited kids between 7-15 years old to join and quickly had a room full of children ready to hop onto the streets to practice their new skills. Unlike what I had imagined—which was asking them to take pictures of what they liked and did not like about their neighborhood—the children challenged my ideas. “Can we go somewhere else to take pictures?” “Why would I take pictures of Puerto Nuevo if it’s ugly?” “I don’t want to take pictures of what I do not like.” We had to explain why we wanted them to take pictures of their neighborhood. “We want you to show others how Puerto Nuevo is.” Indeed, deciding to show their neighborhood on their terms, the kids chose five themes and set out. This technique in some ways followed the example set by Argentine sociologists Javier Auyero and Debora Swistun, whose 2007 Contexts feature engaged young residents of a Buenos Aires shantytown with photo-elicitation methods. This enabled children to show their neighborhood through their own eyes, taking their own photos and allowing them to prompt further discussion with the researchers.

We collectively curated an exhibit first shown in Puerto Nuevo in May 2023. In the curation process, I observed how children made sense of the people and places in their barrio.

“What about this photo? What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. She’s the chicken lady.”

“So, where does she go?”

“She is a talent!”

They saw talents where we, outsiders, saw mundane people. They saw fashion where we saw people in flip-flops hanging out on the canchita [soccer field] of a neighborhood where there is always something going on but not much to do. Their pictures showed the everyday life of their neighborhood and the community that holds it together, such as the iconic murals that give them a sense of pride and place. “There used to be more faces here, but the company painted them all white. We tried to paint them again, but the police came to kick us out.” The kids recorded Puerto Nuevo differently, from a unique insider’s perspective, and in so doing, they created a new reality that they had never seen. “Is this Puerto Nuevo? REALLY?”

A collage of the instant photographs of workshop leaders and the children who participated, taken during the first day of photography workshops.

All photos courtesy Andrea Román Alfaro.

As sociologists of violence and crime, we struggle to portray the central characters of our stories. Should we show the crude reality of people’s lives and the decisions they make, or should we portray them as victims of the social conditions in which they live? Although the answer may seem easy for some, this is a debate that many of us face, especially when we write about our own communities or people with whom we have close relationships. In attempting to answer this question, I came upon sociologist Rueben Jonathan Miller’s reflections in the introduction to his 2021 book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration: “It seems to me that sitting with history, allowing myself to be moved by it, and finding myself within it is the only way to capture what it means to be alive…. I write from my experience as a scholar, as an advocate, and as a man with loved ones who have spent time in prison.” Maybe that is why I instinctively decided to get cameras into the hands of Puerto Nuevo children. I wanted to get the nuance of their lives. I wanted to see what they saw and make them see what I had seen during 16 months of intense fieldwork. I hope we can keep finding ways to write about the complexity of lives—our own and others’—with sensitivity and perspective.

Four kids who participated in the photography project stand in the middle of the street in Puerto Nuevo.

A workshop participant photographs residents sitting on the corner of one of Puerto Nuevo’s busiest roads.

Young men play soccer and hang out at the recently renovated Puerto Nuevo football court. The court is used every day from the morning to the evening.

Kids play soccer at sunset, with the colorful shipping containers of Callao Port looming in the background.

A fruit and vegetable vendor who sets up his stand outside the volleyball court every day. The area operates as a small market, with stands selling fruit, chicken, breakfast, and more. This picture was taken as an example of the talents present in Puerto Nuevo.

Callao Port at dawn.

Prompted to photograph something they did not like about the neighborhood, one participant keyed in on garbage. These couches, placed on a main road for trash pickup, remained long enough to become the favored resting spot of local dogs.

This picture was taken from the second floor of a house. It shows the roofs of several Puerto Nuevo houses, as well as Callao Port.

The Santa Rosa de Lima procession is Puerto Nuevo’s most important festivity. These flower carpets, illuminated by lanterns, are made by residents and will be walked over by the procession.

The volleyball court and the community center form the heart of Puerto Nuevo. In the foreground is a fruit-seller, whose cart features a speaker to announce his arrival and a scale to help in calculating prices.

A Puerto Nuevo girl, with the Callao Port cranes in the background.

A young man poses at the mini-soccer field in Puerto Nuevo.

A Puerto Nuevo resident hanging out near the volleyball court.

Puerto Nuevo residents observe a local mechanic working on a moto taxi (popularly known as a tuk tuk). Moto taxis are a primary means of transportation for many in the neighborhood, and many residents work as moto taxistas.

One of the many salsa singer murals in Puerto Nuevo and Callao, this art features singer Hector Lavoe and musician Johnny Pacheco. Callao residents love salsa.

Top: The “chicken lady” outside her home in Puerto Nuevo. Unfortunately, the chicken lady passed away suddenly in January 2024. Bottom: A local woman who just finished up her breakfast sales stands by a corner in Puerto Nuevo.

Supplemental Material

sj-pdf-1-ctx-10.1177_15365042241252127 – Supplemental material for See It Through My Eyes

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ctx-10.1177_15365042241252127 for See It Through My Eyes by Andrea Román Alfaro in Contexts