Growing up in Guayaquil's Barrios: A Collaborative Ethnography with Children.

Abstract

My dissertation explores everyday life in Guayaquil’s shantytowns and the histories of these communities to better understand the impacts of social and spatial inequalities on families from the city’s poorest neighborhoods to the South, North, and East. I focus on children’s experiences growing up in these neighborhoods and how their understanding of family, poverty, violence, and city spaces influences the ways they internalize and imagine their own social positions and possibilities for their futures. My central research question asks: how do poor children growing up in Guayaquil’s barrios approach their everyday lives and how do their interactions and the relationships they develop with peers, family, and spaces across the city speak to larger societal issues on the production and regulation of childhood, race, and socio-spatial inequalities? To answer this question, my dissertation presents: 1) how the histories of the shantytowns reflect a history of Guayaquil’s socio-spatial segregation, repositioning ideas surrounding socioeconomic aspirations of poor urban communities; 2) how violence in children’s households influences their development and socialization, often leading girls, in particular, to form new families and to simultaneously navigate girlhood and motherhood; 3) how children and their mothers think about their childhood and how their everyday experiences influence the ways they imagine their futures; 4) how poor children think about and experience everyday life in their neighborhoods and across the city, especially in relation to racism and segregation. My dissertation reinvigorates theories of childhood, family, and poverty, highlighting how the experiences of poor children in the shantytowns and across Guayaquil overlap discussions of political economy, children’s rights, and legacies of colonialism. Through a presentation of new methods and methodologies for collaborative research agendas with children, this dissertation also deconstructs the colonialism that not only forms part of everyday life in Guayaquil, but that also forms part of ethnographic interventions.