For more than twenty years, Linda J. Seligmann walked the streets of Peru in city and countryside alike, talking to the women who work in the informal and open-air markets in Cuzco's Andean highlands. Her combination of ethnographic analysis, insightful and human vignettes, and superb photographs offers a humane yet incisive portrait of the women's lives against the backdrop of globalization and other powerful forces. In Peruvian Street Lives, Seligmann argues that the sometimes invisible and informal economic, social, and political networks market women establish may appear disorderly and chaotic, but in fact often keep dysfunctional economies and corrupt bureaucracies from utterly destroying the ability of citizens to survive from day to day. Seligmann asks why the constructive efforts of market women to make a living provoke such negative social perceptions from some members of Peruvian society, who see them as symbols and actual catalysts of social disorder. At the same time, Seligmann shows how market women eke out a living, combat discrimination, and transgress racial and gender ideologies within the rich and expressive cultural traditions they have developed.

In Peruvian Lives across Borders, M. Cristina Alcalde examines the evolution of belonging and the making of home among middle- and upper-class Peruvians in Peru, the United States, Canada, and Germany. Alcalde draws on interviews, surveys, participant observation, and textual analysis to argue that to belong is to exclude. To that end, transnational Peruvians engage in both subtle and direct policing along the borders of belonging. These acts allow them to claim and maintain the social status they enjoyed in their homeland even as they profess their openness and tolerance. Alcalde details these processes and their origins in Peru's gender, racial, and class hierarchies. As she shows, the idea of return—whether desired or rejected, imagined or physical—spurs constructions of Peruvianness, belonging, and home. Deeply researched and theoretically daring, Peruvian Lives across Borders answers fascinating questions about an understudied group of migrants.

Economic Life of Mexican Beach Vendors: Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, and Cabo San Lucas is based on interviews with 82 men and 84 women who vend their wares on beaches in three Mexican tourist centers. Assuming that some people may actively choose self-employment in the informal or semi-informal economy, the employment and educational aspirations of the vendors and their levels of satisfaction with their work are explored. Most of the vendors had other family members who were also vendors, and 75 (45.2 percent) had 5 or more family members who vended, most usually on Mexican beaches. The vendors are aware of the forces of globalization (though they do not express these forces in those words), as revealed by their responses to questions as to how the current world economic recession has affected them. The beach vendors live in essentially segregated neighborhoods that can be considered apartheid-like, far from the tourist zones. Most of the vendors or their parents are rural-to-urban migrants and cross ethnic, linguistic, and economic borders as they migrate to and work in what have been called transnational social spaces. Of the vendors interviewed, 82 (49.4 percent) speak an indigenous language, and of these, 60 (73.2 percent) speak Nahuatl. The majority are from the state of Guerrero, but there were also Zapotec-speakers from Oaxaca. Both indigenous and non-indigenous women take part in beach vending. They are often wives, daughters, or sisters of male beach vendors, and they may be single, married, living in free union, or widowed. Their income is often of central importance to the household economy. This monograph aims to bring their stories to tourists and to scholars and students of tourism development and /or the informal or semi-informal economy in Mexican tourist centers.

This brief studies the phenomenon of street children in two cities in Peru. It looks at some of the conceptual issues and, after analysing why children are in the street and what behaviour and which aspirations they exhibit, deals with the policy issues and lessons to be learned. This brief investigates when and why the transition from children on the street (street-working children) to children of the street (street living children) takes place and elucidates how they survive. It explains the fluidity and the risks involved in any type of child street life.

Palomitáy is an orphanage in highland Peru that provides a home for unmarried mothers as young as twelve years old. In their ordinary lives, these young women encounter diverse social expectations and face moral dilemmas. They endeavor to create a ‘good life’ for themselves and their children in a context complicated by competing demands, economic uncertainties, and structured relations of power. Drawing on a year of qualitative on-site research, Krista E. Van Vleet offers a rich ethnography of Palomitáy's young women. She pays particular attention to the moral entanglements that emerge via people's efforts to provide care amid the inequalities and insecurities of today's Peru. State and nonstate participants involved in the women's intimate lives influence how the women see themselves as mothers, students, and citizens. Both deserving of care and responsible for caring for others, the young women must navigate practices interwoven with a range of a racial, gendered, and class hierarchies. Groundbreaking and original, Hierarchies of Care highlights the moral engagement of young women seeking to understand themselves and their place in society in the presence of circumstances that are both precarious and full of hope.

This dissertation examines the contradictory and complementary ways in which both neoliberal development and children's rights legislation shape national development and child poverty in Lima and Cusco, Perú. It uses childhood as a lens through which to more critically analyze struggle over meanings of development, poverty and appropriate uses of public space, looking at the ways in which children's rights and neoliberalism shape the regulation of poor children through a number of spaces, including social services, urban space, and street children's everyday lives. The project is based on 14 months of in-depth ethnographic research, participant observation and interviews with street children, as well as conversations with policy makers, educators, government officials and social workers. My research design was specifically concerned with both recognizing children as active producers of knowledge and with connecting their everyday experiences with broader systemic changes and processes of development and governance. Rather than focusing on either a macro-scale or a more localized analysis, it links the subjectivity of the poor both with political-economic shifts and discourses and with identity projects. By focusing on street children's everyday lives, this dissertation combines work on the governance of poverty, most of which has remained focused on the global north, with insights from critical development scholars regarding a need for a historical and sociopolitical account of poverty to actively politicize the ways in which Peruvian street children negotiate control, care and survival. Despite beliefs that children are outside of politics, childhoods play important roles in shaping national development and reproducing particular value systems. This dissertation considers how linking dominant development ideologies with the language of children's rights serves to mitigate critiques that development negatively affects the poor, reinforcing dominant development ideologies by allowing them to be packaged in a more socially acceptable way. It analyzes in what ways children's rights discourse provides moral justification for international intervention and the increased regulation of childhood based on Western models. In doing so, it contributes to critical poverty and development studies by linking narratives of development, childhood and rights with the maintenance of poverty. However, rights themselves are subject to competing interpretations and have also provided an important organizing tool for local social movements, such as Peru's child workers' movement. Additionally, children themselves are not simply passive in the face of increased state intervention. They `manage' their poverty in varied and often creative ways, engaging in spatial strategies to evade police and social workers' efforts to regulate their behavior, creating work opportunities for themselves in the street, and in some cases, even playing up their own poverty and vulnerability in order to more successfully street vend. There is a danger, however, in celebrating all acts of survival as resistance. Instead, many forms of children's agency represent contradictory resistance; while in some ways they create more opportunities for themselves or avoid increased state regulation their actions often lead to further marginalization or work to exclude them in other ways. This necessitates both a more nuanced analysis of resistance as well as a need to more closely examine the indicators being used to measure international development and urban 'revitalization'. My project concludes with an in-depth discussion of how feminist care ethics can inform more inclusive rights-based approaches to development.