Youth for sale: Reflections from the streets of Bogotá: 2011

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Breaking the silence...

After finishing a short-term consulting project on human trafficking and youth in the sex trade in Colombia, a student emailed me a link to this song by Calle 13 entitled 'Prepare (me) dinner'.... she mentioned that after transcribing the interviews from the project, she could not stop thinking of how these lyrics echo the life histories of many girls and boys we worked with.

Her email expressed the following:

[3:36 am]

--

Amy,

después de todo este proceso no dejo de pensar en esta canción, retrata muy bien las historias de todos estos hombres y mujeres.

El vídeo dice más de lo que yo puedo escribir, "No se cuentan los segundos se cuentan las historias"

"En esta vida me castigaste, me robaste tiempo, me re cagaste, mi culpabilidad es como una pecera vacía"

Violence touches us all...in distinct ways...it keeps us up at strange hours...makes it difficult to enjoy the holiday season...to be completely present in a family gathering...to swallow the carefully and lovingly prepared food at the dining table where I spent my childhood...on top of gut-wrenching sorrow and a stomach full of personal reflection...should I rest?...just a few days...or keep fighting the silence? Quiet times here in Connecticut by the fireplace... the silence is unbearable. The silence haunts me...disturbs my sleep through its screeching persistence...I try to drown it out with music...with more work...with more wine...this silence will not permit me to rest until we turn it around...flip silent acceptance of horrendous realities to project and operationalize grounded social change...stop trafficking through awareness before its tracks are forever ingrained in the memories of stolen youth...

Thursday, March 24, 2011

After the dissertation: Beyond the 'touch and go' model of fieldwork

Done with fieldwork? Finished your dissertation?

Turn your back and walk away from the community?...

Abandonment is standard for street girls...their mothers, fathers, siblings, or other loved ones often fail them...they are abused at a young age and left to fend for themselves...clients 'touch and go' everyday...

As activist-scholars, we should not fall into this same pattern. As I have argued elsewhere, what is known in the academic world as 'care ethics' depends on constancy...abandonment is fatal to the reproduction of caring relations in the field and to the future of an action-research program started, in my case, as the basis of doctoral research.

Traditional research programs in the human sciences are still bound within this 'touch and go' model...researchers 'penetrate' communities, immerse themselves and 'pull out' when the funding runs dry and when they've obtained what they need to advance in their careers.

Metaphorically speaking, scholars who follow such protocols are no better than brothel administrators or pimps that take what they need from street girls, exploit their image for personal benefit and move on to the next girl [project] when she has nothing more to offer...nothing left to explore...to showcase...

I urge activist-scholars to consider this metaphor when entering into a participatory action research endeavor...

PAR, for me, has only just begun...

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Participatory Action Research (PAR): ABOUT US

Images of a deviant, wasted generation of 'nobody’s children' have become the dominant representation of street youth in Latin America. Media representations sensationalize the drug-ridden, trash-laden places where these young people are often found, while international youth advocacy efforts rely on discourses of victimhood and helplessness in order to gain momentum.

Through the enactment of critical field praxis and care ethics, this research works against these disempowering and exclusionary discourses surrounding female youth in Latin American cities by allowing them to speak for themselves vis-à-vis participatory action research (PAR). The construction of research relations based on notions of interconnection, empathy, and mutual familiarity challenges the separation between researcher and participant and works to level the social field between these dichotomous categorizations that pre-define human relations and hierarchies in the research process. Thus, research ‘subjects’ become research actors and take ownership of the project, define its boundaries and design, and work to effect social change in their community and individual realities.

Using a geographic and gender-sensitive lens of analysis, thirty-three street girls provided insight into their everyday lives and spaces by leading a six-phase, eighteen-month PAR project that utilized a methodologically-innovative triangulation of participatory mapping methods, ethnography, and auto-photography to answer the following general research questions (that will necessarily change and take shape with the input of community members):

How do street girls construct geographies of belonging and affect within the larger backdrop of socio-spatial exclusion in the city? What places (both material and imaginative) shape street girls’ everyday lives and sense of belonging and exclusion? What social meanings are inscribed in these places? What specific activities, behaviors, and discourses render street girls out of place? What actions are necessary to make space for street girls in society and effect change in the community?

ATTEND OUR FIRST PUBLIC PRESENTATION AT UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES!

Research Funding

Pre-dissertation and research related to this project has been made possible by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, and the Florida International University Doctoral Evidence Acquisition Fellowship. The researcher is also working as a volunteer with the street outreach team of Fundación Social Fenix.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0903025.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Dissertation writing support has been granted by the AAUW - American Association of University Women.

"Advancing equity for women and girls through advocacy, education, philanthropy, and research"

Lyrics:

Boys and girls wanna hear a true story?
Saturday night I was at this real wild party,
they had the liquor overflowin' the cup,
about 5, 6 strippers tryin' to work for a buck,
and I took one girl outside wit me,
her name was Lonni, she went to Jr. High wit me,
I said, Why you up in there dancin' for cash?
I guess a whole alot's changed since I seen you last...

She said-

What would you do if your son was at home,
cryin' all alone on the bedroom floor
cuz he's hungry, and the only way to feed him
is to sleep with a man for a
little bit of money and his daddy's gone,
somewhere smokin' rock now,
in and out of lock down,
I ain't got a job now,
so for you this is just a good time but for me this is
what I call life...

Girl you ain't the only one wit a baby,
that's no excuse to be livin' all crazy,
then she looked me right square in the eye,
and said every day I wake up hopin' to die...

She said-

[ - ] I know about pain cuz,
me and my sister ran away so my daddy couldn't rape us,
before I was a teenager I done been through more [ - ],
that you can't even relate ta...

***

What would you do?
...Get up on my feet and let go of every excuse

What would you do?
...Cuz I wouldn't want my baby to go through what I went
through

What would you do?
...Get up on my feet and stop makin' tired excuses

What would you do?
...Girl I know if my mother can do it, baby you can do it

***

[Lyrics provided by Sing365.com]