Teachers, Mothers, or Compañeros: Gender, Power, and Intergenerational Relationships in Peru’s Movement of Working Children

• In Event: 3251 - Children and Youth, Power, and Culture: Relationships to Power in a Vulnerable World

Abstract

Building alliances across different identity categories has been an important topic of intellectual and political concern for feminist theorists, social movement scholars, and community activists. However, a robust body of literature on intergenerational relationships within social movements is only just beginning to emerge. This paper adds to the growing conversation on age-based power within social movements by exploring how intergenerational political relationships are imagined and practiced by participants in the Peruvian movement of working children, a movement with a forty-year history of centering children’s leadership and pursuing horizontal, egalitarian relationships between adults and children. Drawing on ethnographic participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper explores how different adults navigate this role, understanding it as simultaneously pedagogical, personal, and political. Focusing especially on the dynamic tension between being educators and practicing horizontalism, I analyze three different approaches to the role of the adult colaborador. I highlight how gender and age dynamics intersect and significantly shape the practice of creating non-hierarchical (or less-hierarchical) intergenerational relationships within social movements.

Author

• Jessica Karen Taft, University of California-Santa Cruz