INDIGENOUS CHILDREN IN LATIN AMERICA:
Stripped of their identity
Mercedes Roman, Defense for Children International.
I remember an 11-year-old indigenous girl from Ecuador. Her name was
Rosario, and she had come to Quito, the capital, from a nearby indigenous
community. Like many other children, she survived by selling flowers at
night in restaurants and bars, but we all knew that she had one foot in the
flower business and the other in prostitution.
Rosario had no parents and some times would return to her community with
money to help her grandmother. But she spent less and less time in her
community as her survival depended on living and working in the city.
According to UNICEF categories, Rosario was a "street child", a "working
child", an "abandoned child", a "child at risk", and a "child in especially
difficult circumstances". In the context of the Convention on the Rights of
the Child, Rosario was a child deprived of her rights to a family, to
education, to her basic needs, to development, to love and protection as a
child.
And like thousands of other children in Latin America, Rosario was also an
indigenous child in the process of losing that identity. Families who remain
in indigenous communities are able to pass on to their children a semblance
of cultural identity. But for children forced to leave their communities,
the loss of identity aggravates an already painful and debilitating
situation.
Emigrating to the cities, indigenous families live in extremely overcrowded
conditions, one single room for one or more families. They are the drop-outs
from school, not only because they need to work but also because they seem
to be aliens in a school that uses a language that is not theirs. Like
Rosario, these children face the shame, taunting and invisibility of a
racism that strips them not only of their colorful and distinctive clothes
but also of their identity and self-esteem.
Indigenous children in cities often work in hazardous conditions or survive
by begging or stealing. There is a high proportion of indigenous people in
prison, often because they are unable to defend themselves or find
"contacts" to help them. There is a popular saying in Ecuador: "The law is
only for those who wear ponchos."
For those children who remain in the rural areas, it is difficult to say if
the alternative is better or worse. They suffer more severe economic
hardships, and many children live with only their mother or other relatives
because men migrate to the cities for employment. Some children do not go to
school at all.
The education systems in rural and indigenous areas provide other examples
of discrimination: underpaid teachers; one-room primary schools with only
one teacher; schools, teachers and educational systems that do not respect
the language or traditions of these children.
Not only in education, nutrition indicators show the extreme marginalization
of indigenous children. They have the higest rates of malnutrition, lower
height and weight, greatest deficiency rates of vitamin A, iron and iodine
deficiencies. It is in indigenous communities that goitre, a result of
iodine deficiency, is most heavily concentrated.
In countries experiencing civil war, the indigenous children are the most
affected, most often the ones to lose their parents and become the
"non-accompanied children", "refugee children", "displaced children" or
"child soldiers". The street children of Guatemala City are frequently
orphans of war. Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, the armed insurgency
force in Peru, has put a special emphasis on recruiting indigenous children.
Although the UN has proclaimed 1993 the International Year for the World's
Indigenous People. But what will the year bring to indigenous children in
Latin America today, to those pushed to the outermost extremes in the
ongoing process of marginalization and stripped of their identity?
Global Child Health & News vol. 1 no.1, 1993
Articles originated by Global Child Health News & Review may be used without
permission, but acknowledgement would be appreciated.