Working Children and Global Processes

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DOI: 10.1177/0907568206066356 2006; 13; 365 Childhood

Stuart Aitken, Silvia López Estrada, Joel Jennings and Lina María Aguirre Reproducing Life And Labor: Global processes and working children in Tijuana, Mexico

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Evoking processes of globalization as part of an analysis or as an explana-tion for anything is a risky business these days (Rizzini and Bush, 2002). Atone level, it may divert attention from the important task of eradicating theabuse and oppression of children, and yet we believe that solutions requirean understanding of the broader contexts from which the lives of childrenare elaborated. Further, we believe that many contexts of child abuse andoppression arise from a connected world of flexible capital and instanta-neous market adjustments. Local geographies are increasingly important forunderstanding these contexts of children’s well-being, and children’s workfigures hugely in these contexts. Certainly, one of the most egregious formsof exploitation is to build the values of goods on the bodies and spirits ofyoung people. And yet, we believe that ‘child labor’ is too often raised as ascapegoat, and advocating its wholesale ban is risky in terms of unintended

REPRODUCING LIFE AND LABORGlobal processes and working children in

Tijuana, Mexico

STUART AITKENSan Diego State University SILVIA LÓPEZ ESTRADA

El Colegio de la Frontera Norte(COLEF), TijuanaJOEL JENNINGS

University of CambridgeLINA MARÍA AGUIRRE

El Colegio de la Frontera Norte(COLEF), Tijuana

Key words: children’s work, globalization, local

geographies, Tijuana

Mailing address:Stuart C. Aitken, Professor

Director, Center for InterdisciplinaryStudies of Youth and Space (ISYS),

Department of Geography, 5500Campanile Drive, San Diego State

University, San Diego,CA 92182-4493, USA.

[email: [email protected]]

Childhood Copyright © 2006SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks

and New Delhi, Vol 13(3): 365–387.www.sagepublications.com

10.1177/0907568206066356

The issue of child labor continues to challenge

thinking on the nature of work, play, schooling and

apprenticeship. New wisdom from some

contemporary academic writing places children

closer to the center of our understanding of

consumption, production and reproduction, and at

the heart of inequities generated by globalization.

Child labor comes in many forms and intersects

with local life and global processes in a myriad of

ways. The child laborers in this study work as

‘volunteer’ checkout packers in Tijuana

supermarkets. By highlighting aspects of their

complex daily lives, this article develops new ways

of thinking about children’s work socially and

spatially, while acknowledging the global contexts

of this work.



consequences when policies are applied without attention to context andlocal complexities.

This article elaborates aspects of the contexts and local complexities ofthe lives of working children in Tijuana, Mexico. Our intent is to broadenthe discussion of children’s work to encompass the complexities of localgeographies that embrace among other things education and family changein a rapidly transforming regional economy. The focus is on how childrenunder the legal working age learn to labor as checkout baggers within thecontext of a city tied into circuits of global labor that do not recognize offi-cially their work as labor. Forty years ago there was no globally focusedmaquiladora (make-up/assembly) industry in Tijuana (Carrillo andHernández, 1986), and 20 years ago the city had no supermarkets.1

Neighborhood mercados, a variety of specialized stores and trips to SanDiego satisfied most people’s consumption needs. Today there are more than65 Tijuana supermarkets engaged in a government-sponsored program thatenlists the ‘volunteer’ help of children between 9 and 14 years as losempacadores (checkout packers). The children are not paid, but on averagethey earn over twice the minimum wage in tips. This article highlightsaspects of the stories of these young men and women, with an emphasis onthe changing family and labor contexts in Mexico, and the domestic andworkplace responsibilities borne by children. We interviewed 48 childreneither in focus groups or one-on-one and asked them to talk about what theydid at home and at work.

The article begins with our general argument for placing children atthe heart of globalization. This is followed by a discussion of the context ofMexican child labor broadly and then, specifically, with a focus on theTijuana supermarket program. We end with a return to considering thesupermarket packers as global workers.

Globalization and children’s work

A focus on how children learn to labor highlights an important part of socialreproduction and is key to understanding current processes of globalization.And yet, to date, social reproduction remains a neglected aspect of global-ization debates (Katz, 2001, 2004).2 For the most part, discussions aboutglobalization focus upon productive, political and cultural dimensions withlittle consideration of reproduction. Reproduction is not just about biologicalreproduction; it is also about the daily health and welfare of people. Andsocial reproduction is in large part about the differentiation and skill of alabor force. Children’s geographies are integrally linked to social reproduc-tion but the places and practices of children’s everyday lives are rarely con-sidered a dynamic context for understanding historical change, geographicvariation and social differentation (Aitken, 2004). Caught up in a web of

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flexible accumulation with the associated local economic uncertainty of theglobal marketplace, and attendant unemployment and decreasing public ser-vices, the lives of children are drastically affected. Marx (1976: 372–3)argued that children’s and women’s labor is a large part of incipient capital-ism in any particular place because it is flexible, cheap and underminesmen’s labor. In noting this, Katz (2004: 143) goes on to suggest that:

Neither history, nor geography seems to have altered this situation. While thecontinued importance of child labor in urban and industrial areas of the ‘thirdworld’ is well recognized, . . . research [indicates] that capitalist ‘development’[brings] about an intensification and expansion of children’s work.

We show in this article how true this is of Tijuana’s supermarket pack-ers, and how it is derived in a quintessentially geographic way that accountsfor the intertwined connections between the local and the global. This inten-sification and expansion of work during childhood and adolescence isimportant because it is during these formative years that the principles ofsociety are mapped onto the consciousness and unconsciousness (seeVygotsky, 1987). Concomitantly, this is also when some portion of socialreproduction is contested and negotiated in all spheres of children’s lives(see Aitken, 2001).

Our assumption is that interpretative lenses focusing simultaneouslyon local and global representations and lived experiences enable a relativelycomprehensive analysis. For social scientists, this focus is an importantextension of earlier work on the place of children and spaces of childhood(see Aitken, 1994, 2001; Matthews and Smith, 2000). By taking thislocal/global perspective, traditional notions of childhood as a separate devel-opmental and social class are radically undermined, leaving views that val-orize difference. A focus on difference produces work that is about the play,education and the labor practices of young people (Hyams, 2000), their fam-ilies and communities (Aitken, 1998; Bauder, 2001), and the institutions thatshape and are shaped by their lives (Fielding, 2000). Sassen (2003: 3) pointsout that studying the global ‘entails not only a focus on that which is explic-itly global in scale, but also a focus on locally scaled practices and condi-tions . . . and a focus on the multiplication of cross border connectionsamong various localities’. With the increasing academic concern about themachinations of globalization, an understanding of local childhoods requiresa focus on local areas.

In sum, the implications for children of current globalization suggest,first, a focus on the transformation of children and their labor as familial,community and governmental institutions change and, second, a focus on theways that children are seen as flexible in the ways they learn to labor. Fromthis, a focus on where reproduction is constructed suggests that childhood isdifferentiated not only through time but also between places.

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Learning to labor in Mexico

The place of children in Tijuana is complicated by a border that is witness-ing a realignment of international and domestic politics. The culture of thisborderland/la frontera is inevitably and intimately woven into this fabric ofchange. In understanding the contexts of working children aged between 8and 14 in Tijuana it is vital to consider the impermeability of the border,migration, changing consumption patterns, labor opportunities and themaquiladora industries that currently make up a substantial part of the area’seconomy. Global restructuring processes that undergird changes in thesespecific economic sectors force many children in Tijuana out of educationalinstitutions, onto streets and into work. In attempts to offset the worst of thisexploitation in a time of rapid economic restructuring, government officialsin Tijuana set up programs to protect young people. Before discussingspecifics of children’s labor under one of these programs, we briefly outlinethe changing contexts through which children in Mexico learn to labor.

In Mexico, as elsewhere, there is very little agreement on what consti-tutes child labor. Influential international institutions such as theInternational Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Programmeon the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) articulate a distinction betweenchild work and child labor in order to classify what is harmful:

‘Economic activity’ is a broad concept that encompasses most productive activi-ties undertaken by children, whether for the market or not, paid or unpaid, for afew hours or full time, on a casual or regular basis, legal or illegal; it excludeschores undertaken in the child’s own household and schooling. To be countedas economically active, a child must have worked for at least one hour on anyday during a seven-day reference period. ‘Economically active’ children is astatistical, rather than a legal, definition. It is not the same as the ‘child labor’referred to with regard to abolition. (ILO, 2002)

This argument comes from Fyfe (1993: 4), whose definition of child laborpermeates much of the ILO literature. He argues that child labor is definedas work that impairs the health and development of children whereas childwork constitutes all work that detracts from the ‘essential activities of chil-dren, namely leisure, play and education’. Both, he implies, are detrimentalto the development of children and the concomitant development of a nation.With a cost/benefit analysis using their own surveys and those conducted bythe World Bank, a recent IPEC (2004) report argues that eliminating childlabor and replacing it with education will result in a 22.2 percent net eco-nomic benefit globally by 2020, as much as a 54 percent net economic bene-fit to Sub-Saharan Africa, a 9 percent benefit for Latin America and a 5.1percent benefit for transitional countries such as Mexico. IPEC’s consum-mate focus is that the elimination of child labor and its replacement by uni-versal education will yield enormous economic benefits to countries of theglobal South in addition to other ‘social and intrinsic benefits’ (IPEC, 2004:4). Our Mexican study joins those of Katz (2004) in Sudan, Punch (2004) in

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Bolivia and Nieuwenhuys (1994) in India to suggest that child labor is com-plexly contextualized in local areas to the extent that its replacement with‘universal education’ would be problematic.

For the most part of last century, the vast majority of children inMexico learned to labor through the family and this ‘local education’, whichbegan at an early age, was mixed with play and leisure. Marguerite Bey(2003: 290) points out that rural Mexican children today continue to learn bycopying their parents: ‘Girls do this by looking after their younger brothersand sisters, boys by working in the fields with tools scaled down to theirsize’. On this fabric of social reproduction, a school-based universal educa-tion imposes a rhythm that is incompatible with rural activities. Children’swork is indelibly linked to family reproductive strategies. In addition, Bey(2003: 296) points out that in rural Mexican society young children deriveconsiderable pride and well-being from working alongside their parents or inother jobs offered by the community.

The rural Mexican context of child labor brings to light the problemat-ic nature of many international definitions which come from countries of theminority global North.3 These definitions establish universal standards forlocal geographies. The ILO (2002) and IPEC (2004) are intent upon eradi-cating the worst forms of child labor, defined in part as ‘labor performed bya child who is under a minimum age specified in national legislation for thatkind of work’. And while most countries, including Mexico, define the mini-mum age for work as under 15 years of age, of the 245 million child laborersglobally, the majority (180 million) are aged between 4 and 15. For example,in San Quintín, a rural community south of Tijuana, 24.6 percent of the childworkers questioned began work between 5 and 9 years old, and the rest(75.3 percent) started between 10 and 14 years (UNICEF, 1994). Globally,Mexico has the highest rates of child agricultural labor. And, importantly,agricultural work here differs from other places in the world because itremains a family affair (Bey, 2003). This rural context has implications forurban young people whose parents learned to labor in the fields.

In a crude characterization of the global economic map, Mexico mighttake its place among what Ruddick (2003: 339) calls the ‘convergence club’of countries whose GDP per capita is converging on those of the minorityglobal North. These are nations with sufficient capital and human resourcesto take advantage of changes in technology and the restructuring of labor.This convergence in Mexico is limited to certain regions, including the bor-der with the US, and gives rise to what Perez-Bustillo and Cervantes (1997)call ‘growth without equity’ (cited in Ruddick, 2003). For Mexico, thisregional growth has resulted in a significant movement of people to urbanareas and to the northern frontera. As a consequence, in Tijuana today, youthand childhood is being restructured in distinct ways. Prior to this era of con-vergence, Mexican rural and urban children were part of the home and fami-ly for most of their earlier years, and it is in this environment that they


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learned to labor. Today, in an increasingly urban Mexico, childhood is cate-gorized as a stage strongly determined by institutionalized, universal educa-tion.

Formal education transforms children’s activities within the family,structuring their lives differently in time and space. Outside the family anddomestic responsibilities, work joins schools as part of children’s increasing-ly complex daily round. Studies at the national level suggest that in the lastdecades many Mexican children are entering the labor market without leav-ing school (Camarena, 2000; Giorguli, 2002; Mier y Terán and Rabell,2000). For instance, Mier y Terán and Rabell (2000) state that in the 1980sthe combination of work and education was raised and initiated at earlieryears; the percentage of youth that work increased from 16 percent at 15years old to 27 percent at 16 years old. Children’s labor is still part of a col-lective family strategy of income generation, in order for families to makeends meet, but increasingly it is monitored by welfare-based governmentinstitutions. This monitoring suggests that working children often have alower school attainment than those children who do not work (Taracena,2003). In addition, the kind of work that is afforded young people is usuallyflexible, and as a consequence the labor of young people is increasinglythought of as surplus. Although it is impossible to delineate direct relation-ships, we suggest that it is at the confluence of these global economic, politi-cal and cultural projects that notions of childhood and youth are trans-formed.

Family interventions and children’s workIn studies on family and work in Mexico, households are conceived as siteswhere individuals organize, in harmony or conflict, activities needed forsocial reproduction (García et al., 1982). Although most of the literature iscritical about traditional concepts of Mexican family home–work relations, itrecognizes that much of the complexity of family arrangements is predicatedupon complex internal differences among members and differential powerrelations between men, women and children (Del Castillo, 1993; Salles andTuirán, 1998). And, from this perspective, the notion of the family-home as aplace for children’s socialization is prevalent. Gendered and generationallyassigned family roles in Mexico suggest traditional divisions of labor(García and Oliveira, 1999; Selby, 1994).

The separation of education and play from the familial context wasnever appropriate for Mexico, and yet dependency found form when chil-dren’s productive and reproductive activities were monitored by familymembers (Del Castillo, 1993; Salles and Tuirán, 1998; Schiavoni, 1998;Sheridan, 1991; Stromkist, 1998). Unfortunately, this unique notion ofdependency fails in contemporary Mexican contexts with the rise of chil-dren’s work beyond familial spaces. Children continue to work in order tocontribute to their family’s economy but Mexican families are increasingly

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less likely to monitor the ways their children learn to labor because childrenincreasingly divide the day among different spaces and away from otherfamily members. While immigrant parents from rural areas learned to laboraround family members, their urban children are learning to labor under theeye of educational and welfare institutions.

State interventions and children’s voluntary laborThe Paidimeta Program (Program of Support for the Full Development ofChildren Packers at Tijuana’s Supermarkets) represents a state interventionfor regulating children’s work as packers in Tijuana’s supermarkets. The pro-gram intends to contribute to children’s formación (translated astraining/integration skills) both as workers and as family members. In prepa-ration for their future integration to the labor force, ‘children learn a cultureof work discipline, a responsible management of money’. As family mem-bers, the ‘program promotes children dedication to study, children’s personalachievement, family integration, and children’s non-participation in antiso-cial activities’ (Paidimeta documentation, 2002). The latter part of the intentspeaks to the older Mexican discourse described earlier that honors the inter-vention of families in how children learn to labor. It also elaborates concernsof the family welfare system that children are schooled in the dangers ofantisocial activities with specific reference to drugs and prostitution.4

The first part of Paidimeta’s intent is to teach work ethics among thepackers. The focus on producing good workers is elaborated through theLabor Ministry’s desire not only to protect the packers but also to train themfor future integration into the labor market. The Labor Ministry and thesupermarket chains consider the children as ‘volunteers’ who are learningrequisite skills. This intent suggests a deliberate move by government insti-tutions to wrestle away from families the function of labor formación.

The Paidimeta program is formulated to not oppose federal labor regu-lations. In Mexico, Federal Labor Law Article 22 prohibits the use of chil-dren’s labor if they are under 14 years old, and if they are older than 16 buthave not completed elementary school. In addition, Article 23 establishesthat children between 14 and 16 years old require their parents’ permissionto work (these young people may be paid their salary directly). According tothe Paidimeta program, children from 9 to 14 years old can participate aspackers in supermarkets only as volunteers. In practice, we found some chil-dren packers as young as 8 years old. That said, supermarkets took care tonot allow children older than 14 to participate as packers, because to do sorequires recognition of their labor rights; including a regular salary, benefitsand the right to join a union. The only health benefit for packers that thePaidimeta program insists upon is emergency medical aid. Supermarket per-sonnel offices constantly check that children are under 14 years old, andwhen children reach this age they are let go.

Other program rules are broken constantly. While the program estab-


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lishes that children cannot work more than 4 hours a day, and no more than 6days per week on a schedule from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night, infieldwork we found that some children work 6 to 8 hours, and often until10:00 at night. According to program rules, the night shift is allowed forchildren if their parents agree to pick them up from the supermarket.

The dual intentions of the Paidimeta program focus on family andwork ethics, intimating a coalescence of older and modern notions of learn-ing to labor, and they join together to suggest formación integral, a trainingthat is, as the literal translation suggests, ‘essential and whole’. There is animportant geography to this integration that alludes to global processes andlocal commitments.

Children’s formación integral

The supermarkets were unwilling to give us access to their child packers, sowe began contacting them through their schools and, on one occasion,through a doctor’s office.5 As the project progressed, we used snowball tech-niques to gain further access. We were successful in interviewing childrenemployed in both large and smaller supermarket chains. Between Januaryand December 2004, we conducted in-depth interviews with 30 young menand women and, in addition, we ran three focus groups of between five andeight packers, spending the day with them and having them take part ingames and drawing. We asked them to draw sketches of their neighborhoodsand their work at the supermarkets. Our questions focused on the children’slocal geographies and their responsibilities at home, at school and at work.Sometimes we interviewed children at their schools or at their homes. Wheninvited, we visited the homes of the children and met with siblings, parents,aunts and uncles. We also interviewed teachers and youth-oriented NGOworkers as opportunities arose. The data were analyzed using NVivo, whichenabled simultaneous management and interpretation of government docu-mentation, transcribed interviews, maps and the children’s drawings (Figure1). The software aided interpretation of the data by allowing documentationof emerging and recurring themes (called ‘nodes’) through on-screen codingand data exploration capacities (called ‘model explorer’). We used the pro-gram to facilitate the development of themes that elaborated local geogra-phies.

The French social scientist Michel Bonnet noted in 1999 that ‘oneshouldn’t be hypnotised by the problem of child labour, but instead shouldopen one’s eyes and ears to working children and listen to what they have tosay to us’ (quoted in Liebel, 2003: 265). In what follows, we use the words(translated directly) and the images of the child packers to help illustrate ourdiscussion.6 Where appropriate, we make our arguments through retelling thestories of the child packers and their families as we observed them and as we

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heard them through the interviews and focus groups. In other cases, wefocus on the themes that arose from a majority of the packers and illustratethese themes through quotes from individual children.

Trials by space at home and in the communityChildren packers live at the interplay between home, school and work, andas social actors they transform these different spaces, appropriating them bytheir social practices, and many times resisting and challenging definitionsof child, childhood, work and worker (Figure 2). With the intensification ofchildren’s daily round comes a tighter packing of daily time budgets.Packers also experience an expansion of their local geography beyond theconfines of family and neighborhood/colonia. Drawing on the work ofFrench philosopher Henri Lefebvre, we suggest that these children are in theprocess of going through a ‘trial by space’, the endpoint of which means notjust social acknowledgment but also spatial reification; that is rights andacknowledgment in space. The trial is ‘a space, on a world-wide scale,[where] each idea of “value” acquires or loses its distinctiveness throughconfrontation with other values and ideas it encounters there . . . groups,


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Figure 1 Screen shot of NVivo analysis of a focus group with child packers includingtranscribed interviews, pictures and the model explorer that brings them together and

facilitates interpretation



classes or factions cannot constitute themselves . . . as “subjects” unless theygenerate (or produce) a space’ (LeFebvre, 1991: 416). The child packers’trial by space is not just about overcoming physical distance and time con-straints in their daily rounds, it is about resisting and reworking their place insociety.

As noted earlier, in Latin American countries the economic role ofchildren within the family is not new. With global restructuring and econom-ic recession, children are increasingly participating in the labor force, mostlyin agriculture in rural areas, and in the so-called informal economy in citieslike Tijuana. In our study, most child packers work in order to contribute tothe family income, and they give their tips to their mothers, who are usuallyconsidered the family’s manager.

Three children work as packers in Pedro’s family. His mother, Maria,

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Figure 2 Intensification of the daily round between school, home and work in anexpanded local geography facilitated through calafias (minibus taxis)



is a single parent earning 650 pesos a week working full-time at a localmaquiladora factory.

Interviewer: Pedro, on average how much you earn a week?Pedro: Umm . . . 800 pesos [US$80] a week!Interviewer: And what do you do with the money that you earn?Pedro: Well, I give it to my mother.Interviewer: Do you give her all or do you keep a part?Pedro: Well . . . I keep some.Interviewer: What do you do with the money that you keep?Pedro: I spend it on cards.Interviewer: Which ones are your favorites?Pedro: I like the DragónBall Z ones!

DragónBall Z ties Pedro expansively to larger global circuits of youth con-sumption and he is also intensely connected to his local environmentthrough the complex local transit circuits that he negotiates through his dailyround (see Figures 2 and 3):

Interviewer: When you start your day do you go to school first or work?Pedro: I go to work first from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 and then I go to school whichstarts at 1:15 and I get out of school at 7:20 p.m.Interviewer: Good! How do you go to work and school?Pedro: Well I take the calafia [minibus] then I walk a little bit . . . like a blockand then I when I get off from work I walk again a block, take the calafia and


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Figure 3 This view from Pedro’s house suggests the difficulty of the terrain in atypical colonia. (Source: S. Aitken)



when I get out of school I go take the calafia and walk to my house . . . about ablock . . .Interviewer: How long does it takes to go from your work to school?Pedro: Like 20 minutes and then from my school to my house about 35–40minutes.

Children’s work in the supermarket often obtains an expansive mobili-ty and a chance to move beyond the colonia and the community. This expan-sion is not only important in the global commodity context of, for example,DragónBall Z, it is also important in the context of a very difficult urbanenvironment with a disorderly, relatively unplanned structure, a topographycharacterized by hills and canyons, and an inefficient transportation system.While the experience of moving between home, school and the supermarketmay give children better spatial control over the city, at the same time theymay be exposed to the risks of an insecure urban environment. This is partic-ularly true for girls, who usually walk to the supermarket accompanied by anadult.

Maria talks about the needs of her family and, with regard to her oldestdaughter, suggests just how intimately her children and their labor are tied tothe family’s economic and social welfare. Importantly, she intimates theresponsibility that Elena shoulders for the rest of the family (emphasisadded):

That is why you can see the need that Elena understands . . . she doesn’t need towork now but with the economic situation at home she decides to work. . . . Ihave children, I am a widow, and when my husband died in an accident beforemy boy was born … Well, I stay on my own with my two children . . . What Iearn is not enough to make them succeed. We live near my mother-in-law, andshe is sick so we need to take care of her and buy her medicine, we take her tothe private doctor and to cover the costs in a private hospital is very expensiveso we take her to the public hospital. Elena notices all, and we don’t have thesupport of Dad. Moreover, we are living in a difficult situation plus the healthinsurance is not good . . . that is the thing, where Elena can support us with herwork.

This suggests a different kind of trial by space, one that is intimately con-nected to the social and spatial contexts of the family and emotional geogra-phies that elaborate spaces of economic resourcefulness and caring.

Like Pedro and Elena, most of the children we interviewed live in low-income colonias populares (Figure 3) and worked as packers because ofeconomic need, as a part of their family’s survival strategy. Convergencewith childhoods of the global North is suggested by the minority of middle-class children in the study whose families do not need the money, but whochose to participate because they wanted to do something different, and to beaway from their homes. Nonetheless, older issues of patriarchal dominanceand traditional values are suggested by Carmen:

Interviewer: Did your family support you to get this job?Carmen: Yes, I told them I wanted to work, and my dad said ‘no, because we

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do not need the money’, and I said that I did not want to be at home, and he said‘ok’.Interviewer: What do your brothers and sisters think about your work?Carmen: My little brother wants to be a packer, he likes to wear my cap andapron.Interviewer: Do you think that children must work?Carmen: Yes, no . . . let me see. If they have a money problem at home I’d saythat their fathers have to resolve it and children must study. For me working issomething wonderful, I get some fun, I do my own thing.Interviewer: How much do you earn a week?Carmen: 1000 pesos, today I made 100 pesos; I think 1000 pesos a week is ok.Interviewer: What do you do with the money?Carmen: I give it to my mom, she saves it for me, and when I need somethingshe has to buy it for me.Interviewer: What does your mother do with the money?Carmen: Sometimes my mom borrows my money because my dad forgets togive her the money when he rushes to work. Then I give her money from my lit-tle can and she pays me back the following day, but I tell her to keep the money.

The Paidimeta program is not in opposition to children packers –either boys or girls – engaging in domestic responsibilities at home such asmaking beds, washing dishes, preparing meals and taking care of small sib-lings. What often happens is that as a consequence of their participation inthe Paidimeta program, children do not have time to do domestic tasks athome. In addition, children’s participation in these activities often reflectstraditional gender divisions of labor within the family; while boys are moreinvolved in tasks like making beds and cleaning their rooms, girls washdishes, prepare meals and take care of their brothers and sisters.

There are important contextual differences that suggest participation indomestic work is related in large part to the structure of households (seeAguirre, 2004). For example, domestic chores are less for children in fami-lies where there are adult women:

Interviewer: What kind of tasks do you do at home, besides studying and work-ing?Teresa: Eh, well I have to take out the water that is leaking in the bathroom.Interviewer: And what else?Teresa: [I have] to make my bed, and do my school duties, and I read the Biblein my free time.Interviewer: Do you do these tasks everyday or only on weekends?Teresa: Only on Saturdays and Sundays.Interviewer: Don’t you help at home during the week days?Teresa: No because I am going to school and I am also working.

These findings confirm the work of Mexican authors such as Giourguli(2002), who argue that the effects of family structures on children’s workand education are gender based. For instance, boys are under pressure to ful-fill a provider role, while girls may have a chance to combine work anddomestic tasks.

We want to develop new ways of thinking about children’s work and


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space within the context of a rapidly modernizing Tijuana, while acknowl-edging gender biases and the risks of this work to the children and their fam-ilies. So what precisely is meant by rights and acknowledgement? From ourinterviews it is clear that dignity for these young people is about taking oneconomic responsibility and contributing to their family’s well-being, butwhat of their place in a larger societal/global structure? As suggested in thissection, the kind of trial by space with which these young workers engagerelate in important ways to home and community environments that precipi-tate their reasons for working and the spatial efforts that encompass thatwork. Other trials by space emanate from the shop floor.

Trials by space on the shop floorChildren’s work results in a myriad of different experiences that reveal thenew sociospatial dynamics of the supermarket floor. For the most part thepackers enjoy the shop floor space. Even though it disciplines them, at thesame time it gives them some freedom and distance from family dynamics.While waiting their turn at the counter, seated on a bench or making a lineby height, children chat, play and laugh, and generally horse around.

Children’s work organization at the supermarkets follows two differentpatterns. On the one hand, large chains like Calimax and Gigante let childrenorganize teams by themselves. These stores have a large number of childrenworking in three different shifts:

Pedro: Like I . . . mmm I am in charge of the cashier and yes we are a lot ofempacadores [packers]. We organize in teams of two or three for each cashier.If it happens to be that there are not many of us packers in that day, well thenone will take a cashier each.Interviewer: When you have the groceries packed on the cart, do you take thecart outside the store to the customer’s car?Pedro: Yes, then the other packer will stay packing the groceries by the cashier!. . .Pedro: Well. . . like I am the kid’s manager/mediator . . . everyone goes to me!So if they have a problem related to money they go and ask me. Sometimes theyfight because they say that it was their turn just because the other person got agood tip from the customer . . . then they start to fight and then they go with meto complain! So I tell them that they need to divide the money depending on thecase . . . some others just cry for their space then start to fight! And it is not thateasy!!!Interviewer: So you are in charge of all the kids in the supermarket?Pedro: I am in charge of all the [boys] in the supermarket and then a girl will bein charge of all the girls in the supermarket!Interviewer: If there are children who are bad-behaved at the supermarket, whathappens?Carmen: Well, I tell them off, I tell them not to behave in that way, otherwise Iwill send them home, or report them to the supervisor who also tells them off orsends them home. I have been on charge of a lot of children. I have the right tosend them home. Once, there was a boy named Christian who was rebellious. Itold him ‘you cannot do what you want’. He was rude to the cashiers and used

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to fight with them. So, I sent him home for a week. He apologized but I askedhim for his apron and cap. He never came back.

At smaller chains, such as Comercial Mexicana and Casa Ley, supervi-sors are in charge of organizing children into teams. Children sometimesface difficult relationships with supervisors and customers, and with otherchildren. According to the Paidimeta program, store managers should men-tor and take care of children packers. However, the relationship betweenchildren and managers is frequently one of conflict. As one young man putit:

Well, in the morning, I have a short woman as a supervisor . . . she is fromVeracruz and she treats us really bad! And she was always telling us off plus wealways had to greet her and say good afternoon and then she would tick us off!Well if we were playing she would tell us off again! There are some cool super-visors that would let us go out to eat and everything . . . normal, also let us talkwith our friends but there are other supervisors that would not!

To deal with tensions and conflicts, some children resist, some argue,some break rules and some consent to the social order of the supermarketfloor:

Interviewer: How are the customers with you?Pedro: Well . . . there are some occasions . . . when you will find a señora thatwill be really picky because they want their merchandise to be well packed andorganized! Other señoras want you to take the merchandise to their car . . . andoh . . . oh! . . . if you do not pack the groceries right! . . . they get really angrythen they will scold you and tell you to do the things right and oh boy if you arenot paying attention or if you are playing around!Interviewer: How are you treated by customers?Pedro: Once, we were packing [shopping] into small plastic bags, and I apolo-gized to a customer because we did not have big bags, but he did not want smallbags, and he started telling me off about things. I said that it was not my fault,but I prefer him telling me off rather than arguing back at him.Interviewer: Do you think he was right?Pedro: No, he had no right to treat me like that, they should treat me in thesame way I treat them.

Child packers are employed by the supermarket to do only one thing:pack groceries at the checkouts. In actuality, these working children knowmore than how to pack merchandise; they learn product codes and theyknow where products are located. Managers take advantage of this knowl-edge in different ways, asking children to check prices and look for productsinside the store. In addition, children will often wheel customers’ carts out totheir cars and help them unload (see Figures 4 and 5).

The resilience of these young people to the disciplining of the shopfloor is often countered in their play, which is also monitored and disci-plined. Most play occurs off the shop floor:

Interviewer: Besides working, what else do you do with your friends at thesupermarket?


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Elena: Sometimes I ask permission to the supervisor to play a game. Girls startchatting about soap operas and we pretend that we are part of the soap opera.Interviewer: What do they do?Elena: They give themselves the actresses’ names; for instance they are nowplaying Mariana de la Noche.Interviewer: Do you play inside the supermarket?Elena: No, No, we play outside, sometimes when we finish our shift.

With this the children expand into an immensely popular national Mexicantelevision soap opera. The plot of this soap follows the trials and tribulationsof a young rich Mexican girl who is in love with a poor boy.

While children are officially considered non-workers, some managerstreat them in a disciplinary fashion, as if they were subordinated employees.The supermarkets keep records of children packers with information aboutthem and their families. We noticed that these records were used to cite chil-dren who did not conform to the rules established for formal workers.Discipline reports were written when children laughed, ran and or played inthe supermarket.

Reproducing capital’s needs: global children in local contexts

A premise of this article is that it is remiss not to consider children’s work,play and education within global discourses of social reproduction thatinclude an understanding of family transformations, community changes and

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Figure 4 Packers learn product codes, learn where products are located and wheelcustomers’ carts out of the store



local and regional development. These are considerable issues that go wellbeyond the purview of what we have done here, and yet we are able to drawthree substantial implications from our focus on Tijuana’s supermarket pack-ers. First, the minds and bodies of children, how they are constructed andhow they are taught to labor are a crucial part of describing the distinctiveshape of larger material transformations. Focus on children and social repro-duction is important then, insofar as it ‘break[s] the frames of dominantmodels of transformations in the world system’ (Stephens, 1995: 8). On thispoint, we note the ease with which young people in Tijuana grow intoresponsibilities at home and at work, and the ways they incorporate play andcreativity into these responsibilities. Walter Benjamin (1978) talks about arevolutionary imagination in children’s play and creativity that for the mostpart remains dormant (coiled like a spring) or is disciplined out of adult life.In noting this, Katz (2004: 257) argues that revolutionary imagination of thiskind may be the key to halting, or at least transforming ‘capitalism’s rapa-cious trajectory’.

Following this, the second implication of the globalization debates forchildren is that they are marked as flexible – perhaps the most flexible –consumers and producers of capital. This suggests the notion that children


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Figure 5 Packer’s drawing depicting conflict and receiving tips at the checkouts



are pivotal artifacts of contemporary globalization. The so-called nature ofchildren changes as the objects around them – social practices and institu-tions, family and community structures and labor relations – change. Ofcourse, young people are not a simple tabla rasa upon which the will of cap-ital is etched. Children not only ‘become’ through the influences of thesechanging objects, they also bring something of themselves into cultural lifeas they actively participate in the day-to-day workings of places. In severalsupermarkets, packers negotiate the responsibility to supervise themselves;from organizing themselves into teams to enabling child-like behavior(laughter and playing) on the shop floor.

And this brings us to a third implication of globalization for children’slives: issues of disequilibrium and inequality are very much manifest at thelocal level. Over the last four decades Tijuana has been uniquely positionedin the global economy by rapid modernization and continued dependence onthe global minority North. Commentators suggest that globalization, with itsfocus on the homogenization of cultures and rapid dissemination of informa-tion through communication technologies, heralds the ‘death of geography’through processes of ‘delocalization’ (Gray, 1998; Reich, 2001). Conversely,we believe that globalization is multi-scalar, emanating from, and effecting,a variety of spatial levels (see Martin, 2004). Pointedly, Amin (2002) arguesthat the global is not simply ‘out there’ but also ‘in here’. The local focus ofglobalization suggests a complex web of processes that impinge upon thelives of workers in a myriad of ways, and it is young workers who flex mostunder pressures to adjust.

The packers in Tijuana experience space–time expansion as they playsoaps, collect DragónBall Z cards and journey daily between home, schooland work negotiating various modes of transportation while securing theirown safety in a chaotic urban environment. They also negotiate space–timecompression as their worlds collapse into a stringent daily routine. This, ofcourse, is a problematic generalization. In the same way that the processes ofglobalization are neither unidirectional nor even, so is it impossible to char-acterize or position a uniform context for childhood because the local condi-tions of global children are so varied. In short, geographical studies arguethat childhood is not only constructed in different ways at different times butalso varies depending upon where it is constructed (Holloway and Valentine,2000). The compression and expansion of child labor is about Tijuana at aparticular global moment.

Concluding comments

The issue of child labor is not a new one for policy-makers or academics,and yet it continues to challenge our thinking about how local geographiescontextualize definitions of childhood and youth, and the nature of work,play, schooling and apprenticeship. Child labor comes in many forms and

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intersects with these issues in a myriad of ways. Protests against the abusesof child labor are important and laudable. And yet, Ruddick (2003: 345) cau-tions that there are risky unintended consequences when policies such as thewholesale ban on child labor are applied without attention to context and thecomplexities of local geographies.

Given the seeming peripheral and yet converging status of Mexico in arapidly polarizing global economy, the rise of institutionalized child-work inTijuana suggests many things, not least of which is the context of children ashaving a significant place in a peripheral capitalist society. The specificcharacteristics and forms of action of the children emerge under the influ-ence of traditional and modern cultures and approaches to life as well as thethings shared with children’s work globally. Questions of quintessential con-structions of regional childhoods and trials by space that connect with localprocesses are raised here as is the possibility of a new kind of childhood thatis no longer compatible with an ‘original’ bourgeois or western construction.Nor does it appear that it is possible to generalize about how children learnto labor across generations. Children are social actors whose lives are shapedby their local working and living environments, and the times of those envi-ronments, and in turn they also shape those times and environments. Wehave to investigate the ways in which children interact at the interplay oftheir different roles and how they are placed in society; as well as the trans-formations, continuities and resistances that may result from their everydaysocial and spatial interaction. If we agree with the decade-old admonition ofJens Qvortrup et al. (1994) that childhood matters then surely in this agendaof ongoing importance we must add that children’s geographies matter also.

What this article suggests is that Tijuana’s local geography – its physi-cal and social landscape – is intimately entwined with global processes andchildren are caught up in, voluntarily participate in, and inform larger trans-formations. As economic changes over the last two decades have trans-formed grocery consumption in Tijuana, then so too have the lives of childpackers at the supermarkets expanded spatially and intensified temporally.The spatial expansion is suggested by the ways children get around and getto know their city. The temporal intensification is suggested by the wayschildren juggle schoolwork, domestic chores and supermarket employment.The child packers’ daily rounds suggest a complex web of social and con-tractual relations between home, school and work, but they also articulatetrials by space that suggest changing contexts of responsibility and identity.These changes are manifest on the shop floor and at home to the extent thatthe work of these young people bears little resemblance to ways their parentslearned to labor. At times their responsibilities highlight a resistance to capi-talism’s rapacious trajectory, and at times they suggest complicity. And thenagain, at other times and in certain spaces, they reflect an imaginative revo-lution that suggests hope in the difference and transformative power ofyoung people.


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Notes

Special thanks to Adriana Fernandez and Kristin Sverson from San Diego State University forhelp with interviews and translation. Thanks also to Professor Nancy Postero from theUniversity of California at San Diego for her support of this project at its initial stages. Thestudy was supported financially by a grant from UC-MEXUS/CONACYT.

1. The conditions that established the supermarkets were the ongoing process of industri-alization and federal policies that in the 1980s created new highways connecting border citiessuch as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez to the rest of the country. The introduction of national prod-ucts in the border markets occurred through the establishment of large supermarket firms(González and Alonso, 1990). Nowadays, the growth of the commercial sector is reflected inthe proliferation of supermarket branches in Tijuana with the expansion of the urban area, andmajor retail chains entering into joint ventures with US warehouses such as Costco, Smart andFinal, Office Depot and others, as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA).2. Even though a large proportion of discussion on globalization comes from the disci-pline of geography, in a recent special issue on this topic in the Transactions of the Institute ofBritish Geographers (2004, Vol. 29, No. 2), nothing is mentioned about children or their work.3. Samantha Punch (2003) uses the terms minority global North and majority globalSouth in place of Developing Third World and Developed First World to suggest a more pre-cise categorization of difference.4. Although we have no evidence from our discussions with children, their parents andtheir teachers that packers are involved in these activities, an NGO worker from La Fundaciónde Protección a la Niñez pointed out that a clear danger exists when children earn in tips overtwice the mininum wage:

I believe that we need to be very careful about it. Because yes the kids are earn-ing good! . . . I believe that sometimes when we are young we do not have thecapacity to know how we are going to invest our money. . . . Sometimes [it] isgood when the family asks for the money, because the child might say: [Talkingas if child] ‘Oh no, I need to buy this thing first.’ . . . It would be easy for him tobuy tobacco, it would be easy to buy beer, drugs; because he can afford it.Therefore, it is something with [a] high risk.

5. The supermarkets’ suspicion of our study presented an ethical dilemma. AlthoughPaidimeta supported our research they were concerned that if we found and documented abus-es the supermarkets would withdraw from the program, as they had in Mexico City when orga-nized labor got involved, thus removing any possibility of overseeing children’s welfare.6. Names are changed in order to protect identities.

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