Angolan Children's Experiences in Residential Centers: Displacement, Liminality, and Belonging

• In Event: Language and Liminality in the Schooling of Nondominant and Immigrant Youth

Abstract

This paper examines how two Angolan children talked about their displacement from home and having to live in Angola’s centros de acolhimento, residential centers that provide long-term shelter, academic support, and vocational training for children in need. Given that displacement reshapes one’s sense of self and belonging (Koven 2019; Fina 2018; Merino, Becerra, & Fina 2016), I first study the discursive strategies the children used to meaningfully structure their experiences both to themselves and to the institutional audience that heard their stories (Blommaert 2001). Second, I show how the two children negotiated their belonging within the residential centers while confronting everyday forms of marginalization that undermined their social and educational lives, gradually pushing them out of the institutions.

Theoretically, I ground my analysis in Victor Turner’s formulation of liminality. The children’s narratives of transitioning from home to centros de acolhimento reveal how youths cross physical/symbolic borders as well as articulate the state of being “between and betwixt” as they make their transitions. Residential centers themselves are liminal spaces that are neither permanent nor transient. They are neither fully a home nor a school—but involve many of the same educational processes as schools—where children grow up in an institutional setting. Although children in residential centers appear “situated,” my data suggest that their everyday lives are shaped by the liminal nature of the institution.

Methodologically, this paper draws on a year-long ethnographic research project I conducted between 2018 and 2019 in two residential centers, in the central highlands of Angola. Using interview data with a 14-year old boy who traveled with his mother from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Angola, I examine his perspectives on becoming an orphan after his mother’s sudden death and his adjustment to living in multiple residential centers afterward. Using recordings of a 13-year old girl discussing how she ran away from home and a roleplaying sequence where she imagines herself arguing with the social services, I examine how she discursively frames her decisions and new experiences in the center.

The data give an intimate portrait of the lives of children whose own stories are often overshadowed by institutional narratives. The paper illustrates how, despite being safe havens for living and learning, the residential centers have not created an equitable environment where displaced children can fully belong. The analysis also identifies possible reasons for why these children were institutional misfits compared to their peers who were successfully integrated.

I build upon studies on the importance of storytelling to children’s identities and representation (García-Sánchez 2016; García-Sánchez & Orellana 2006; Baquedano-López 1997; Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mintz 1990), as well as recent ethnographic work on migration (Heidbrink 2014; Terrio 2015; Statz 2016), orphanhood (Cheney 2017), and homelessness (Cox 2015) that reveals that extra-familial settings, such as centros de acolhimento, are important sites of socialization and education for non-dominant youth. My paper focuses on the children’s own perspectives on their social worlds, contributing to anthropological understandings of how children negotiate belonging and exclusion in liminal spaces.

Author

• Kristina João Nazimova, Temple University