ABSTRACTS

In Ecuador, Texaco and Chevron have left their carbon footprint on the indigenous community of Sarayaku, because of this the children are forced to step into a role to take charge and speak on their rights to have their indigenous community protected and valued. The state knowingly engaged in continuing environmental liability in high risk areas, disregarding children and the environmental harm it causes. As a growing youth climate movement gathers steam, children and young people around the world are leading calls for action to curb global warming and protect their future. Climate-related disasters often have disproportionate impacts on children and serious implications for their rights.  Local residents believe the pollution has led to health problems such as cancer and birth defects. Moreover, increased competition for natural resources in turn increases risk of conflict which again has the biggest impact on children. Looking at Ecuador, we will focus on how the oil spills caused by Chevron and Texaco have caused a rise in climate change activism and its effect on children.

Investing in the Future: Education as an Economic Alternative to Child Labor in Peru

In the 1990s, the government of Peru passed education reforms that extended free and compulsory school education to all students aged between 5 and 16. Yet even with high educational enrollment levels, child labor is still a prevalent practice that can diminish educational achievement. However, is poor performance in educational achievement due to child labor or a lack of investment into Peru’s public education? Peru’s spending on its public education budget as a proportion of GDP has fluctuated greatly, but even throughout times when Peru’s public education spending hit all-time highs relative to its historical spending, it still trailed the spending of other countries with similar economic status within the region. This piece utilizes economic data and public policy to analyze Peru’s historical education budget. It will also analyze Peru’s current spending on its public education budget, as a percentage of GDP, and compare it to those of other Latin American countries that have similar economic status. Finally, it makes recommendations for modifications to the Peruvian education budget, including allocations, and guidance for a policy model that encourages educational reform rather than restricting child labor altogether.

‘C’ is for Castro and ‘R’ is for Revolution: Castro's Curricular Revolution

Fidel Castro used images of children associated with education as a strategy to consolidate power for the Cuban Revolution from 1959-1966. This piece builds upon Anita Casavantes Bradford’s book The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962, by examining the shift toward a socialist government and its effect on the national discourse of children’s education of the children.  A primary source used as an example of this political education reform is the picture book Libertad o Muerte! This book was an interactive learning tool that taught children the official history of the revolutionary process culminating in 1959, placing Fidel Castro as the hero of the book. The album’s structure allows the child to become an active player executing revolutionary ideology. Castro persuaded critics of the revolution to his mentality by drawing on the image of the conditions of children under capitalism as poor: lacking in nutrition, healthcare, and especially in education. Through this campaign image, the discourse of revolutionary Cuba placed the figure of the child at the center of the revolution, making children a motif for protection, mobilization, and even indoctrination. Under Castro, education became widespread. Those who obtained this reformed education must actively promote the new government during school, in keeping with the Hombre Nuevo ideology.  Therefore, education was a key component for the mobilization of Castro’s campaign, developed through his child archetype, creating a literate population loyal to Castroism.

Behind Bars: The Criminalization of Migrant Youth

As of November 2018, there were over 14,000 unaccompanied minors being housed in immigration detention across the U.S, with many more being apprehended at the border each week. While many of these minors did, in fact, come to the U.S. alone, other children became unaccompanied minors in the eyes of the immigration system after being separated from their families at the border due to the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy. In the media and across the U.S., images of children locked behind bars spread like wildfire. As a result of gang violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity, there are numerous children migrating to the United States each year. While these youth engage in this often dangerous journey, they are seen as very adultlike, facing harsh realities that, to the Western world, no child should have to endure. However, once they enter U.S. immigration system, youth are criminalized similarly to adults and are denied the assurance of children’s human rights. By drawing upon public policy analysis, statistical data published by immigration enforcement and various research organizations, and the works of childhood studies scholars, this project explores the ways in which the U.S. immigration system treats unaccompanied migrant youth as criminals and how the definition of “child” is fluid as children migrating pass through many different spaces. Ultimately, the treatment of migrant youth defines how the United States, very differently from how it views its own youth, views children from the Global South under an outdated, colonial lens. 

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The Evocative and the Endangered: Climate Change and Children in Mexico

Climate change awareness narratives warn that due to neoliberal development, the impacts of high carbon footprints, pollution, and environmental degradation do not stop at the borders of each nation-state. Recent data has proved that children are disproportionately affected by climate change, despite their minimal carbon footprint. Contemporary southern Mexico serves as an excellent case study of this phenomenon due to the region’s geography and exclusion from Mexico’s infrastructural systems. The communities remain politically isolated from the rest of the country and are especially susceptible to floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Children’s biological and cognitive lack of preparedness for these natural disasters make them extremely vulnerable, and in many cases, victimizes them in the face of environmental catastrophes. Mexico’s disaster prevention agency (CENAPRED), created after the earthquake of 1985, is tasked with preparing the public for these disasters and administering aid in their aftermaths. This piece investigates the rights of children in the face of unprecedented environmental challenges through climate change litigation, statistical data of climate change-related child mortality and the presence of children in disaster preparedness and relief policy. Children are often seen as a reason for action to mitigate climate change, and have become a voice for this crisis, but they have virtually no visibility in government adaptation plans for multi-national environmental and human protection policies. How can children simultaneously have a voice in important matters, keep their “childhoods,” and be protected from disaster?

Bleeding for a Buck: Child Poverty and the Profitability of Pain in Mexico City

 Mexico’s Constitution of 1917 sought to empower the workforce and regulate child labor nationwide to encourage children to spend their time in school rather than at work. However, the phenomenon of street children, especially in Mexico City, persisted. They work selling produce, newspapers, or even street performing. This piece presents the child labor laws that came out of the Mexican Revolution in historical context, and examines how these are reflected in the growth of a child-based informal economy, specifically with regard to child street performers from 1990-2019. Child performance, in the street or elsewhere, goes deeper than just their need for money, as it operates around the concept that I call the cap on cuteness, which refers to the age limits of profitability of a child’s economic and behavioral innocence. Children in poverty grow dependent on public perception of their innocence in order to meet their survival needs.  As they grow up in the streets, a space that is seemingly more of an ‘adult’ space than one for children, their innocence fades fast, as they prematurely explore sex, drugs, and petty crime as a means for survival. Children end up breaking their bodies in order to preserve the pity people had once felt for them when they had their innocence, which demonstrates a failure on the part of the government, as it has enabled these children to be trapped in the cycles of poverty.

Drug Money and Disrupted Childhoods: A Look at Children's Involvement in Mexican Cartels

Drug trafficking syndicates in Mexico have grown in global prominence in the past few decades. Labeled as some of the largest and most dangerous criminal organizations in the world, cartels in Mexico have been engaged in conflicts between governments and communities that have shaped the landscape in a variety of ways. Cartels in Mexico have employed a number of tactics to control and manipulate both their operatives and those in their sphere of influence, including the use of children as operatives for drug trafficking and even armed soldiers. This piece examines the role of child operatives in the functions of Mexican crime syndicates. Cartels have been able to exploit their control and expand the spread of their propaganda in communities by recruiting children as young as 11. Children are profitable operatives for cartels because they are easily coerced and manipulated. Additionally, children receive lighter sentences than adults for the same crime if caught and charged. Both the Mexican and the U.S. governments have played a role in the development of cartel operations on both sides of the border. This piece examines the role of child operatives of cartels through news reports, journals, books, and pop culture representations.

The Question of Educational Justice for Mapuche Youth in Chile

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This project focuses on how Chile’s indigenous students can be better served by the national public education system today. With really no other viable option than to participate in the traditional Chilean education system, Mapuche students are forced through mechanisms of assimilation that are covert at some times and more obvious at others. This form of educational hegemony forces native students to see their personal culture and language as less valid than what is normally deemed as important academic curriculum. Even more tragically, fewer and fewer Mapuche children are learning their native language, as parents encourage Spanish as form of protection from existing ethnic prejudices. This interdisciplinary piece utilizes academic sources from History, Educational Theory, and Cultural Studies. It also draws evidence from Chilean educational statistics and documents from youth activists demanding educational equity. This project aims to shine a light on the ways that Chile's official national curriculum hurts indigenous students, and makes suggestions for ways to more meaningfully integrate indigenous students into mainstream education. Recommendations include better funded culturally-conscious teacher trainings, increased Mapuche teaching incentives, and more emphasis on native culture and language in the classroom.