children?

Such a long time since last writing. Writer's block and also feeling so self-conscious and out of practice at expressing myself through writing. Anyway, I've been doing "research" for this project I'm trying to do on the 2000-2001 Argentine economic crisis. It's completely tragic and the consequences are still so haunting. However, whenever I have a conversation about crisis, or trauma, two main themes are repeated, or at least that's how I'm seeing it (perhaps I'm just trying to formally frame things, which could be a huge error on my part). #1: There is a complete obsession with security, especially of delinquency, specifically among adolescents. It's interesting how children can seem more threatening than adults, because it seems wrong? There is something about young men, some ambivalence when childhood seems to be perverse in it's absence. Eduardo Galeano (in the middle of reading Patas Arriba y El Mundo al Revés), discusses the obsession with security at length. He strikes a balance in pointing to the desire to have security at the cost of justice (thinking that there is a strong tie-in to the Bush years, especially the use of fear in the 2004 presidential election). How paranoia allows for people to see violence against young people, usually of darker skin and very poor, as completely excusable. As a society dehumanizes and objectifies young bodies (child prostitution can be seen as related), there is a loss in hope of the future, and a longing for a past that did not seem to be so very dangerous and when social labels such as "child" seemed more normal, or at least meant that there was a definable space between infancy and toddler and adult. There are the theories that link national identity and the child, the growth of the nation and the maturation of a child. What kind of nationalism, or rather nation-identity, am I witnessing here? I see an adult brother talk to drugged-out teenagers and they ask me about where to get cocaine in front of a this guy's (I'm guessing the age) 8 yr. old brother (maybe younger). These two teenagers have glassy eyes. They say that cocaine costs about 20 pesos and they only have 10. I lie and say I would help them if I could, but I'm honestly without money on me. A lie, but I sound genuine. The thing is, I'm aware of this sickening feeling in my stomach that says run, but I'm a block from my house and they see me all the time and now I'm their neighbor. Better to be on good terms, to win some kind of agreement that is unspoken but based on trust. I'm also perversely intrigued, playing between fear and curiosity. This is fieldwork, right? I am intrigued, but there is something bigger than me, a talk about drugs in front of a child, glassy eyes that say that their already high and want more. I'm coming home from a milonga with make-up on, leggings and a short dress that I often use to go dance tango. I'm leaving this closed-in, exclusive space that calls for a certain etiquette and stepping into another exclusive space. I'm curious about why they are letting me in. The house is beautiful, they are standing in front. This young adult and his brother seem like squatters and I think there are multiple families living inside. A beautiful building whose architecture can be observed from outside despite it's state of disrepair and neglect. Are they engaging me in a conversation to rob me? Or did I engage them by asking for a cigarette and wanting to be friendly; I always feel that it's better to be on good terms with those living close to me, it's true that there can be some sort of security in that relationship. I have been in similar situations before and I always get out clean and safe, and I repeat the same risks over and over again, testing myself, testing my own fear, seeing how far this perverse game of attraction and repulsion will take me.
Buenos Aires is gripped by a fear of such people. It can seem irrational, it leads to the most awful comments you could imagine, but there is an uneasy navigation between not letting one's self become occupied and controlled by fear and understanding the darker side of human beings. There is the Argentine equivalence of a crack epidemic. It's on a much wider scale, and there is the cheapest version of crack, supposedly permanently damaging your brain and laced with glass shards that is sold outside of schools and in slums at the price of a bus ride. Argentina is the highest drug consumer in comparison with it's neighbors. Children are becoming killers. Robbery has gone down, but violent crime is going up. The suburbs of Buenos Aires are far more dangerous and contradictory than the city. As Galeano points out, the suburbs have their closed communities where a wealthy child is also robbed of his childhood through a type of classist apartheid. And the fear is not coming out of nowhere, it is coming from somewhere, often from rumor, more often than not from a sinister media that has it's own political loyalties, but also from a bit of truth. Young people from a neighboring slum are becoming killers that break into beautiful house and killing before robbing, sometimes only running away with ten pesos. The drugged children are those that seem to lose any perspective of reality, of life, but are they not also being robbed of their own right to be a child, to live without a pain that leads to a deep and dark desire to numb it? The police are corrupt, they are violent, they often shoot first before even looking for a weapon or even a threat. And yet, one I see an officer on the corner I feel relieved. Politically I think the city's government borders on fascist, but I felt this paranoia after my night time chat and when I walked home calmly, I ran to my apartment as soon as I got through the front door, pretty much impossible to open without a key, and then unlocked the two other doors to my apartment. So, basically, I'm feeling safer because I'm behind three doors and I feel secure, but I'm haunted by this 8 yr. old. I don't want to be another paranoid BA inhabitant, but I see the contradiction between my social conscience and the individual me. Now I feel a desire to go back, to ask them about the crisis, to answer questions I have that almost don't exist, but are really just ways to get information. I don't even know what I want, but I want to be closer, I want to feel trusted, I want to feel that this anthropological thing can work, that my interests can be satiated. It's not like I'm thinking of going to some Congo war zone. I'm really quite safe. But there is this foreign-ness, this novelty that pulls me in and warns me to stay away. There are children, but they don't have a childhood. There is cocaine for 20 pesos; divide by 3.80 and get the dollar equivalent. It's real, so real it didn't seem real and it was too real. It's the ambivalence between neighbors and outsiders, between adults and learning to walk, form sentences, my inclusion in a place and language that is obviously not my own. It is an ambivalence that is scary and awful but incredibly fascinating, and only a perversity, that exists within me, could see it so, to use to my own devices to achieve some written product. I could get lost in it, not know where I begin or end, not know when to fear or to get closer, not locate myself as neighbor or researcher or foreigner or Spanish speaker. Limits, boundaries, gray, danger, propaganda.