because they mirror the literature that points to one type of work experience as normative in the United States while the other is not.13 It is more acceptable when children work to gain experience and earn a little bit of pocket money and less so when they do it to help with the family’s economic survival. In the United States, the association of children and work has been paradoxical since the turn of the twentieth century. Sociologist Viviana Zelizer analyzed the transformation of childhood that took place in the United States between 1870 and 1930.14 She used the term useful child to refer to the nineteenth-century child who actively contributed to the family’s economic survival through labor.15 She notes the emergence in the twentieth century of the productively “useless” yet emotionally “priceless” child.16 The dominant view is that school and work are antithetical spheres. The notion of childhood that prevails in most postindustrial societies is that children must be educated, “developed,” and “raised.”17 You might recall my student James and his mother, and how uncomfortable she felt receiving financial help from her son, even though he was already a young adult. In fact, children’s protected, sacred status defines modernity, an era characteristic of order and structure and a movement away from tradition.18 As one scholar has observed, “The dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work is considered a yardstick of modernity.”19
However, divergent meanings of childhood also coexist in a given time period and in the same location.20 Academic researchers confirm this observation. Antonella Invernizzi found that in Andean rural communities in Peru, the “work done by children is much valued and seen as a means of taking an active part in family and community life.”21 In contrast, the middle classes in the urban regions “see the child’s daily life as being geared exclusively to education and play.”22 Similar to what Invernizzi found in Peru, anthropologist Tobias Hecht distinguishes between two ways of experiencing childhood in northeastern Brazil. He refers to children who do not work as having “nurtured childhoods” of protected freedom and play. In contrast, poor children, who are expected to work from an early age and contribute to the production and income of the household, experience “nurturing childhoods.”23 Nurturing childhoods are common in developing nations like Brazil, Peru, and México, but they are supposed to be anomalies in postindustrial societies such as the United States,24 where children are still defined as “emotionally priceless” and a child is expected to have a nurtured childhood.25 Today, the general consensus is that in the United States, children and teens require parental protection and economic support, and if children do work, the normative view is that it should be for their own pocket money or savings and not to help support the family.26 What happens, however, when many of us cannot meet these normative childhood standards?
The reality is that these normative childhood standards have been difficult to uphold for struggling American families as well. History shows us that in times of economic crisis, American children also work with la familia. The Great Depression of 1929 is a quintessential example of this paradox. Sociologist Glen H. Elder Jr. shows that despite the social expectation that American fathers should be the sole breadwinners, extreme unemployment rates during the Great Depression made it difficult for most men to uphold this role. This reality often had repercussions for the rest of the family, as wives and children worked outside the home to help make ends meet. In his book Children of the Great Depression, Elder sheds light on how American children juggled school and part-time jobs such as “newspaper carrier, baby sitter, janitorial assistance, store clerk, and delivery agent.”27 The wages for these types of work were low, but the extra earnings helped supplement the family income.28 Since then, some children in the United States have continued to do work outside the home.
There are classic examples everywhere you look. For example, Shirley Temple, Elizabeth Taylor, Drew Barrymore, the Jacksons, and Selena Gomez are iconic celebrities of different generations, but they are also popular examples of child workers. Today, major television networks such as the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Sprout, and PBS provide entertainment not only for children, but almost strictly by children as the main actors, whereas adults merely appear in the periphery of certain shows.29
As a polar opposite, we can also find other not so visible examples of child workers. The literature on the ethnic economy has shed light on the experience of children in businesses owned by ethnic minorities. The majority of these studies have focused on the role of children in Korean and Chinese family-owned businesses in the formal economy, such as restaurants, Laundromats, and liquor stores.30 In contrast to Korean and Chinese immigrants that have high rates of business ownership and are hailed as entrepreneurially oriented groups, other immigrant groups, such as Mexicans, exhibit low levels of entrepreneurship in the United States.31
Self-employment has been an important avenue for the economic advancement of immigrant groups such as Cubans and Koreans and has been a key factor in the educational success of the second generation.32 Current studies reveal that family-owned businesses can serve as springboards for the children of Mexican immigrants as they have for Koreans and for immigrants in the past—including Italians, Jews, Asian Indians, and Middle Easterners.33 However, as sociologist Zulema Valdez points out in her book The New Entrepreneurs, it is not at all clear whether ethnic entrepreneurship among disadvantaged Mexican-origin immigrant parents provides a similar prospect of economic mobility and success among their second-generation children.
When compared to the Chinese and Korean children of quintessential ethnic entrepreneurs, the Latinx children in this study are at a disadvantage because their parents are more likely to experience a negative reception within the larger society and a vulnerable social location associated with lower levels of education, undocumented status, low English language proficiency and high poverty rates. Operating under these intersecting disadvantages, many first-generation Latinx immigrants and some of their children have turned to street vending as an economic strategy. The Latinx children in this study are intricately involved in their families’ street vending businesses, performing work on the street that has been deemed inappropriate or dangerous for most children. According to Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht’s study on the use of Los Angeles sidewalks, “children were common participants in sidewalk activities, but their presence became an indicator of disorder and neglect, which allowed the state to intervene in their care.”34 The common opinion was, and is still today, that the streets are not the proper place for children. However, the children in this study work in these highly visible spaces and are exposed to customers, urban traffic, and government officials, such as the police, health inspectors, and social workers, and they sometimes confront anti-immigrant xenophobia and racism. So, what can we learn from street vending Latinx families?
Mutually Supportive Children and Parents
I invite the reader to understand the children in this book and their family work dynamics beyond static idealized notions of what childhood and families—specifically, immigrant families—should be. This study challenges the dualistic view of children as economically useful or emotionally priceless or as experiencing “nurturing” or “nurtured” childhoods. The childhood period of the children in this book is fluid, situational, and context-based. The children in this book are in the intersection of these two polarized forms of childhood ideals and are mutually protective and supportive. The children’s role in the family shifts depending on gender, age, need within the family, and the needs of children themselves. These families remind us that childhood is socially and culturally constructed and its definition continues to vary not only over time and geographical location, but also within one time and in one geographical location.35
Childhood is not static; it is constantly challenged, renegotiated, and transformed as structural, economic, and familial needs also change. Let us recall my classroom experience once more, where in one time and place, my students shared with each other different types of childhood work experiences. Should I have said to my students that one childhood upbringing was better than the other? Of course not. Rather, this exercise helps us understand how an intersectionality perspective is useful to seeing how different aspects of our identities, such as our race, class, and gender, can take greater or lesser salience in different contexts, situations, activities, relationships, and even stages of our lives.
For
