The Citizen Life Course: Age Identity in Ecuador's Educational Revolution

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Authors Grace, Samantha L.

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THE CITIZEN LIFE COURSE: AGE IDENTITY IN ECUADOR'S EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION

Samantha L. Grace

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

SCHOOL OF ANTHROPOLOGY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2018

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED: Samantha L. Grace

Acknowledgements

I started working towards this dissertation in 2008, when my husband Guille and I packed up our black and white tuxedo kitten and moved from the D.C. metropolitan area to Tucson, Arizona to start graduate school at the University of Arizona. In the two years immediately after, I often felt like my brain was being pried open to lay down the pathways for new epistemologies. The coursework and mentorship from Susan Shaw, Ivy

Pike, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Jen Roth-Gordon, Brian Silverstein, and Mimi Nichter gave me new intellectual direction. To Ivy Pike I am particularly indebted for the introduction to the life course approach, and to Jen Roth-Gordon for showing me how to blend my identity-focused research interests with a commitment to pedagogy. But above all, it was Susan Shaw's steady guidance that allowed me to transform those inchoate ideas into a clear direction for my scholarly path. I had heard from other students that

Susan was a great advisor, someone who quickly “got” where you were trying to go and took the time to help you learn how to get the rest of the way there, and with her diplomatic corrections and perceptive questions she got me through Master’s thesis, comps, and, finally, this dissertation.

While my professors were bending my mind, my peers in the graduate program were shaping my new academic identity. Pete Taber, in particular, became a mentor and close friend and provided invaluable feedback on almost everything I wrote leading up to and including this dissertation. For seven years he was an ideal writing companion in coffeeshops and bars (depending on the time of day) and, after a move to Oakland, CA 5 took me away from the academic environment of the University of Arizona, remained a constant virtual writing buddy online. This dissertation was made possible by his daily encouragement, as well as by my dear friends Dana Osborne and Robin Steiner. They held my hand through the internet through the last two years of writing, and their understanding, advice, and accountability kept me moving forward when all my instincts insisted it was time to stop. And thank you to Lucero Radonic, Julie Armin, and Lindsey

Raisa Feldman, who charitably agreed to participate in writing and academic support groups with me.

And, although it's unlikely any of them will ever read this, this dissertation was produced out of the time, emotional, and intellectual investment of the 14 kids whose real names will not appear anywhere in this document, but who gave me an incredible gift in helping me with this research project. Here's hoping we all graduate and become professionals!

The research was made possible by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the School of

Anthropology, my six incredibly helpful parents (and Mom and Nelly especially, for crossing the continent repeatedly to grandmother the babies so I could work during those critical seven months), and my co-knight-in-shining-armor, Guille. Thank you, my love, for shaping so much of your life around supporting my intellectual journey. You have been an unwavering helpmate over the last nine years (well, sixteen, actually, but we're talking about the PhD now), and your willingness to move from DC to Tucson to

Ecuador to Oakland and who knows where next is only the smallest example of that. And also, thank you for making the children with me: they are (for now anyway) the perfect counterbalance to the life of the mind. 6 Table of Contents

List of Figures ……………………………………………………………………….. 7 Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………… 8

Part 1: Introduction …………………………………………………………………. 9

1. Theoretical Overview: Age as a Problem of Citizenship …………………… 10

2. Methods and Setting: Life Course Ethnography with Quiteño Students …... 40

Part 2: Age Horizons ………………………………………………………………. 65

3. The Phenomenology of the Quotidian School Day ………………………… 66

4. The Intergenerational Stakes of Sharing Subjectivity ……………………… 94

Part 3: The Citizen Life Cycle …………………………………………………… 123

5. Making National Progress with Unidirectional Aging …………………… 124

6. School Reforms and the Equal Right to Discontinuous Aging …………… 148

7. Bad Kids and Biocitizenship in Ecuadorian High Schools ………………… 176

Part 4: Conclusion ………………………………………………………………... 213

8. Making Age More Equitable in School and Beyond ……………………… 214

Appendix A. Student Informant Descriptions ………………………………...... … 218

Appendix B. Recruitment Script …………………………………………………. 230

Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………... 232

7 List of Figures

Image 1. The view from my desk at I.T.S.E. Maestro before the students arrived ……….9

Image 2. A daily schedule for Colegio Conquistador …………………………………….65

Image 3. A student-made anti-pregnancy poster …………………………………………123

Image 4. A mural on an elementary school wall in downtown Quito ……………………213 8 Abstract

This dissertation begins from the classic anthropological observation that how we age is culturally specific, and examines how Ecuador’s “educational revolution” has changed what aging looks like in that country. As Quito's public schools underwent rapid and wide-ranging transformations from 2009-2017, its students and their families also adjusted to new "youth" rights and responsibilities. Ethnographic fieldwork on how high school students and their families negotiated these changes in school and at home was analyzed through a life course lens encompassing phenomenological and governmental approaches to time and identity. Here, age identities are shown to emerge from the efforts of formal schooling to define what it means to be a good citizen across the life course.

The result is an ethnographic study of a particularly modern relationship between time and youth identity that joins intersectional work on gender, race, and class in considering how categories of social differentiation govern populations.

This dissertation theorizes the “age horizon” to analyze age identities through informants’ encounters with a wide variety of temporal guideposts, which subjects use to locate their own identities. It develops the concept of the “citizen life cycle” as the normative life course trajectory that emerges from understanding age as a technology of citizenship. It also contextualizes the citizen life cycle as a single “path” towards national belonging within a much wider and more variable “age horizon.” The concept of the citizen life cycle emphasizes how “youth becoming” gets constructed as a “life stage” within a larger normative “life cycle.” I pay particular attention to the effects of policies, infrastructures, and practices that my informants encounter in their daily attendance in high school. 9 Part 1: Introduction

Image 1. The view from my desk at I.T.S.E. Maestro before the students arrived.

Dissertation Abstract: In Ecuador's "Educational Revolution," sweeping reforms to educational infrastructure have exposed how the age identities of urban high school students and their families are a locus for negotiating national belonging. Public discourses depicting normal youth as a natural fit with schooling justify the goal of improving educational equality, but these normative age identities also reproduce (and obscure) historical patterns of exclusion based in race, class, and gender. Through policies as broad as yearly graduations, and as narrow as lottery-based enrollment and curriculum standardization, urban public schools teach Quito's citizens that the country depends on students making the most of their time as youth. The "citizen life cycle" - a normative sequence of rights and responsibilities required for national belonging - is what results when students identify their ages as unidirectional (i.e., always getting older), discontinuous (i.e., graduating between " life stages"), and impermanent (i.e., a limited time to "get it right"). This dissertation explores high school as a stage in a "citizen life cycle" and introduces the possibilities that emerge from contextualizing normative life cycles within phenomenological "age horizons" across the life course. 10 1. Theoretical Overview: Age as a Problem of Citizenship

Since G. Stanley Hall defined the concept of adolescence in 1904, we descendants of

Western European enlightenment have delighted in characterizing it as a period of "storm and stress." The phrase was borrowed from the Romantic aesthetic of the Counter-

Enlightenment a century earlier. It reassuringly promises that our children are temporarily insane and their biologically determined psychology is to blame, and it justifies our efforts to protect them and those around them from their wild and irrational tendencies.1

Ecuador's youth have not entirely escaped these colonial2 visions of dysregulation, but have an equally evocative description of the life stage as "la edad del burro," or “donkey aged." Teens, that is, are like a braying ass that refuses to obey out of an irrational stubbornness, which only a smart and benevolent authority can coax into appropriate behavior with a combination of soothing words and a switch. And yet, as in the U.S. and most of the modern world, it is these very same youth who are held up as the hope of the nation and the promise of progress.

This dissertation begins from the classic anthropological observation that how we age is culturally specific, and examines how Ecuador’s “educational revolution” has changed what aging looks like in that country. As Quito's public schools underwent rapid and wide-ranging transformations from 2009-2017, its students and their families also adjusted to new "youth" rights and responsibilities. Ethnographic fieldwork on how high school students and their parents negotiated these changes in school and at home was analyzed through a life course lens encompassing phenomenological and governmental

1 See Koops and Zuckerman (2003) for a larger discussion of how the Romantic aesthetic of “sturm und drang” came to be associated with youth. 2 See Lesko (2012) for a discussion of how these “savage” depictions of youth emerged out of the colonial legacies that that continued to dominate Europe and the Americas at that time. 11 approaches to time and identity. Here, age identities are shown to emerge from the efforts of formal schooling to define what it means to be a good citizen across the life course.

Age as Temporal

If I ask you, “how old are you?” you will likely respond by telling me your chronological age. In Spanish, if I ask you “¿Cuántos años tienes?” (the same question, but literally, how many years do you have?) the question is even more explicitly chronological. There’s more than a preoccupation with birthdays wrapped up in this basic communication about age. For one thing, how we understand age is closely connected to how we understand time. When we see time as directional (e.g., moving from the past, through the present, towards the future), we often see age as directional, too. If we talk about time in objective, quantifiable, and singular units (like minutes, weeks, years), this is also how we talk about age. But the anthropologies of age, like the anthropology of time, have shown that much of what we take for granted is not nearly as universal as we might expect.

The idea that adolescents are “naturally” rebellious - that a stormy adolescence is a biologically predetermined stage in a universal life cycle - was part of the theory of aging popularized by developmental psychology. But Margaret Mead threw this approach into question when she wrote an ethnography of Samoan girls, showing how much the experience of "adolescence" varies by culture. Her challenge was revolutionary in 1923, 12 and still provides an important counter-balance to universalist models of human development. Although her approach did not explicitly dispute the analytical framework that reifies biology and time as universal and objective ways of measuring age, she did take issue with what was considered biologically determined (e.g., the storm and stress of adolescence). Her work opened the door to the question: what is the relationship between biology, culture, and time in human experiences of age?

The next step in theorizing that relationship came from interdisciplinary work on old age, which pointed out the limitations of measuring age in years. As Christine Fry puts it,

“Chronology (time elapsed since birth) does not predict biological aging because of diversity in genetic endowments and environmental influences. It is even less predictive of social aging" (1990:129). In other words, a 70 year old's chronological age does not tell you much about whether they are "active" or "infirm," nor does it help you guess very accurately how long they have left to live. In gerontological research, the concept of

“biological age” emerged as a potential solution: the idea was to measure senescence through one or many bodily systems (such as one’s heart health or one’s telomeres), thus preserving many of the same goals of statistical objectivity and comparison that make chronological age so appealing for bureaucratic and medical management. However, identifying which biological variables are relevant to a universally applicable "biological age" proves to be almost as problematic as using chronological time as a measure. While attending to biological change is still valuable, “biological age" does not provide the kind of universal framework of age that some hoped for (Sauvain-Dugerdil et al 2006).

Instead, the search for "biological age" highlighted that the biological and the sociocultural are interdependent, not independent, layers of experience. Rather than 13 replacing chronological age with biological age, these findings supported a call for an approach that looked at sociocultural identities and biological changes in relation to how they fit within a whole life.

The attention to timing in the biocultural life course approach is not only a question of time sequence, but of the accumulation of biocultural experiences. Margaret Lock’s concept of “local biology,” for example, shows how an accumulation of dietary differences (in things like alcohol, soy, and tea) between U.S. and Japanese women result in major differences in how menopause is experienced (Lock 1993, Lock and Kaufert

2001). Leidy characterizes this temporal aspect of aging as layered, horizontal trajectories that dissolve the clear boundaries of life stages (1996). Even more profound in its implications for the relationship between time and the life course is the idea that fetuses are impacted by ecological changes that are spread out across multiple generations of mothers, rather than just their own experience in utero (Kuzawa 2005). All of this is to say that the life course makes it possible to think about time not only as a length, but as a concept with depth.

Another way of framing the accumulation of experience is an emphasis on the

"contingency" of biological, sociocultural, and temporal events. Medical anthropologist

Caroline Bledsoe's book Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa

(2002) was a significant step in developing an anthropological approach to the life course. In ethnographic work with women in rural Gambia, she examines how local women’s aging was better understood through a framework of potentially multidirectional biocultural “contingency” than through linear conceptions of “timing.”

She argues, 14 The possibilities that the physical aging process is not tied to [chronological] age,

that time is not determinant of childbearing ability, and that aging is under social

control in ways that we have not considered are highly counterintuitive to the

academic common sense from which most of us write. (2002:7)

For example, Bledsoe’s informants wanted to have as many children as possible and tried to maximize their bodies’ reproductive potential by allowing their bodies ample recovery time from pregnancy and childbirth. That was, she notes, quite different from trying to maximize reproductive potential by having as many pregnancies as possible before the age of menopause. The former frames the process of aging as contingent on bodily experiences. The latter is an implicitly chronological calculation based on averaged fertility timelines among women, which can be seen, for example, in the efforts of women in the U.S. to find the optimal timing for childbearing when also building a career.3 Although Bledsoe was initially tempted to frame this as avoiding wearing out one’s body “prematurely,” she realized that her informants did not find predictions based on a chronologically average ages of menopause to be compelling frameworks for their own fertility timelines. Since her informants privilege the de facto end of their fertility as

"natural" (instead of viewing menopause as the statistical norm which they can fail to reach or succeed by surpassing), for these women, the concept of "premature" aging is not logical.

The women in Bledsoe's study who used birth control to maximize the number of living, healthy children they could have were not mistaken about how birth control works

3 This is also reflected in the heated debate among medical anthropologists about struggles over this timing, e.g., http://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/04/op-ed-egg-freezing-wtf/. Sadly, despite the embrace of Bledsoe’s book by medical anthropologists, her insights around contingent aging do not seem to have been included in shaping the debate. 15 nor were they ignorant about their own health. Just as a difficult birth “aged” their bodies, birth control gave them the time to recover. These women literally made themselves younger by rejuvenating their bodies through contraceptive use, a feat that I cannot do complete justice to in this short summary. Bledsoe points out that if a traumatic birth can put an end to your childbearing, then “years old” is not nearly so relevant to your aging than the number and quality of births you have experienced. This means that instead of defining age as an objective process in relation to a stable beginning point (i.e., counting birthdays), these women gauged their age in relation to a variable endpoint (i.e., when they would no longer be able to have children). Contingency (here, on the quality and number of births) supersedes chronology as a comparative metric. This is not specific to childbearing, however, as privileging any variable endpoint (death, for example, being the most universal) over a stable beginning point would also necessarily privilege contingency (e.g., risk, illness, etc.) and social comparison (e.g., I am likely closer to death than my friend) and limit the utility of chronology.

Bledsoe’s emphasis on contingency is a particularly anthropological approach to the life course and it lines up neatly with the sociological principles of the life course outlined by Elder et al. (2003): 1) a longitudinal perspective (in this case, contextualizing childbearing years within a whole life), 2) human agency (here, contraceptive use), 3) historical embeddedness (particularly the cultural values and technological options in rural Gambia at the turn of the 21st century), 4) the timing of transitions (into and out of motherhood identities), and 5) linked lives (most obviously those of women and their children, but also to community members). But rather than a model which takes both time and the biological as independent variables, in which “we see biological individuals 16 flowing through a social system” (Fry 1990:133), Bledsoe’s approach shows time, biology, and culture as all contingently interdependent. Rather than either doing away with chronological age altogether or reifying it as objective, this approach makes chronology visible as a productive cultural practice.

Bledsoe, like Mead, makes cross-cultural comparisons that throw our "commonsense" presuppositions about aging into question. This dissertation highlights the relevance and applicability of anthropology's findings on age and the life course by analyzing variation in aging within a culture rather than between cultures. By identifying the mechanisms that imbue age identities with power and construct some age identities as normative, it becomes newly possible to strategically intervene on the processes taking place.

To develop a model for analyzing how my informants negotiate multiple possible ways of aging, I build on the concept of "age horizons" first proposed by Jennifer

Johnson-Hanks (2006) in her analysis of intersecting biological (childbearing) and social

(motherhood, schooling) events. Johnson-Hanks defines age horizons as "the socially constructed guideposts, the points de reperes, the expectations and aspirations that underlie and motivate social action” (2006: 23). Although she refrains from delving much into the genealogy of the concept beyond that, it seems too much for coincidence that

“horizons” is one of the frameworks in both Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s phenomenologies of time. I use Johnson-Hanks' concept as an introduction to phenomenological work on time in order to explore the temporal subjectivities of my informants and to offer a subject-centered concept of age horizons for the anthropology of the life course. 17 This dissertation addresses the question of how age relates to time in two different ways. The two "Age Horizons" chapters that follow (chapters three and four) take on a more thorough articulation of that relationship through the lens of identity and subjectivity. There I draw on the classic phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, as well as the dialogic phenomenology of Bakhtinian chronotopes and Elizabeth Grosz’s corporeal phenomenology. These discussions of age horizons serve as the foundation for exploring how age functions as a technology of citizenship as I discuss in the chapters on the

Citizen Life Cycle (chapters 5-7).

Theories of Citizenship

While the concept of "age horizons" helps us understand aging in a new way, a complementary theoretical framework is needed to examine how those horizons are imbued with power. In order to more fully develop this idea, which I refer to as the

"citizen life cycle," I rely heavily on several post-structural theories of citizenship.

Following an overview of Ecuadorian citizenship, I begin by examining the supposedly

"rational" explanation for the distribution of power across childhood, adulthood, and old age that is outlined in the classic approach to citizenship. I refer to this approach as

"prescriptive" as it describes a basic set of requirements for full social and/or national membership. Some studies of prescriptive citizenship challenge the normative hierarchies of aging by proposing different ideological requirements for full membership. However, the move towards a "governmental” citizenship, replaces ideologies of inclusion/exclusion with the government of populations through accountability. This move opens up the possibility of an analysis of age as a mechanism of power, rather than 18 as an analysis of the power afforded to an a priori identity. I conclude the section by examining how biocitizenship (a subset of governmental citizenship) complements the life course approach I take in this dissertation.

As in Latin America more broadly, public discourses of citizenship in Ecuador are often more focused on holding the state accountable for protecting citizens (Dagnino

2003) than, say, the more “active” citizenship we find in studies of the U.S. and Britain, which tend to emphasize individual responsibility as an obligation of citizenship (e.g.,

France 1998, Hall et al 2000, Rose and Novas 2005, Geijsel et al 2012). President

Correa's party slogan, "The Citizen Revolution," for example, was understood as a call to hold the government accountable for citizenship inequality. His campaign built on (and, some argue, expropriated) the progress made in social movements led by Ecuadorian indigenous activists in the late twentieth century that demanded rights for groups disenfranchised by ethnicity, race, and class (Blackburn 2009, de la Torre 2006), and gender (Lind 2005). Scholars situate these movements as a reaction to the colonial legacy in which indigenous citizens were classified as a tribute-paying “corporate collective” rather than as rights-bearing citizens (Sattar 2007). The bifurcated state4 was justified by the supposed irrationality of indigenous heads of household as “children with beards” who required the “care” of a benevolently paternalistic state in conjunction with white landowning patrons (O’Connor 2007). Although the legal exclusion of indigenous subjects ended in the mid-19th century, clientelism and infantilizing systems of patronage continue to shape the discourse around the responsibilities of the state to its more

4 Sattar (2007) borrowed this term from Mamdani’s (1996) book, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. It highlights how direct and indirect techniques for governing indigenous populations emerged in the postcolonial era. Sattar, like Mamdani, is particularly interested in the loss of indigenous rights that followed the legal expansion of citizenship to include indigenous people. 19 disadvantaged citizens (Brysk 2004, Cameron 2010, Brun and Diamond 2014). By shifting regulatory power over indigenous citizens to landowning patrons and the Church, the state was left free to disavow responsibility for the resulting abuses and oppression these entities heaped on the newly enfranchised indigenous communities even as it indirectly guaranteed them by empowering postcolonial elites. As a result, the multigenerational interpersonal relationships between Euro-Ecuadorian social elites and indigenous workers, such as between bishops and tenants of their parish, or landowners and their indigenous agricultural employees, became a de facto local government. This left the state available as a nominal ally for indigenous reform movements, but did little to challenge those power arrangements (Clark and Becker 2007).

The dynamic of state accountability for the protection of the rights of marginalized citizens is additionally complicated by the postcolonial Andean ideologies of education as a “civilizing force” (Luykx 1999, Sattar 2007), even as indigenous and poor

Ecuadorians were historically excluded from formal schooling (Martinez Novo and de la

Torre 2010). While one of the major victories of Ecuadorian indigenous movements has been expanded educational access, education’s celebrated5 power to transform poverty into economic success remains strongly tied to the embrace of a racist and paternalist education system.

Age in Prescriptive Citizenship

5 The economically transformative power of education is a truism, but one particularly clear example of the embrace of the ideology can be found in Ecuador’s 2010 Educational Progress Report, where they cite a CEPAL report that says individuals need 12 years of schooling to stay out of poverty as a justification for national education goals (IPE 2010:14). 20 Childhood - including youth - has been integral to the definition and application of modern citizenship theory since a preoccupation with the rights and responsibilities of national belonging (re)emerged in T. H. Marshall’s seminal essay in 1950. For Marshall, childhood was relevant as a beginning boundary, and the transition between youth and adulthood marked an individual’s graduation into newly independent national participation. He even famously framed the right to education, “not as the right of the child to go to school, but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated” (1992

[1950]: 16). Marshall suggested that children lack the capabilities (he particularly mentions reading and writing) necessary for full political and civil rights (for example, freedom to vote for representatives, freedom to compete for good jobs).6 An understanding of citizenship as a prescribed list of rights and responsibilities, rather than an aspect of identity that is differentially experienced by everyone, shapes most discussions of youth citizenship in youth studies, education, and anthropology.

Many researchers of youth citizenship (e.g., Roche 1999, Smith et al 2005, and Lister

2007) have focused on the exclusion of children and youth from the “status of citizen” with the intention of rehabilitating the social belonging of the child. Similarly, the exclusion of older people from social belonging (and sometimes from civil rights) is a

6 In this respect, Marshall was fully in line with much older discussions of democratic citizenship. In his discussion of children’s (sexual) citizenship, for example, Evans draws on Mill to preview his larger argument: "Within classic analyses of rights and liberties children have been consigned to non-adult status, their immaturity and ignorance demanding the paternalist protection of father and state. Mill's famous Liberty Principle (1910:13) establishes the pre- or proto-citizenship status of the child: 'the only purposes for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good whether physical or moral is not a sufficient warrant. In the part [of his conduct] which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.' (Mill 1910:13) Children, however, cannot be sovereign because they have not reached: 'the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children or young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury.' (Mill 1910:13)." (1993: 238) 21 common theme of social gerontology (Higgs 1995, e.g., Phillipson 1982, Ginn 1993).

Despite the overlapping concern with exclusion from citizenship based in age, some of the more nuanced distinctions between procedural and social rights in old age have failed to make their way to childhood studies. Instead, the arguments around youth citizenship tend to imply that children’s meaningful public participation merits the label of citizenship, apparently contesting Marshall’s depiction of children as pre-citizens. These arguments do not, however, contest the age-based differentiation of rights (e.g., they are not arguing for a younger right to work, consent to sex, or vote). Instead, some seem to suggest that by applying the mere label of citizenship to young people, their exclusion

(which seems to mean a lack of respect for their opinions and contributions) can be resolved (e.g., Smith et al 2005, Weller 2007).7 Many of those citing Marshall's

"exclusion of childhood" as the problem, however, seem to have missed his point that defining childhood as a stage of "becoming" is essential to the production of adult citizenship. Indeed, the commonly cited quotation above is embedded in this context:

The education of children has a direct bearing on citizenship, and, when the state

guarantees that all children shall be educated, it has the requirements and the

nature of citizenship definitely in mind. It is trying to stimulate the growth of

citizens in the making. The right to education is a genuine social right of

citizenship, because the aim of education during childhood is to shape the future

adult. Fundamentally it should be regarded, not as the right of the child to go to

school, but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated. And there is

here no conflict with civil rights as interpreted in an age of individualism. For

7 An exception to this is Gonzales (2015), who inverts this approach and argues for the ways in which cultural citizenship should be reflected in legal rights for transnational youth. 22 civil rights are designed for use by reasonable and intelligent persons, who have

learned to read and write. Education is a necessary prerequisite to civil freedom.

(1992[1950]: 16)

In other words, childhood is excluded from the pool of (civil, and, though he doesn’t say so here, political) adult rights and responsibilities, but not from a position of national belonging. The rights and responsibilities of children and adults are qualitatively different, and Marshall doesn’t specify the responsibilities of children beyond implying they involve learning to be reasonable and literate, but he certainly does not suggest these rights and responsibilities are unimportant or unrelated to a valued position in society.

Ironically, he ultimately makes a far stronger argument for the social belonging of youth than those advocates of “youth citizenship” speaking against him.

This is a particularly important genealogical consideration given that Marshall’s argument was primarily concerned with mapping (and fixing) the relationship between class welfare and the state. Contrary to what would be expected from a more simplistic vision of age-based exclusion, childhood and old age actually preceded the poor as “the first modern ‘welfare classes’ in European welfare states” (Leisering 2003: 209; cf.

Glennerster and Le Grand 1995). Leisering frames this as a state’s concern with ensuring the “security” of its citizenry (i.e., making sure that children and the elderly are not destitute despite not being active in the labor force) rather than ensuring its “equality”

(which Marshall argues is the main value of “social rights” like education and pensions).

And yet, the overlapping concerns with the relationship between rights, responsibilities, and national membership across classes raise tantalizing questions about the role of age identity in the genealogy of modern citizenship. 23 If, as Lister and some other researchers of youth citizenship ultimately intend, we define citizenship more inclusively as a relationship with the government8, negotiated and characterized by social participation, then childhood is not excluded so much as taken for granted. But what is lost in this change in definitions is the central position of

“equality.” Marshall’s focus (and indeed, that of most citizenship studies) was on how citizenship rights and responsibilities constrained and produced (class/socioeconomic) equality. And once a definition of citizenship allows for the differentiation of rights and responsibilities based on identity, even age identity, its use as a prescriptive model for expanding equality becomes, to say the least, a lot more complicated.

By the 1990s, citizenship studies had already moved towards an empirical emphasis on how citizenship is differentiated across identities (Bell 1995, Lister 1997, Isin and

Wood 1999). Within this context, Hall et al (1998) argue that the normative transition from childhood to citizen-adulthood (as implied by Marshall and most others) masks the ways that age intersects with other identities to create very different life course trajectories. They argue that this conflation of citizenship and adulthood falsely depicts citizenship as universally experienced by all citizens. Instead, they call for an analytical separation of adulthood and citizenship in order to better recognize the diversity of identities (e.g., gender, race, religion) experienced and developed during both youth and adulthood, which should in turn lead to an improved analysis of “the important distinction between the normative and material dimensions of citizenship” (1998: 311).

8 And usually this means a relationship with the state, but transnational research with youth is increasingly moving towards a vision of citizenship that can be simultaneously global, transnational, and local (cf. Koyama 2016). The best of these incorporate much of Aihwa Ong’s (1996; 1999; 2006) theorization of cultural, transnational, and neoliberal citizenships. 24 This argument is fundamental to the approach taken in this dissertation, which takes the relationship between citizenship and age as its central point of inquiry.

In a similar vein, Sandi Kawecka Nenga (2012) examines the ways that monolithic definitions of “community” contribute to seeing both youth and adult civic participation as homogenous within age groups. Kawecka Nenga argues that youth’s varying degrees of access to various adult civic and political communities, e.g., a young person might be able to join a national LGBT organization but be excluded from joining LGBT events in their hometown, reveals differential paths of social membership across the life course.

When we move away from examining youth entry to “the community” (of adults), she argues, we can see that different communities have different age-based barriers for entry.

This highlights the value of models of citizenship that hone in on points of disjunction

(i.e., the circumstances under which rights, responsibilities, and belonging change).

Examining, rather than reforming, prescriptions for citizenship provides a rich ground for analyses of intergenerational, and particularly familial, rights and responsibilities, and their role in negotiating national belonging. Brian Duff’s comparisons of parenthood in the citizenship theories of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rorty, and West, describe a realm of

“insecurities and fundamentalism” that plague the ideal (adult) citizenship. Duff shows that the host of specific rights and responsibilities of parenthood (entailed by the

“exclusion” of childhood) often motivate contradictory roles for parents as seeds of citizen virtue, insecurity, fundamentalism, and, finally, perhaps, pluralism.

Analyses of "educational citizenship" are particularly concerned with the rights and responsibilities that attend a student identity, such as the right to representation and participation within school governance (e.g., Macedo and Costa Araújo 2014). Most of 25 these also take a prescriptive approach to citizenship. That is, they are generally concerned with expanding youth access to a short list of legally enshrined rights and responsibilities rather than with analyzing the mechanisms that produce and limit students' belonging. In contrast, the anthropology of education has focused more on the role of schooling as a site of cultural practice. For example, Bradley Levinson argues that the "social belonging" and "membership" aspects of citizenship are best captured in "an anthropological concept of identity," which leads him to the less prescriptive question,

"what forms of education constitute citizen identities" (2011: 280). But for Levinson as for many anthropologists studying more formal citizenship education (also referred to as

“civic education”), the citizen identities in question are largely (though not exclusively) citizen identities imagined in adult futures.

Research on formal schooling and citizenship tends to frame youth in relation to their future adulthoods, and in doing so risk reifying ethnocentric teleologies of age (Bucholtz

2002). Bucholtz calls instead for an "anthropology of youth" that zooms in on the cultural practices making up youth identities, wherein identity is intended to imply something

"agentive, flexible, and ever-changing" (2002: 532). To address Bucholtz's call, this dissertation explores the relationship of youth and citizenship as a normative path through an age horizon and reintroduces teleological ideologies of youth as a culturally relevant object of study. It furthermore considers prescriptive definitions of citizenship - age- inclusive or not - to be culturally relevant discursive frames shaping popular conceptions of belonging and membership. However, rather than using a prescriptive model for analysis, the following chapters build on the governmental approaches of Cruikshank’s

(1999) “citizen-subjects” and Rose and Novas’s biocitizenship (2005). 26

Governmental Citizenship

What I am calling the governmental approach is particularly relevant to citizenship studies that examine the rights of children and youth to education, in which the right to education is inextricable from compulsory school attendance, child labor laws, and popular discourses about youth. As Cati Coe points out,

Education, as one of the state’s obligations to its citizens, is also a means by

which citizens critique and put pressure on the state to provide for them. Schools

thus become places where the relationship between a state and its citizens is

negotiated, with each side seeking to influence the other. (2005:5)

In other words, although the practices and policies of formal schooling are aimed inculcate students into citizenship, they do a good deal more (and less) than they set out to do. In order to analyze that, “rights and responsibilities” need to be analyzed empirically (rather than juridically).

Barbara Cruikshank’s book, The Will To Empower: Democratic citizens and other subjects (1999), effectively shifted the analytical frame of citizenship from a prescription of particular rights and responsibilities to a description of governmental mechanisms that worked through identification with the state. Rather than focusing on how governments exclude portions of their populations, she reframes citizenship as a technology in order to emphasize “the means by which government works through rather than against the subjectivities of citizens” (1999: 69). Cruikshank builds on the idea that, as Li put it later,

“Foucault understood subjects to be formed by practices of which they might be unaware, and to which their consent is neither given nor withheld” (2007: 25). This approach was 27 groundbreaking in the context of citizenship studies that focused on the implications of exclusion (particularly British concerns with the expansion of social rights and the civic responsibilities of “active citizenship,” e.g. Hall et al 2000, Bell 1999). Instead,

Cruikshank wholly inverted the analysis by arguing that insofar as exclusion is produced by accountability, it is not the opposite of national membership so much as it is constitutive of it. As she explains it, "Technologies of citizenship, such as those aimed at empowering ‘the poor,’ link the subjectivity of citizens to their subjection, and link activism to discipline” (67). In Cruikshank’s model of citizenship, citizen rights - as much as their responsibilities - can be coercive and disciplinary. All citizenship must also entail subjection: in the moment of identification with citizen rights, one also becomes accountable for and subject to regulation of that identification (c.f. Shaw 2012, Garcia

2005).

Cruikshank’s analysis of the ‘citizen-subject’ is particularly valuable when read in conjunction with Donzelot’s (1979) classic, The Policing of Families. Donzelot’s genealogical exploration of the state’s relationship with its citizens through public and private spheres provides a particularly useful template for understanding citizenship in a state like Ecuador where constitutional protections are often unenforced (Roberts 2012).

The Policing of Families depicts a transition in 18th century France from the family as a patriarchal authority protected and aided by the state to the family as a site for surveillance, assistance, and hygienic interventions. His attention to the differentiation of families - and family members - identifies a host of mechanisms for calling citizens into intergenerational relationships of self-government and political participation. To

Cruikshank’s emphasis on the accountability of the (public) citizen, Donzelot adds a 28 discussion in the change of the autonomy (and accountability) of the family in the private sphere. For example, as the family became a medium, rather than an object, of government, the moral autonomy of the family was increasingly contingent on fulfilling normative responsibilities to the state. His analysis of the familial configurations of citizenship highlight the role of state institutions in shaping individuals' accountability to each other. If the state institution of schooling is more explicit in its efforts to produce citizens than some of the other institutions of Donzelot's analysis, schooling's mechanisms of citizenship are no less complex.

Donzelot’s emphasis on moral (rather than juridical) accountability for the betterment of the family is particularly critical to understanding the way that rights and responsibilities take shape for children, given that their participation in public (schooling) depends on their familial relationships. Donzelot concludes, “The procedures of social control depend much more on the complexity of intrafamilial relationships than on its complexes, more on its craving for betterment than on the defense of its acquisitions”

(1979: 94). Like Foucault, his mentor and colleague, Donzelot sees “the family not as a point of departure, a manifest reality, but as a moving resultant, an uncertain form”

(1979:xxv). In highlighting the “constructedness” and “productiveness” of family, he analyzes it as a mechanism similar to institutions like formal schooling. As I analyze the age identities of my 10th grade informants as they move between school and home, I build on Donzelot in seeing these as parallel sites for negotiation of national belonging (rather than seeing the intimacy of home as “natural” versus school as “constructed”).

The connection between public institutions and “private” interactions is central to the

Foucault’s ([1975] 1995) concept of “docile bodies.” In his exposition on that theme in 29 Discipline and Punish, Foucault uses the example of parochial schooling to illustrate how institutional practices and embodied experience became linked through temporal structures that he labeled “disciplinary time.” He pointed out that the efforts to organize the micro-scales of time into regular, measured amounts were of a piece with the macro- scale temporal organization of “evolutive historicity” that reflected the same

“segmentation, seriation, synthesis, and totalization” (160). In a well chosen selection from a manual of classroom time-tables, Foucault draws the reader’s attention to how disciplinary time is embodied: “At the first sound of the bell all the pupils will kneel, with their arms crossed and their eyes lowered…” (La Salle, Conduite…27-28, quoted in

Foucault 1995: 150). He poetically concludes, “Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power” (1995: 152).

Nancy Lesko (2001/2012) references the same quotation in her argument that adolescence is a life stage centrally defined by a temporal ideal of slow and steady progression, which she glosses as “becoming.” Lesko argues that this understanding of adolescence is itself a technology of citizenship, “a social space in which to talk about the characteristics of people in modernity, to worry about the possibilities of these social changes, and to establish policies and programs that would help create the modern social order and citizenry” (5:2001). This reframes age as an identity that does not simply reflect the intersection of physical development and social mores, but is itself a technique for governing populations. For example, Lesko argues that the modern definition of adolescence justifies and produces the characterization of modernity as progressing towards ever-greater, better developed, more rational futures. Although her approach recognizes the “constructedness” of adolescence as a life stage and notes how such 30 normative frameworks function as a form of discipline, she limits her analysis to the historical connections made between the characterizations of that single stage and the shifting social anxieties it is connected to. Lesko doggedly resists the temptation to naturalize an understanding of adolescence as a precursor to adulthood, quite rightly identifying that as evidence of Western discourses of development and becoming. She argues, as I note elsewhere in this dissertation, that youth who deviate from normative life course trajectories (by “growing up too fast”) offend public sensibilities because they are aging “out of order.” Her analysis of the discourse around that “correct order” provides a historical (and, above all, colonial) explanation for the homogenization of that sequence.

This dissertation builds on Lesko’s analysis of “adolescence” as a technology of citizenship by analyzing how Ecuadorian youth identities are negotiated through structures and practices at home and in school that are aimed at producing good citizens.

More specifically, the concept of the “citizen life cycle” I develop in Part 3 incorporates

Lesko’s approach to youth identity by emphasizing the practices and structures that discipline youth’s age identities and highlighting the ways they link back to national belonging. Although she does not offer an alternative etic frame specific to age (or youth), Lesko generally approaches age in the same way that Foucault analyzes identity, power, and the subject more broadly.9 My own analysis examines the “citizen life cycle” as the normative life course trajectory that emerges from understanding age as a technology of citizenship. But it also contextualizes the citizen life cycle as a single

9 Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert Dreyfus, 2nd ed., 208–26. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. https://foucault.info/doc/documents/foucault-power-en-html. 31 “path” within a much wider and more variable “age horizon,” building on the life course literatures discussed above. Furthermore, rather than framing “youth becoming” primarily in relation to other non-age based technologies of citizenship as Lesko does, the concept of the citizen life cycle emphasizes how “youth becoming” gets constructed as a

“life stage” within a larger normative “life cycle.” I pay particular attention to the effects of policies, infrastructures, and practices my informants encounter in their daily attendance in high school.

Biocitizenship

All of the authors discussed here--Coe, Cruikshank, Donzelot, and Lesko—ground their analyses on Foucault’s understanding of governmentality, so it is no surprise they share a concern with how individuals’ perceptions of their rights and responsibilities are organized through institutions. But none of them incorporated the more bodily aspects of his theory in their approaches to citizenship and social belonging. Foucault’s concept of biopower is simply, “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy” (2007[1997]: 1). In other words, these political strategies do not just respond to, but both make possible and constrain particular biological paths (Epstein 2007, Klawiter 2008). In Klawiter’s (2008) book on the biopolitics of breast cancer, for example, activists’ agitation for greater public and medical recognition of the ambiguous and liminal “pre-cancer” identity both helps achieve access to early screenings that will shape whole populations’ life expectancies and also reshapes how they experience health and medicine. 32 Rose and Novas (2005) brought Foucault’s concept of biopower to citizenship studies through Petryna’s (2002) concept of “biological citizenship,” to draw attention to health- centered rights and responsibilities negotiated between populations and the state.

Although Rose and Novas offer an inclusive definition of biocitizenship that makes room for both biosociality and “regimes of the self,” this term has been largely taken up in contexts like the ones they describe, in which “activism and responsibility have now become not only desirable but virtually obligatory” (451). For example, in her provocatively titled article, “The Risk of Age,” Antje Kampf (2010) applies the concept of biocitizenship to the matrix of (chronological) age-based responsibilities for prostate cancer screening, but stops short of recognizing “old age” as a site of biosociality in its own right. In fact, although social preoccupation with the health of aging bodies is an old concept, it is only recently that aging studies have begun to turn to these Foucauldian frameworks.10

A significant body of research on biological citizenship focuses on children (and families of children) living with a variety of illnesses and diseases from obesity to genetic disorders (e.g., Fitzgerald 2008, Wright 2009). But Steven Epstein’s observations on the role of age in medical research remain one of the only studies that considers age itself as an issue of biological citizenship. Epstein’s term, “biopolitical citizenship,” remains firmly in the realm of policy, health, and medicine, but shifts the emphasis to differentiation rather than exclusion, as his title, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in

Medical Research, implies. Epstein observes that both children and older people were

(eventually) included in the “inclusion-and-difference” paradigm of intended to remedy

10 Katz and Gish 2015 discuss the relevance of Foucault to old age in “Aging in the Biosocial Order.” They also discuss the relative absence of Foucault from analyses of old age until recently. 33 “underrepresentation” of women and minorities in medical research. He proposes that age identity - and particularly childhood - works differently from other identity politics in this biomedical paradigm because,

children are not a self-identified political constituency in the United States the

way that "women" or "people of color" are, for the simple reason that, most of the

time, children themselves are not agents in the political arena. Children don't

represent themselves; their interests are always represented by others. (2007: 118)

Epstein’s point is well taken, and, indeed, frequently made in relation to children in less health-centered discussions of citizenship. A more successful application of the concept of biocitizenship to children eschews the activist element altogether, as in

Petherick’s (2011) discussion of youth manipulation of biomedical discourses in high school physical education classes. And in Petherick’s analysis, an interesting shift takes place: in addition to framing biocitizenship in terms of a sustainable (health) relationship between one’s self and a governing institution, i.e., as a ‘good student’, the child-as- biocitizen must also create a foundation for an imagined future adult self to participate in a more abstractly imagined state. For example, Petherick describes the rationale for participation in organized sports in high school in order to become a healthy adult who can continue to use the skill of running to stay in shape without the continued support of state organized sports (cf. “biopedagogies” in Wright 2009). This temporal concern of the youth citizen as simultaneously a concern of the present and the imagined future runs throughout this dissertation.

Perhaps it is the popular imagery of youthful bodies as the epitome of health that explains the limited emphasis on biocitizenship in discussions of youth citizenship. 34 Barcelos (2013) provides a thorough analysis of biopower in public health interventions on teen pregnancy, but hers in the exception. Far more plentiful is the literature (and popular discourse) framing adolescence as a period of both biologically and socially determined risk, such as the depiction of teen pregnancy as physically dangerous as well as a recipe for poverty. This dissertation also benefits from analyses of sexual citizenship that seek to dismantle dominant notions of private and public spaces (e.g., Fonseca et al

2012, Cossman 2002, Evans 1993). Above all, it benefits from the questions raised by

Rose and Novas about how presuppositions of the biological have “shaped conceptions of what it means to be a citizen, and underpinned distinctions between actual, potential, troublesome, and impossible citizens” (2005: 440). It is the temporal presuppositions of the biological, such as the presupposition that youth psychosocial skills develop homogeneously and within (school year) age cohorts, that provide new insights into how both social identities and inequality are maintained. In other words, biocitizenship draws attention to the ways that some of the most “naturalized” aspects of identity construction

(i.e., the body, health, developmental normativity) intersect with projects of national belonging. Governmental (bio)citizenship’s emphasis on accountability reframes prescriptions for the equal distribution of rights and allows us to begin to answer the question: how do rights and responsibilities change with age?

Dissertation Overview

In order to better understand the relationship between age and citizenship, this dissertation looks at how Ecuadorian high schools privilege certain temporal frames in tying youth identities to particular rights and responsibilities. The data collected for this 35 analysis is introduced in the next chapter, where I discuss the sites, people,11 and methods that I draw on for the rest of the dissertation. The central argument, that age identity is a citizenship project, is grounded in a phenomenology of age as presented in Part 2 (Age

Horizons) and an analysis of the governmental management of students’ normative life cycles as presented in Part 3 (The Citizen Life Cycle).

In order to analyze the ways that my 10th grade informants in Ecuador experience age,

I develop the concept of "age horizons.” In Part 2 (chapters 3 and 4), I present the literatures I build on as a genealogy of age in anthropology that starts with the gauntlet thrown by Margaret Mead in Coming of Age in Samoa. The section continues with the problems raised by interdisciplinary studies of old age, and shows how they are largely resolved by taking a life course approach emphasizing the interdependency of biology and culture. Caroline Bledsoe's contribution of the concept of “contingency” is particularly valuable in characterizing the relationship between culture, time, and biology in cross-cultural research on aging. From there I show how cross-cultural comparisons help us better understand return to the “commonsense” frameworks of chronological age.

Then I point to the gaps in our understanding of age variation within cultures, and introduce the concept of “horizons” as a starting point for the theoretical framework I develop as a solution.

Part 2 explores how my informants’ age-based subjectivities are experienced in a quotidian present that can be shared intergenerationally. The “Age Horizon” chapters take a phenomenological approach to my student informants' experiences of youth by exploring the subjectivity of time within the constraints of age identity. This begins in

11 Short descriptions of each student can be found in Appendix A 36 chapter three, "The Phenomenology of the Quotidian School Day," where I examine my informants' daily experiences in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological concept of "horizons." Contingent and inflexible "guideposts" of time, culture, and biology populate these age horizons, and the subject at the center ages as she moves through the guideposts. Age identity is theorized here as a horizon through which a temporally dynamic subject travels.

Part 2 continues with the problems raised by interdisciplinary studies of old age, and shows how they are largely resolved by taking a life course approach emphasizing the interdependency of biology and culture. Chapter four, on the intergenerational stakes of sharing subjectivity, explores how such horizons are collaboratively defined and experienced. Drawing first on Bakhtin, intergenerationally constructed chronotopes challenge the reification of age as an individual experience, and suggest that time is experienced between (rather than within) subjects. Drawing next on Elizabeth Grosz's feminist corporealist phenomenology, the changes in age subjectivity that are often framed as "becoming autonomous" are reframed as multigenerational changes and intimately shared experiences. This opens up radical possibilities for what a "life course trajectory" even means, but it also grounds Part 3's conceptualization of the “citizen life cycle" by highlighting the individuality of a socially mobile life course trajectory as an age-based technique of citizenship (rather than a "natural" characteristic of age identity).

Part 2 points out the gaps in our understanding of age variation within cultures, and explores the concept of “horizons” as a starting point for the theoretical framework I develop as a solution. 37 Part 3 (The Citizen Life Cycle) looks at how my informants orient themselves in relation to youth as a period of "becoming." High school infrastructures, practices, and policies are analyzed as temporal guideposts marking out a normative path through my informants' age horizons. Each chapter examines how a different temporal aspect of

"youth becoming" contributes to a larger citizenship project. Normative youth identities are analyzed as unidirectional, discontinuous, and impermanent, and this undergirds

Ecuadorian discourses on national progress, educational reforms as a means to reduce inequality, and the age-based differentiation of rights as a mechanism of inclusion. How age identity shapes, and is shaped by, techniques of citizenship is explored through the idea of the "citizen life cycle." I define this concept with particular attention to the ways in which my 10th grade informants experience their age identities unidirectionally (i.e., always getting older), discontinuously (i.e., expecting a major transition between "youth" and "adulthood"), and impermanently (i.e., you'll only be this age for so long). I propose that these three temporal elements are key to understanding how normative aging in

Ecuador contributes to mediates the differentiation of rights, responsibilities and belonging.

Part 3 begins with the argument in chapter five that the unidirectionality produced in high schools' “temporal architectures” links youth aging to “national progress.” When that happens, "growing up too fast" (ie., having a non-normative youth age identity) is attributed to the “irrational choices” of individuals or families. Not only that, these choices, and the “alternative” life course trajectories that result, are held accountable for damaging (perjudicar) the nation's progress. It is no accident that "deviant" youth identities are experienced more frequently in intersection with other less privileged 38 identities (e.g., girls, Afro-Ecuadorians and indigenous people, low-income families), and chapter five shows how this occurs through the explicit effort to ameliorate class, race, and gender inequality by tying national belonging to "becoming."

Chapter six shows how discontinuity shapes my informants' experiences of youth, and argues that schooling is largely responsible for producing that temporal frame of age.

It suggests that school reforms targeted at expanding youth equality through discontinuity actually mask the ways that policies like universal school attendance make individuals accountable for inequality upon entry into adulthood. Reframing the juxtaposition of childhood-as-a-period-of-learning and adulthood-as-a-period-of-providing as an age- based technology of citizenship opens up a host of novel explanations for how race, class, and gender inequality are reproduced in adulthood not in spite of, but because of age- based efforts to use schooling to level the playing field.

Chapter seven's analysis of students’ frustration at an influx of “bad kids” to their school suggests that their framing of citizenship training as an "impermanent" state also helps explain the contingency of rights across the life course. The "riskiness" of youth reveals that subjecthood (or the restriction of rights) is tied to citizenship not only through techniques of "responsibilization" but also by linking identity to the age-based distribution of social rights, remedies, and protections. That is, by normalizing age as an

"always temporary" identity, mechanisms like “youth risk” help justify the attenuation of rights by gender, race, and class. I consider what "exclusion" from citizenship based on age has in common with "exclusion" based on other intersecting identities (i.e., class, gender, and race) and argue that the analysis of age reshapes our understanding of that intersectionality by placing it in time. 39 In Part 4, I revisit the contributions of the concepts of "age horizons" and "citizen life cycle" within the literatures of the life course, citizenship, youth, and education. I conclude with a call for an intersectional life course approach, and discuss next steps for addressing questions left unanswered here.

The theoretical ambitions of this dissertation emerge out of analyzing the very particular experiences of 14 Quiteño 10th graders and those of their families and classmates. The next chapter introduces both the methods that I used to translate the experiences they chose to share and the context that makes their experiences so widely relevant. What follows is how I found my feet. 40 2. Methods and Setting: Life Course Ethnography with Quiteño Students

For such a small country, Ecuador manages to squeeze in a lot of different regional identities. The coast has a reputation for being laid back, the highlands have a reputation for being conservative and serious (and this can be further broken down into the more agricultural religious southern sierra versus the northern sierra centered around Quito as the more secular and ambitious seat of political power), and the Amazon (when it’s mentioned at all) is still seen as uncivilized.12 Quito, as the home of the traditional social and political elite have been located since colonization, is largely considered to have the best and oldest schools. Ecuador’s modern school system was established in the mid-19th century as part of an effort to seed a national, Catholic identity (Crespo and Ortiz 1998).

The first public schools emerged in the liberal revolution three decades later as a secular

12 You might think, with all the power gained by the indigenous political movements, that this would have changed. But the indigenous groups that lead these movements are generally highlands groups, and the Amazonian populations have relatively little clout even within those contexts. However, one educational context in which the Amazon does actually come up is in discussions of the initiatives for “culturally appropriate” bilingual education, which indigenous activist groups were able to have included in Ecuador’s new Constitution under Correa. To the extent that Ecuador’s primary and secondary education has been studied by sociologists and anthropologists, the contested quality of bilingual education has dominated the conversation.

The districting of the Ministry of Education has the Division of Coast and Sierra as the largest scale of regional differences, something that shows up both in how funds are distributed as well as in what constitutes a calendar “school year”. Afro-Ecuadorians, who are stereotyped as “from the coast,” have been largely erased from public discourse on race and inequality in formal schooling, but this may be changing as Ecuadorian social scientists are now starting to give a great deal of attention to the experiences of Afro-

Ecuadorians in a variety of contexts. 41 rejection of the country’s Constitutional relationship with the Catholic Church (Guerrero

Blum 2003), and have remained secular since then.13

During the decade that Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa spent in office,

“revolution” was a popular phrase. Just as “The Citizens’ Revolution” (la revolución ciudadana) was his campaign slogan, “The Educational Revolution” (la revolución educativa) became the catchphrase for the sweeping policy and infrastructure changes

(not to mention huge economic investment) that his administration would institute.

Although the changes to elementary and secondary education never grabbed as many headlines as the more controversial regulation of higher education, the Correa administration certainly put its money where its mouth was. From 2009 to 2017, Correa's

Ministry of Education built more than 230 new schools, eradicated school fees (including for textbooks and uniforms), started free school lunches programs, instituted massive teacher training programs, and raised national high school (bachillerato) attendance by an impressive 22% (El Comercio, 24 May 2017). As you might expect from the slogan,

Correa framed the investment in education in terms of its potential for ameliorating national class disparities, as seen for example in one of his weekly addresses in 2014:

One of the structural causes of poverty is the terrible public education that the

poorest [people] receive. Now we are breaking that vicious cycle of poverty and

giving justice. The poor need opportunities, not handouts. … The most important

13 It is worth mentioning, however, that this has not been without challenge, e.g., in 1994 the National Conference of Bishops was still lobbying hard to include religious education in the public schools (Guerrero Blum 2003, Mora 1996). Furthermore, while there is no official religious education, I observed teachers explicitly extolling Christianity in class as part of teaching students good discipline and morality, and in one memorable case, called out an atheist student for their beliefs. 42 thing that we do is the educational revolution.14 (El Comercio, 1 January 2014,

Enlace ciudadano 358)

In short, the investment in education was framed not so much in terms of the rights or nurturing of children and youth, but in terms of the right of future adult Ecuadorian citizens to have been educated.15 Access to high quality education, in this framework, is not only a citizen right and a responsibility of the state, but one which works specifically through the transformation of populations. This transformation is simultaneously understood through the progressing needs and abilities of individuals as well as through the improvement of the nation. The ages for formal schooling coincide with the legal transformation from one citizenship status (minority) to another (majority), but the huge changes of Ecuador’s education system are making this normative transition to adulthood more widereaching than they have ever been before. Working in schools and the homes of students during the "revolution" was thus an opportunity to observe and discuss the impact of policies, infrastructure, and discourse on expectations of the life course. This dissertation thus seeks to understand how citizenship works through and on the changing age identity of its populations by turning the lens of the life course onto the governance of Ecuadorian national membership and identity through its public high schools.

Both of the schools where I conducted research were more than 70 years old. This was definitely a point of pride for students, as the best reputed public schools in Quito

14 “Una de las causas estructurales de la pobreza es la pésima educación pública que recibían los más pobres. Ahora rompemos ese círculo vicioso de la pobreza dando justicia. Los pobres necesitan oportunidades no limosna. … Lo más importante que hacemos es la revolución educativa.” (Correa, Rafael. “Enlace Ciudadano 358, Desde Calderón, Provincia de Pichincha.” El Comercio, January 25, 2014. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/enlace-ciudadano-358-calderon-provincia.html) 15 This is not to say there were not also significant reforms of the laws protecting the rights of children and youth, e.g. Proyecto de Ley Orgánica de la Juventud (2011). 43 (and Ecuador) were also among the oldest16. In fact, until the “educational revolution” few, if any, schools had been built in decades (El Comercio, 24 May 2017). Until then, those who could afford it generally sent their children to private, often religious, institutions if they were unable to access those best reputed, and oldest, schools. Apart from the illustrious careers of some alumni, those school reputations were probably largely based in the long-standing approach to enrollment. Until President Correa’s executive decree in 2009, there was no location-based system for applying for secondary schools, and instead students could apply to any school they wanted. The most desirable schools thus limited who they would accept based on their elementary school performance, and the GPA (promedio) cut-offs were for the most competitive schools were widely known. For example, out of a 20 point GPA, the best schools would have accepted only those students with a 19-20, and even someone with a perfect score might be passed up if another candidate had a better disciplinary record or had won valedictorian (abanderado) of their elementary school.

When President Correa took office, that began to change, and quickly. The old system was criticized for the deep inequality in education quality, and one of the earliest dramatic changes of the “educational revolution” was the introduction of a location-based school enrollment system. This was accompanied by an immediate and expansive school- construction program to expand the number of available spots so that any student who wanted to attend school could enroll somewhere. The location-based system, usually called “sectorization” (sectorización) by my informants (and often called “zoning,” or zonificación, in official documents), did not entirely replace the old competitive system,

16 They also tended to be found in the center of Quito, which is, not coincidentally, where most of the middle to upper class Quiteños could be found. 44 but rather created dual enrollment that still privileged the choice of the best qualified elementary graduates, while guaranteeing that less competitive students still had some access to their local schools. So, for example, if Colegio Conquistador had 200 spots open for their incoming 8th grade class, the first hundred spots would go to those valedictorians and high achievers who chose it, and the second hundred spots remained a lottery for students living within a 4km radius of the school. The ostensible goal was to create a more egalitarian school system based in more consistent education quality across schools, something that many of my informants agreed was happening as a result

(although many saw this as lowering the quality of their school to average rather than raising the bad schools to their level).

Most of my informants were part of the “competitive” group of enrollees, including a few elementary school valedictorians, rather than the “local” group, and so it is little surprise that they complained that the educational quality of their school was “decreasing to become more average” rather than setting the bar for all public schools. But their sense of loss must be understood within a much broader change in sentiment about the quality of pubic education. Every middle and working class person I spoke with agreed that public education was improving to such a degree that (non-elite) private education was now no longer worth the additional expense. This general opinion was at least partly substantiated by the closing of as many as 1,655 private schools in Quito alone during the decade of Correa’s presidency (El Comercio, 24 May 2017).

When people spoke enthusiastically about the changes in public education, one of the first named reforms were the efforts to minimize the economic barriers to access.

Most, if not all, fees for enrollment and attendance were erased in the name of making 45 education free (at least through 10th grade, that is, as long as it was mandatory to attend).

As curricula were standardized, textbook production was centralized and made free (with warnings on the manuals that read like the “not for individual sale” labels on candy).

Programs offering free uniforms and free food gradually began to roll out, starting in the areas with higher need (not, however, the schools where I conducted research). When the

Correa administration came to power, they poured money into the Ministry of Education

- doubling its investment in the first two years (Informe Educiudadania 2011). The administration also doubled the number of Ecuadorians receiving monthly allowances through a cash-transfer program, which even critics acknowledge “has improved the income, health, and education of the poorest” (de la Torre 2013). 17

A new bureaucratic infrastructure also accompanied a new approach to organizing school grades. The old system was broken into primary and secondary school, with students graduating from primary school in 7th grade and entering secondary school in

8th grade (I use the terms “elementary” and “high school” interchangeably to describe these overarching categories). The new system, however, has replaced these two overarching categories with three: first voluntary Beginning Education (0-5 years old), then mandatory “Basic Education,” (1-10th grade), and finally voluntary “Bachillerato”

(1-3rd grade, again). After that, students can apply to one of the public or private universities. Basic Education is separated into Kindergarten (1st grade), Elementary (2nd-

4th grade), Middle (5th-7th grade), and High School (8th-10th grade). Although there are

17 Although the Correa administration’s educational reforms are too many to list, the implementation of new policies and laws (particularly those found in the Plan Decenal 2006-2015, the 2008 Constitution, the Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir 2009-2013, the 2011 Ley Orgánica de Educación Intercultural, and the yearly Planificación Institucional of the Ministry of Education) are now principally administered through a new bureaucratic system of zones, districts, and circuits that was built between 2010 and 2013. 46 public schools that include all of the school grades together, most public schools in Quito house either “primary” (1-7th grade) populations or “secondary” (8th-10th grade plus 1st-3rd bachillerato) populations18. For example, both of the schools where I conducted research included students attending 8th-3rd grade.

Although the centralization of the education system through the expanded Ministry of Education has universally applied most of its policies across public schools, it has not entirely done away with the historical divisions between public schools run by the state (a fiscal) and public schools run by the city (a municipal). I chose to work at one of each:

Instituto Tecnológico Superior Educativo (ITSE) Maestro” was the fiscal and “Colegio

Conquistador” was the municipal. ITSE Maestro seemed to have to deal with more red tape than Conquistador, something that became apparent on my first day there when the

ITSE Maestro main office could not accept a delivery because the Ministry of Education had the keys to the gym where it was meant to be unloaded. On the other hand, a senior teacher at Colegio Conquistador (the municipal) reported that the teacher shortage they were experiencing while I was there at least partly resulted from fiscal schools getting first pick of the teachers available19. Despite the different systems, a given school's reputation did not seem to have much to do with which level of government administered it. Although Colegio Conquistador and ITSE Maestro were both considered good schools, the former was identified as one of the best schools in the country whereas ITSE

Maestro’s reputation was limited to historically producing the best accountants.

18 Some of the new schools built during the Correa expansion were limited to only the Bachillerato, however. 19 At Colegio Conquistador, for example, teachers attributed a wave of teachers quitting to new policies that required teachers to stay at the school for 8 hours a day (effectively ending the common practice of supplementary jobs). 47 Following the standardization of the national curriculum, Colegio Conquistador retained its special Bachillerato Internacional (international baccalaureate) program (which ran like a magnet program inside the school), but ITSE Maestro’s special accounting degree was replaced with the more generic Bachillerato General Unificado (national high school diploma).

As public institutions, both schools I chose for the study were directly impacted by the education reforms. These day-to-day consequences of policy change were particularly visible to the student populations I selected for this study, who had entered the school in

8th grade (in 2011 at Conquistador and 2012 at Maestro), before many of the new policies had been completely rolled out. My participants were also concerned about how those policy changes would continue to impact them since they planned to remain in attendance through the completion of their Bachillerato (in 2017 at Conquistador and

2018 at Maestro).

The number of students in each of the 10th grade classrooms where I conducted daily participant observation fluctuated by a few students every day, but at approximately 35 per class, I was able to get to know everyone reasonably well over the four months of my research in each school. Watching and interacting with them in small ways throughout the day contributed a great deal to my general sense of the expectations of school-based interactions, and provided important context for understanding the personalities and behaviors of the kids who would ultimately participate in my study.

Research Design 48 My first trip to Ecuador was in 2008 when I stayed with my husband’s family for three months, living with in a house with four generations of family (his parents, his paternal grandmother, his sister, and his sister’s four children ages 2 to 10), and making daily visits to another house where his maternal grandmother, adopted elder, aunt, uncle, and cousins lived. They had been joined by another generation of babies by the time I made two preliminary data collection trips in 2011 and 2012. Data collection for the dissertation began when I arrived in Quito in August 2013 and ended when I left in June

2015. My original plan of staying for 12 months and spending spring semester in one school and fall semester in another was interrupted by a visa expiration and a baby.

Instead, I spent from March to July 2014 at Colegio Conquistador, did preliminary data analysis in the U.S. after my visa expired and then returned (with a three month old baby and a series of helpful grandmothers) from March to June 2015 to collect data at ITSE

Maestro.

Taking a life course approach to citizenship already suggested a number of methodological imperatives. First, age had to be taken as an object of inquiry that put the subjectively experienced body in social time. That is, age needed to be examined through the infrastructures and intimacies that governed the timing of transitions and their meaning. The first step was participant observation in the daily experiences of school, but this had to be contextualized within the less visible intimacy of home and family.

Furthermore, absent a longitudinal study that tracked changes over a lifetime, examining age in the context of a whole life required interviews that included links between multiple generations as well as an opportunity to collectively discuss and reflect on changes through historical time. Second, as in any empirical examination of citizenship, 49 discourses of national membership needed to be examined in relation to the rights and responsibilities as they are experienced by individuals. But as an examination of citizenship through the lens of the life course, this demanded special attention to those rights and responsibilities that govern individuals through time. In this case, that meant attention to the negotiation of students’ membership in their high schools and to the familial interdependencies constrained by and supporting that membership.

The description of the methods below follows the same sequence I employed in the field. At each of the schools I recruited, I began with school-based participant observation. Then I recruited 7 students (from each school) to form the foundation for focus groups and a series of three layered semi-structured interviews with students, parents, and a small multigenerational group of intimates chosen by students. Finally, I chose a family with whom I had a good rapport to conduct participant observation in informants’ homes.

Recruitment, Part 1

Recruitment of research sites began with my initial visits to high schools when I arrived in Quito in August 2013. I started with elite private schools, rather than middle class public ones, but after a number of informal interviews with alumni, teachers, and school administrators, a job teaching ESL for one of the elite schools, and a very positive preliminary meeting with the principal of another, I was informed that policies to protect the privacy of students prevented me from conducting the kind of research I proposed. In the meantime, thanks mostly to conversations with friends and taxi-drivers, I had identified Colegio Conquistador as an ideal “mid-level” municipal school. The process of 50 gaining permission was straightforward: first a perfunctory, if overly formal, letter from

Colegio Conquistador’s rector, then a signature from a mid-level bureaucrat. The latter I acquired by walking into the Ministry of Education wielding only the bright, slightly vacant smile of a well-intentioned foreign blonde who doesn’t quite know how the system works but really appreciates how kind everyone is. When I returned to Ecuador the next year, things were harder. As a fiscal, rather than a municipal, school, the rector of

ITSE Maestro had far less leeway for making decisions about things like letting a researcher in, and directed me back to the Ministry of Education. But in the year and a half since I had first arrived, the Ministry’s physical infrastructure had grown significantly, and I was redirected to a new district office where things were done with much longer lines and paperwork, and no smile, however bright, would cut through the tape20. When I headed back to ITSE Maestro with papers in hand, the rector amicably added his own signature (and with none of the stuffy ceremony or air of beneficence that accompanied the same act at Colegio Conquistador) and sent me off to make my own way as I would.

School-based Participant Observation

When I arrived at Colegio Conquistador, I didn’t know which grade or class I wanted to observe and started by visiting a number of grades and classes. Throughout my visits, I asked the students which grades they thought would be best for the purposes of my

20 It is also worth noting that this was actually quite consistent with the posters around the new North District Ministry building which promised that their new decentralized office would be able to give more attention to more people, and that this attention was intended to be far more egalitarian. Indeed, the hassle now seemed to be far more evenly distributed across all visitors, rather than reserved for those with race, class, or foreign privilege. 51 research, and eventually a consensus emerged that it was the 10th graders who were the most betwixt and between age identities, and would, therefore, have the most insight to offer for someone interested in understanding how rights and responsibilities change with age.

The 10th graders were neither as eager to please as the 8th graders nor as apathetic towards my existence as the 3rd years, and I soon found myself in the 10 grade class that was universally identified as the worst behaved. Having worked in a number of public middle and high schools in the U.S., including with gang involved youth, I felt more or less prepared for this situation when the inspector general explained it to me as he walked me over to introduce me to the teacher at the start of class. But instead of finding a class of aggressive and apathetic students, I learned that, at Colegio Conquistador, badly behaved meant primarily that they talked too much. This, I decided, was the right class for me.

Unlike my experiences of classroom research in the U.S., teachers’ opinions about my presence ranged from overly enthusiastic (in the English language classes) to utterly indifferent. I had expected to find at least one or two teachers who objected to the disruption my presence could hypothetically cause, but whether they were more optimistic about that than their U.S. counterparts had been or the hierarchical structure of the school administration left them feeling uncomfortable voicing such discomfort, I received no challenges from teachers. Another possible explanation was that they simply did not feel the same kind of ownership of the space, since while most U.S. high schools assign classrooms to teachers and students move around throughout the day, in Quito the classrooms are assigned to the students, and teachers go from room to room with 52 whatever materials they can carry. (The exceptions to this were the computer classes that took place in the labs at ITSE Maestro and the physical education classes at both schools, which were generally outside on the courts or fields, but were occasionally in the gymnasium. Colegio Conquistador also had a pool and had a couple of weeks of swimming classes in the middle of the semester.)

While teachers schlepped the occasional laptop (for powerpoint presentations or

YouTube videos), quizzes, and handouts between classrooms, students generally stayed in the room the whole day, except for the 45 minute recreation period in the middle, when they poured out to eat their lunches and hang out on the open grounds. At Colegio

Conquistador, students could purchase food (mostly of the hot snack variety) at the privately owned stand set up between the basketball court and the soccer fields, while teachers ate in a small cafeteria serving hot meals. At ITSE Maestro, students also ate outside (or wherever they found a good spot to sit), but it was hardly lunch time by the time recreation period came around 4pm.

At both schools, I started my day near the beginning of theirs - around 7:30am at

Colegio Conquistador and 1:30pm21 at ITSE Maestro. I left my recorder near the front of the room (having gotten written permission from the school administrators and verbal permission from the teachers and students in the first days I visited) and found a desk at the back of the room where I could take notes through the first two or three classes of the day. Although there was a little bit of awkward adjustment - thankfully I never followed through on my idea that I should go ahead and buy a school uniform to symbolically

21 This was not, contrary to my initial assumption, part of an effort to be flexible around the constraints of working youth. In fact, the school had a student body twice the size of its available space and rather than cutting the number of grades or class sizes in half, they split the school day in two so that the Bachillerato students attended in the morning and the 8th-10th graders attended in the afternoon and evening. 53 align myself with the students - the rest of the students accepted my presence quickly and without concern. Students came and chatted with me to fill the time between classes, although these tended to be the most inconsequential interactions I had with them, and generally on the theme of differences between the U.S. and Ecuador and whether I knew any celebrities (Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez in particular). This made our interactions just like most of the other between-class interactions: short, insignificant conversations, smartphone games, low-level hazing (hiding backpacks and pulling out chairs), and game fads reminiscent of the cootie-catcher fortune telling games of my childhood. The ease with which I was included in these activities spoke to their social triviality, but was also, I believe, supported by my efforts to demonstrate that I had little to no alignment with teachers (frequently forgetting teachers’ names, whispering questions in class, participating in passing notes, and generally being as respectful of teacher authority as possible instead of attempting to share it in any way).

At Colegio Conquistador, I observed a class of 35 students and at ITSE Maestro, the class I joined had 38 students. At both schools, my daily participant observation occurred with 7 different teachers, and was supplemented with a number of school-wide events, such as sex education assemblies and school pride events, as well as the regular student assembly in lines on the patio to sing the school hymn and listen to presentations from administrators and fellow students. By the time I finished participant observation in both schools, I had recorded about 114 hours of class time over 76 total days.

Recruitment, Part 2 54 A couple of weeks after I arrived at each school, I began the process of recruiting students for the triple interviews and home-based participant observation. That process looked like this:

Step 1: Ask the teacher of one of the classes I regularly sit in on to give me 10-15 minutes of class time to give my spiel. Wonder whether their exceptionally supportive responses were social nicety or relief at being responsible for 1/3 less class time.

Step 2: Go to the cheap internet cafe/copy shop and make 50 copies of the

“Recruitment Script”22 so that I don’t have to pay the inflated in-school copy shop prices, and marvel at the injustice of students being forced to cough up 5 cents a copy for the worksheets their teachers provide when I’m only paying 2 cents a sheet.

Step 3: Smile stiltedly as the teacher inevitably introduces me and my research as

“evaluating the good behavior” of the students. Hand out copies of my recruitment form at the front of each of the five rows of seven students for them to pass back, then begin my pitch by trying to categorically deny that I am evaluating their good behavior without appearing rude to the teacher who just gave me the floor. Be very clear that I have no affiliation with their school, for better or for worse.

Step 4: Continue the pitch by explaining that anyone who hands me back a recruitment form has not committed to participating in my study, but rather is just letting

22 See Appendix B 55 me know they could be interested in being invited along with their families. Say for the first of hundreds of times that they even if they do eventually consent to participate, they can always change their minds. Struggle to explain what I mean by “snacks” for the focus group, because the word I learned in Mexico means “dinner” here.

Step 5: Ask for any interested kids to hand the forms back in and let them know I’ll accept them later, too. Feel immensely relieved as more than half the class hands something back to me.

Step 6: Sit down at my desk in the back of the middle row and immediately start shuffling the pages according to gender, since achieving a decent balance of boys and girls will be my first way to narrow down who I will invite to participate.

Step 7: Start calling the homes of students who volunteered to try and set up a time to come over and go over the consent materials with them and their parents. Experience gratitude that so many kids volunteered, because the first round of calls turns into a first round of defections.

In the home-based consent process that followed, I explained the overall structure of the research design with the confidence that no students were participating because they felt pressure from parents or teachers. In general, the students who I consented in at this stage stayed in, with only two early withdrawals: Nelly,23 a Conquistador student whose

23 All names used in the dissertation are pseudonyms. 56 mother told me at the consenting stage that they were “too private” to be interested in participating in the series of interviews following the focus group, and who was eventually replaced by Jeaneth, and Liliana, a Maestro student who participated in the focus group and the one-on-one and mother-daughter interviews, but then decided she was done when my repeated contacts about organizing a third “core network” interview became onerous. In both cases, I was disappointed - Nelly would have provided an interesting angle as my only indigenous identifying participant, and Liliana’s candid reflections on how poverty shaped her experiences of high school and the life course stood out among all my interviews. Still, the recruitment phase went about as well as one could hope when asking a bunch of high school students to dedicate their free time to talking about how age shaped their rights and responsibilities.

Ultimately, from the school-based participant observation at Colegio Conquistador, 17 students volunteered and I selected three boys (Angel, Benjamin, and Pablo) and four girls (Luz, Estefany, Valentina, and Jeaneth) to participate in the series of interviews

(described below), and one boy (Angel) for home-based participant observation

(described below). From the 24 initial volunteers at ITSE Maestro, I selected four boys

(Michael, Lucas, Tomas, and Patricio) and three girls (Aurora, Alicia, and Liliana) to participate in the series of interviews, and one girl (Aurora) for home-based participant observation. 24

Interviews

24 See Appendix A for descriptions of each the 14 10th grade participants. 57 On days when I needed to coordinate interviews with those students I had selected to participate in the interview portion of the study, taking advantage of being in the same place at the same time was absolutely critical to confirming that our interview was actually going to take place. Only a few students had any device (like a cell phone) that made them easy to contact when we weren’t face to face, and catching the right people on a home phone was always chancy. And, like the youth I worked with in the U.S., my informants often forgot about dates we had established ahead of time, so those reminders were critical.

Nowhere were students’ challenges with following through on appointments more evident than in the focus groups that kicked off the participation of student informants after the consent process. I held the focus group at my apartment, as its location only a few blocks from both the schools and a popular mall made it easy to find and reasonably central. But at both schools, I ended up cancelling the first one we scheduled because only one kid showed up, despite my increasingly exasperated phone calls to their homes to find out whether they were coming. The second attempt included more confirmation calls ahead of time, but most of the kids still showed up at our meet up sites (outside the school and outside the mall, respectively) more than an hour late. Despite this, we did eventually manage five out of the seven informants in both cases, and the chance to have some group discussion about the themes of the research - their thoughts on school and siblings, their responsibilities at home, and what they thought citizenship meant - established the groundwork for both the rapport and the themes of the questions I would ask in the next rounds of interviews. 58 Although I did experience scheduling difficulties with the next phase of interviews as well (for example, I counted 19 cancellations, most right before I walked out the door to drive to their homes, for the 21 interviews I successfully scheduled with ITSE Maestro informants), the fact that they were cancelled (rather than simply no-shows) made those challenges much less frustrating. With these kinds of scheduling problems, it would be reasonable to wonder whether, perhaps, they were not really interested in participating. I certainly wondered that myself, particularly when I was making a fifth phone call to try and set something up, but the easy conversation and enthusiasm I generally met when I actually arrived for interviews relieved my doubts. The kids assured me that cancelling plans - including being hours late or simply not showing up - was totally normal, and that

I should not take it personally. I took it personally anyway, but I appreciated the explanation. Once we actually managed to have the interviews, they generally went smoothly. In general, students preferred to meet at home and their homes were private enough to speak confidentially (although a couple of exceptions included one who preferred to meet in my apartment, a few in a nearby coffeeshop, and one while we walked to a public park that really did not provide nearly enough privacy).

The first interview was one-on-one, something that was intended to solidify my primary affiliation with the student. At the end of the conversation, the students chose which of their parents they wanted to do the second interview with (at least, if they had two, which most of them did), and identified the 3-5 friends and family they would invite to the third interview. I generally began the first interviews by asking the students to walk me through what they did on an average weekday, starting when they woke up and ending when they went to bed. Then we moved on to discussions of friendships, of what 59 they could do to make their parents proud and disappointed, and what their parents could do to make them proud or disappointed; we talked about school and how they felt about it; I asked what they thought about the sex education they were receiving and what they thought was normal for romance among their peers; I finished by asking them what they thought citizenship meant.

In the second and third interviews, we revisited most of those themes (although I did not bring up sex education or romance), and added in a question about how things had changed since the previous generations were the age of my student informants. Although

I was careful not to reveal what students had told me, their answers in the first interview helped me to frame my questions in the latter interviews to elicit more complex and anecdote-filled responses. The non-verbal social dynamics that emerged during those interviews were equally informative. Generally the parent-child dyads were easy and intimate - hardly a surprise given that the students chose which parent they wanted to do it with - but the third interviews were more complex. Since I had directed the students to choose participants who were both close to them and represented a generational range, there was often a near-age sibling, a close cousin, an aunt or uncle, and sometimes a grandmother. These interviews, which I thought of as “core network” interviews, generally held the student at the center of the reflections, but often the student spoke little. Meanwhile, as different people responded to the questions and to each other, the alignments and agreements shifted in both subtle and striking ways. There were occasional moments that were very uncomfortable, particularly when parents wanted to demonstrate that they did not approve of some behavior or other that had come up (a

"bad" friendship, for example, or concern that their child did not behave properly in 60 school). There were also moments of affection that I that left me feel uncomfortably voyeuristic, for example, during an interview when I carefully observed a student stroking his grandmother’s arm with artless intimacy. But, on the whole, the dynamic was one of mutual interest, in which parents held the authority for subtly directing who would speak and when, and kids generally performed a respectful chorus. Kids were more likely to vocally disagree with their age-mates, and when they agreed with them I took that more seriously than the general head-nodding with which they corroborated most statements from their elders.

Although the structure of the research design would have had me conduct a total of 42 interviews (that’s 3 interviews per student informant x 7 informants x 2 schools) with approximately 70 informants, in practice, group scheduling constraints kept me from meeting that goal. Instead I ended up with a total of 36 interviews: 14 one-on-one interviews with 14 informants (7 students x 2 schools), 13 parent-student dyad interviews with 27 informants (6 dyads from Conquistador + 1 extra unexpected parent for a triad interview, and 7 dyads from Maestro), and 9 core network interviews with 43 informants

(3 core-networks from Conquistador, 6 core-networks from Maestro).

Home-based Participant Observation

Although there was plenty of information on intergenerational dynamics visible in the dyad and core network interviews, the home-based participant observation provided more depth. It was not, however, as much depth as I would have gotten if I had actually been able to follow through with the original plan to spend a month living with one family 61 from each school. By the time I was at ITSE Maestro, I had both a three-month old son25 and his grandmother in tow, which complicated my comfort with sleeping on the floor of someone’s living room, to say the least. At Colegio Conquistador, however, I was only three months pregnant, and I started out with every intention of staying the month. After some deliberation between the various invitations, I decided that Angel’s situation was most likely to be sustainable: he lived about an hour from the school (and my apartment) by two buses, and even though he had six aggressive dogs that refused to be won over by my attempts at affection, they were always cowed enough by Angel and his family that I thought I could still move around in relative safety. Monday, June 30, I packed a backpack and moved into the small room that Angel had been staying in, which included his brightly colored bed, a cloth anime poster, and was otherwise filled from floor to ceiling with various kinds of storage. This room was attached to a small sitting room and a bathroom, although you had to go into the yard to reach the bathroom. Angel, his 19 year old brother, his mother, and his father (who had recently moved back in with the family after years of separation) all slept in the building - a large kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom - three steps across the yard. Angel’s maternal uncle lived in a third small building next to that, but I only met the man in passing.

I settled in fairly comfortably, sneaking past the dogs in the yard at dawn to make my breakfast as quietly as possible so I could be ready to take the buses with Angel and spending the afternoons and evenings hanging out watching YouTube videos with Angel on the desktop in the kitchen or sitting on the bed to watch the World Cup or video games

25 Apart from some delighted cooing upon introduction, the existence of the baby seemed to have minimal impact on my informants’ interactions with me. I found this somewhat surprising, but guessed that I was generally “foreign” enough that my parenting was read as a facet of this rather than a point of connection. 62 on the TV in the bedroom with his brother. I ate the dinners Angel and his mother made and washed dishes after, then hung out talking after dark with his father. For a week.

Then, Friday, I discovered that pregnancy had changed my body enough that I could no longer make it through the night without peeing, and my unexpected presence at midnight with no owners in sight caused the dogs to attack. Not long after Angel’s mother helped me clean the bites and I returned to bed, Angel's uncle arrived. His drunken muttering about me directly below my window managed to both be incomprehensible and too threatening for me to ever be really comfortable sleeping there again. I left the next day. I kept visiting during the day, but by this point - given the impossibility of scheduling anything quickly - it was too late to try and arrange to stay with someone else before my return trip to the U.S. I consoled myself that I could set something up upon my return, but when I arrived in D.C. I was told by the embassy that the Quiteño bureaucrats had misinformed me about the ease with which I would “fix” my visa’s expiration, and I would be unable to return until after the baby had been born.

Nevertheless, the time I spent with Angel - and the three evenings I spent visiting

Aurora when I arranged for the ITSE Maestro side of the home-based observation - combined with what I was able to observe of people’s home-based interactions during my interviews to provide a more thorough view of the distribution of daily rights and responsibilities among my informants and their families. Although relatively few of the fieldnotes from the time I spent hanging out in people’s homes ultimately show up in the dissertation, this part of the data collection was even more influential than the interviews in shaping the direction that I would eventually take in attempting to answer my research question. Most dramatically, the unstructured hanging out with students in their homes 63 woke me to new consideration of the shapes of the continuities and transitions between home and school. Student responsibilities existed at home not just through mechanisms like homework (which was actually not very visible), but through parents’ support with washing uniforms, the time constraints on cooking and eating together, and loving reminders about small tasks due at school. The questions that these experiences raised for me would eventually inspire the approach to examining the relationship between age and time that I unpack in the two Age Horizons chapters.

Coding and Analysis

Just as the research questions led me to particular data collection methods, the kinds of data I collected led me to particular data analysis methods. It was in the iterative process of coding and transcribing the interviews and fieldnotes that the data was transformed into more meaningful reflections on age and citizenship. In order to do justice to the depth and complexity of the data, I went through two stages of coding using the qualitative coding software, MAXQDA. This allowed me to combine traditional text- based coding with the direct coding of audio recordings (without written transcriptions).

Although I had audio recordings of the classes, I used these to confirm details in my notes rather than as primary sources for my coding. In the first stage, preliminary ideas for codes were noted in initial reviews of the fieldnotes from class-based participant observation, focus groups, interviews, and home-based participant observation. Then I used MAXQDA’s flexible codebook to shift the grouping and renaming of codes, changing first and second generation codes in relation to emergent themes. 64 The second stage of coding began when I began writing the chapters of the dissertation. I reviewed the code-sorted text segments to identify patterns, trends, and relationships between the cases and contexts present in the data. As I wrote, I returned frequently to MAXQDA, this time bypassing the fieldnotes to directly code the audio

(from classroom observations, focus groups, interviews, and home-based participant observation). Rather than the open coding style of the first stage, this time I limited coding to the themes in the chapter being written. After reviewing the coded audio segments, I transcribed and translated the quotations that I ended up using here.

65 Part 2: Age Horizons

Image 2. A daily schedule for Colegio Conquistador

The theory of age horizons articulated in the next two chapters is a phenomenological, subject-centered, approach to age identity that includes time, culture, and biology as interdependent variables. Building on the comparative approaches of life course ethnographers from Margaret Mead to Caroline Bledsoe, these two chapters map out an etic approach to analyzing age that privileges the particularity of various cultural configurations but resists reifying age as a predominantly cultural construction. By framing age as a “horizon” populated with guideposts shaped by time, culture, and biology, what is special about age identity (i.e., it's mutability) can be analyzed in relation to other facets of identity (e.g., race, class, and gender) as a site of governmental and disciplinary power. By highlighting the ways that aging is experienced between, rather than within, subjects, this approach opens up unorthodox solutions for addressing the longstanding patterns of gender, race, and class inequality that feature prominently in most age horizons. 66 3. The Phenomenology of the Quotidian School Day

“I want to understand how responsibilities change with age.” That was my quick and easy answer when people asked me about my research. It was also how I started my interviews: “Tell me about what responsibilities you have.” All the kids had the same answer: Estudiar. I’ll translate it as “to study” but it really meant the act and activity of being a student. To study. To go to school. To come home and do homework. To get good grades. It didn’t really matter if I specified their responsibilities to the school or to their families, their answers were the same. Being students was both the daily reality of my informants and central to how they understood themselves as Ecuadorian youth, but it wasn’t until later that I understood why that mattered.

Contrary to commonsense expectations that time is the objective layer undergirding age, both time and age identities are organized through everyday experiences. This relationship between age and time became clear as I followed my 10th grade informants through their daily routines, first as they attended school, then as they spent time at home, and finally as they moved through the city between. In each of these spaces, students' experiences of time helped to give meaning to an everyday experience of the present. At school, their social roles as students led them towards an experience of time as a regular progression. At home, their age identities were tied to predictable sequences of obligations that varied in relation to the particular constellations of capacities and needs in their families. And in the time that students spent in the city between school and home, their age identities were radically conditional and experienced as a time of unmarked readiness punctuated by moments of transformative performance. Together these 67 quotidian26 subjectivities make a multifaceted but coherent student-youth identity, a particular kind of age identity revolving around the daily responsibility to study.

It is surprising, given the amount of attention paid to how gender, race, and class identities impact experiences of schooling, that chronological measures of student age are generally accepted as unproblematic and objective representations. Even those scholars who take age as an object of inquiry - such as those who have examined the recent phenomenon of U.S. parents holding their children back from entering kindergarten so that they will have the advantage of being more developed than the other children (e.g.

Bassock and Reardon 2013) - do not generally question that age can be adequately represented in comparisons of subjects’ “years old.” Of course it follows that age, no less than gender, is an amalgam of physiology, performance, and sociocultural frames. That is to say, age is an identity. But while the theorization of other categories of identity has successfully replaced essential unity with negotiability (Hall 1998; Butler 1993), thinking about age as an identity goes farther and takes change as its sine qua non. Examining age means examining an identity that could be represented by the points of a four dimensional object (an object in time) a shape whose planes expand and shrink even as you watch. Age has a special relationship with time, one which I came to see more clearly as I watched my informants negotiate their student identities.

Social scientists studying old age have long been aware of the flexibility of biological aging and the ways that chronological age fails to map neatly onto it. Moving

26 I prefer the word “quotidian” to its synonyms “daily” and “everyday” (even though it’s Latin roots mean exactly the same thing) for two reasons: 1) it’s cognate with the word I used with my informants in Spanish (cotidiano), and 2) even though its Latin roots still mean “every-day,” its relative unfamiliarity in English allows for more conceptual distance from the emphasis on time as measured by the repetition of days. 68 backwards from Lock’s studies of menopause to Bledsoe’s study of reproductive maximization, the utility of a life course approach - a holistic measurement that takes an

“entire lifespan” as its unit of analysis (Leidy 1996) - has been making inroads into ethnography, too. But few, if any, analyses of children and youth consider (let alone challenge) the implications of the linear and unidirectional models of developmental psychology.27 Although Bucholtz's (2002) call for anthropology of youth, rather than adolescence, provided some correction to the reification of age as a life cycle, it did not provide a new theory of youth as an age identity. Instead, it moved away from looking at youth in relation to other age identities by zooming far in on how cultural practices were negotiated by and between youth. Bucholtz’s call built on the revolutionary work of

Margaret Mead, who challenged the biological determinism underlying the developmental life cycle approaches discussed in the first chapter. Mead also set the stage for Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (2006) to contest Western expectations about schooling and childbirth as universally useful ways to measure adulthood. Johnson-Hanks develops a theory of “vital conjunctures,” which (like Bledsoe’s emphasis on contingency) highlights tense moments of social transformation during which “certain potential futures are galvanized and others made improbable” (2006:3). In other words, life course trajectories are decided in the moments when multiple aspects of age identity come into conflict. Johnson-Hanks conceives of vital conjunctures as “guideposts” within a

“horizons,” which she follows Husserl in defining as “the borders of possibility, desirability, and potential danger as perceived by the participants.” Like Johnson-Hanks, this dissertation builds on the phenomenological concept of horizons, but using Merleau-

27 This is not to say that they don’t still do very fine analyses of age, as for example, Sax 2010. 69 Ponty’s more corporeal engagement with time, from which Husserl’s emphasis on individual intentions has fallen away.

In this chapter, I draw on moments from my participant observation and interviews with three students (Angel, Estefany, and Tomas28) in order to examine my informants experiences of subjectivities and identities within an age horizon. The juxtaposition of identity and subjectivity in this chapter is informed by Merleau-Ponty’s definition of a horizon and by the critical distinction between subjectivity and identity. While subjectivities are the flow of life in motion, identity is the transformation that occurs when experiences are held down and examined. Wittgenstein's "criterion of identity" distinguishes between experiencing one’s pain as singularly one’s own (when I prick my thumb I feel it) and identifying one’s pain as something that can be conceivably shared with someone else (thus allowing the similarities in thumb-pricking to become a frame;

1967[1953]:91). While subjectivity is the experience of the subject (i.e., a fundamentally experiential and phenomenological frame for the self), identity is a frame for the self as defined through discursive practices (Foucault 2002[1970]). Identity and subjectivity are undoubtedly "sutured" together (Hall 1996), and how and when those sutures work is a question that a closer examination of the relationship between age and time can help clarify.

I define “age” as a category of identity that embraces the interplay of time, biology, and culture that is rooted in particularity rather than universality. This is consistent with a life course approach that is particularly indebted to the work of Pia

Kontos (1999). Kontos’ version of a life course approach is, itself, an explicit marriage of

28 I give more detailed descriptions of these and the other students I interviewed in Appendix A. 70 Lock’s (1993) ‘local biology,’ Myerhoff’s (1992) attention to the cultural malleability of

(old) age, and Butler’s (1993) emphasis on the materialization, signification, and regulation of (bodily) matter. As Kontos puts it, “experience, corporeally constituted, is the lived conjunction of mind and body, body and culture, body and physical and social surroundings. To this effect, ageing occurs not only in the body but in time, in place, in history, and in the context of lived experience.” (1999:687) Like her, I reject the mind/body dichotomies of “social construction” and “age as biologically determined” and share her privileging of the embodied self as an agentive subject of experience.29 Which is to say that while "age" may be a discursive frame of identity, it is an intimate discourse that emerges in response to shifting needs.

The debates over defining aging are tangled up with social scientific debates over time. As Gell (1992) points out in his genealogy of the anthropology of time, the conflict between seeing time as socially constructed versus objective30 is a long-standing tension.

Gell attributes the constructivist version of time to Durkheim’s argument that time is only knowable through social conceptions of it, and compares this to developmental psychology’s investigations into the universal capacities for experiencing time. That is, developmental psychology suggests that there may indeed be universal biological experiences of time (for example, the development of the concept of sequences) that

29 The question of the relationship between cultural and biology remains a critical theoretical question for working with age. Mead’s early challenge to the idea that age is universal and the later work on age summarized in Rubinstein (1990) make a neat parallel with Rubin’s (1975) call for the distinction between sex and gender in seeking to separate out the “layers” of culture and biology. By contrast, this dissertation seeks to theorize age as a temporally dynamic intersectional identity embedded within a horizon of experiences. 30 That is, time can be studied using universally available measurements like chronological units of time. The “objectivity” of that approach and its superiority as a theoretical frame of time, however, is a far more complicated question for anthropology. This dichotomy is inextricable from the social construction versus “objective measurement” concern that colors the debates around theorizing age in anthropology. 71 defend the “objectivity” of certain types of measurement. Insofar as age is inextricable from human experiences of time, this is a worthy theoretical question to explore. This dissertation, however, challenges the framework that sees either time or age as subjective experience layered atop (or completely replacing) objective experience. Instead, I take

Merleau-Ponty’s (2002[1945]) elaboration on the phenomenological concept of horizons to center the experiences of the subject. In this approach, what universal aspects of time exist stand out as guideposts within the horizons of human experience.

Merleau-Ponty defines “horizon” through the gaze of a subject in space: you may be looking directly at an object, or the object may be peripheral as your gaze moves, once you've seen it you know it is there. He says,

The horizon is what guarantees the identity of the object throughout the

exploration; it is the correlative of the impending power which my gaze retains

over the objects which it has just surveyed, and which it already has over the

fresh details which it is about to discover. (2002:78).

A page later, Merleau-Ponty describes a house as an example of such an object: you know it is there even when you aren't looking at it, it is visible by other observers (even though they come from other perspectives), and even if it burns down, remains understandable through the memory of its location. Building on this idea of horizons moves us away from thinking about age as a line in the same way that it helps us move away from thinking of time as a line. When we look at a horizon, we can locate ourselves in relation to it because we recognize guideposts like the sun and mountains and roads.

Our experiences of age are are similar, we can locate ourselves through guideposts of time, and biology, and culture. The sun is a bit like time in its perpetual motion. And the 72 mountains are like biology in that we only have a little bit of control over the shape they’re in, but, just as the placement of the mountains helps you quickly tell which way you’re walking across the campus of the University of Arizona, that shape is really important in helping us identify ourselves. Roads are cultural products: we build them, and they go more or less where we want them to. But just like road can both curve around the mountains or cut through them changing their shape, and just like the setting sun can make it impossible to see the mile markers of the road, and just like the mountains can block out our view of the sun, culture and time and biology can all impact each other, too.

These are all guideposts: even when you can’t see them, knowing that they’re there - or even just used to be there - can help you get oriented. They don’t just exist separately, it’s their positions in relation to each other that help us know where we are.

That’s useful, because it lets us see how age identities are experienced through our interactions with these “guideposts.” In the context of age, for example, one guidepost might be that a woman having a baby. Culture contributes to her timing the biological process of pregnancy, but even more importantly, where that guidepost (having a child) fits in relation to others - like whether she’s in high school or grad school - will shape how she experiences motherhood as an age identity.

A horizon is not itself an identity, but rather the experiential context that makes it possible to identify the object of your momentary gaze. Maintaining a coherent identity when an object moves from focus to periphery becomes particularly useful in discussions of identities in time, and is the primary justification that Merleau-Ponty offers for using the metaphor of the "horizon." When space is replaced with time, selections of the past, shapes of the present, and imaginations of the future form the guideposts that populate 73 the periphery and can be, at any moment, the object of perception. Merleau-Ponty's horizon is a descendent of Husserl's "intentional horizons" but without Husserl's emphasis on an inner concept of time or the agentive intentionality of a self-conscious subject (2012[1913]). Although Merleau-Ponty’s temporal horizon reaches out from the present towards the past and future, I narrow my lens in this chapter to the quotidian present, and wait until the next chapter to expand it again.

The quotidian present of a student identity is primarily negotiated across three space-times: a) the school-day, b) home, and c) the city between. In each of these, age identity is constrained in different ways, and each has its own temporal rhythms. But all three populate the horizon of the quotidian present for my 10th grade informants. The daily temporal structures of school, where students spend most of their waking hours during the week, construct the present as a time of regularized sameness. The time spent at home, in contrast, builds a present in motion, responding to the changing needs of the household as well as the individual responsibilities of the student. The subjectivities of home are tied to the needs of family members, for instance who can cook dinner and whether the school uniforms need to be cleaned. When those needs create repeating routines, they produce a present of irregular flexibility whose boundaries are marked by the regularity of school. Finally, the time that students spend moving through the city produces a more liminal experience of the quotidian present, punctuated by moments of danger and boredom can transform age identities. Together these subjectivities constitute my informants’ experiences of age. By teasing out how age-based practices shape experiences of age and time we can begin to see how power shapes age horizons.

74 School

As the term "school day" implies, the time that students spend in school is significant.

The time they spend in school is both a key right and a key responsibility of youth, enshrined in law and certainly highly valued by the families of my informants. Just as my informants’ bureaucratically certified ages mandated their school attendance, the quotidian guideposts they encountered in school gave meaning and coherence to their student age identities. For eight hours a day, my 10th grade informants were immersed among regular, chronological guideposts of time. Guideposts like the start and end of classes and the assignments students worked through created a temporal rhythm that students experienced from their desks as they responded to the directions of adult authorities. From my position, sitting uncomfortably with my too big body crammed into a small metal desk at the back of the class, I could see how these guideposts were steeped with power, and with them my informants’ age horizons.

In both Colegio Conquistador and ITSE Maestro, temporal patterns were marked by school bells followed soon after by calls for attention from teachers and school administrators. After lining up by class for morning announcements on the basketball courts, students dispersed to their classrooms. From there on, each class period of the day could be substituted for another period of the same (45 minute) length. Every week the daily schedule of 45 minute classes repeated itself. And the students themselves were accountable for appearing substitutable as well: uniforms and restrictions on hairstyles and jewelry, homework assignments carefully copied from books, correct answers given by any one of a room full of raised hands. 75 Students experienced these patterns as they worked on assignments during the time allotted and presented themselves for the hourly attendance. Students sat quietly at their desks while the teacher called each person up to the front table to mark assignments in their gradebooks. Studying was the primary responsibility of every one of my 10th grade informants and the classroom is where that responsibility was held to account every day for seven 45-minute periods. Due dates occurred throughout the day, and students were expected to be ready. With such short class periods, occasionally a teacher would spend an entire period taking attendance and collecting (and sometimes grading) assignments from the 35-40 students sitting at their desks. Every period revolved around the assignment of the day, a repeating central guidepost of students’ quotidian present.

About half of the students in any given period did indeed sit quietly working on written assignments. Sometimes they did the assignment all on their own, but often they passed around already completed versions to friends to copy, or sneaked across the room to check someone else’s assignment, or to copy over the assignment a second time from a draft version to a neater, color coordinated and aesthetically attractive final draft. While copying each other’s work was still seen as cheating, it was too widespread to be controlled by teachers (who generally pretended it wasn’t happening). The other half of the students just hung out with the friends they sat near, gossiping, playing games, doing makeup and curling hair, and pranking each other. The creaking wooden floors, high ceilings and concrete walls filled the room with a dull din all day long. But despite the noise, students generally got the work done that they would be graded on and continued to accumulate the grades that would allow them to move forward. 76 More ambitious teachers, or those who were blessed with a double period (which happened a few times a week for the “core” subjects), used their class periods more interactively. In many classes, teachers simply read aloud from Ministry of Education subject textbooks then asked students to sit quietly to complete the assignments individually, in pairs, or in small groups. One particularly engaging math teacher had students work through problems he put on the board and regularly called students up to collectively complete them and correct them. But no matter what the teacher asked the students to do, there were always a few who could be seen working on their assignments for other classes. Of course, students worked on their assignments at home, too, but to understand what it means for a 10th grader to be at school, you have to understand that the classroom was a space for working on assignments.

These patterns constructed students as substitutable subjects who were progressing, slowly but surely, towards their annual graduation to a new grade. That progression depended primarily on the regular and successful completion of school assignments, and that relationship was made regularly explicit in the reminders of teachers. Students were agents of their changing identities through participation in these patterns. To extend the metaphor of sun, mountains, and roads, you might think of these assignments as regular mile markers of a paved road stretching forward towards an imagined destination in the future.

The guideposts among which my informants themselves not only help us to understand how the time and space of school felt to them, or even simply how they spent eight hours of their day. It was rather that the power that imbued the guideposts of time 77 and space there served as a crucial anchor of their quotidian subjectivities. As Munn pointed out in her seminal essay on “The Cultural Anthropology of Time,”

Authority over the … definition, timing, and sequence of daily and seasonal

activities … not only controls aspects of the everyday lives of persons but also

connects this level of control to a more comprehensive uni-verse … in which

governance is grounded. It has to do with the construction of cultural governance

through reach-ing into the body time of persons and coordinating it with values

embedded in the "world time" of a wider constructed universe of power.

(1992:109)

In other words, whether it is the calendar or the organization of a class period, the school’s authority over time is a site of its political power. In many ways, the regular, chronological time of high school organized the adult authorities as much as the students, something that served to make chronological time appear all the more universal, objective, and natural. But although both adults and youth were incited to bureaucratically timed, regular action, how they experienced of that regularity depended greatly on the differentiated rights and responsibilities of their school-based age identities.

This difference was clear insofar as the classroom was as a space where students were held accountable for their presence through their visibility, sitting in their metal chair- desks, to their teachers and their inspectors, standing at the front of the room. That visibility was largely organized by a class list in each teacher’s official gradebook. Each class in a grade had their own room and so it was the teacher’s arrival that marked the start of a period. Every day, the periods began with the teacher taking attendance aloud: 78 last name, first name, a student responding “presente” or a quick scan of the classroom for a hand where the owner of the name was assigned a seat, a checkmark in the gradebook, and onto the next on the list. Although most teachers recognized most of their students by name, they often relied upon the book to call out comprehension questions throughout class as well. Class participation grades were given based on how well students were able to respond to these questions. And every marking period, the teachers read all the students’ grades aloud to the whole class, while each student made careful note of their own and occasionally congratulated or teased their companions.

The inspectors, school administrators who were responsible for everyday discipline and last minute substitute teaching, also came in every day and took attendance for a separate attendance list, standing front and center instead of settling in with grade books at the corner desk like the teachers. Students who were wearing the wrong uniform, or who had an unauthorized hair style, makeup, or jewelry, were at risk of getting in trouble during this official surveillance. In practice, this seemed to depend on unpredictable external factors like whether the inspector had recently gotten in trouble with their own superiors, which left room for effective student defensive actions like slouching low behind a backpack to hide sartorial deviance. Nevertheless, this highly bureaucratized form of visibility was dedicated to counting, assessing, and disciplining the population of students. In response, students shared the goal of being seen as both present and otherwise unremarkable. These patterns were not cumulative, the way that assignments were, although they were no less regular. It is true that these cycles made age-based changes visible: uniforms changed fit and got progressively shabbier as the year went on.

But while students spent a good amount of time discussing and showing off the clothes 79 on their bodies, the authorities made no note of these changes (at least that I was ever present for).

Not all student visibility was so bureaucratically controlled. While some students made an effort to win the good opinion of teachers with relevant questions and ready answers, the attention of peers was also important. Quiet rebellion against the restrictions on appearance were observable in stitching up the sweatpants of the informal uniform to make tight legs, wearing forbidden earrings and makeup or daring hairstyles. “Bad” kids called out insults to the teacher in voices carefully modulated to preserve plausible deniability on both sides. Students with their heads together in quiet gossip and, occasionally, flirtation intended to avoid the censure - if not quite the awareness - of the teachers. One boy made a killing selling candy out of his backpack to other students, who passed their coins across the room for sticks of colored sugar that made their way back.

When the demand for sugar grew to such a fevered pitch that teachers could no longer ignore the interruptions without losing the appearance of authority, the school psychologist was called in to remonstrate the boy in front of his peers. She announced that she was going over the inspectors and even the Inspector General all the way to the vice principal about his bad behavior turning the classroom into a market, after which he laid low for a few days before starting up the business again. The school could be a place for smoking, drinking, and taking drugs; romances played out in hands clasped as they walked across the basketball courts and the occasional kiss on the bleachers or behind the bathroom. On a special day, a student might be kicked out of class or get their poster hung on the wall, but these highlights were ultimately generally subsumed within the larger patterns of the school-day, school-week, and semester. 80 Everyone participated in the activities of bureaucratic surveillance, but students were active in shaping the 45 minutes of a class period through contests of authority and artful rebellion just as much as bored busywork. Furthermore, the petty agonies followed the same rhythms day after day, changing no more or less than the assignments they worked on. Students resisted their authorities, but they did not reshape either the segmentation of the day or its cumulative impact on their progression through their age-grade-year. The hierarchical relationship of student-youth and adult-authority found coherence in the regular temporal rhythms of visibility that shaped their experience of the quotidian present.

Home

When students go home, they don’t stop being students (any more than they stop being part of a family when they are at school). But the temporal rhythms of the quotidian present at home are flexible and responsive in contrast the measured regularity of school. At school, adult authorities are primarily invested in students as substitutable individuals who must be moved progressively through their roles within age graded cohorts. But at home, any age-mates also share a web of family relationships, and adults are deeply invested in them as complex and interdependent people.31 At home, a student is also a son or daughter, a sibling, a cousin, a grandchild and each of those roles is given substance with its own story-filled history. Daily routines are not made up of standard and uniform length tasks and even the repetitive tasks are steeped in a shifting network of shared needs. The stricter scheduling of children’s school and parents’ job create temporal

31 see chapter four for a more complex discussion of how that interdependency shapes experiences of age horizons. 81 boundaries around the timing of dinner, homework, and other regular chores, but within these constraints the timing of tasks is relatively flexible. The quotidian subjectivities of home are no less a production of the present than those of school, but at home changes in age identity are neither unidirectional nor particularly cyclical. Instead of imagining the guideposts of time at home as mile markers on a road, the age horizon with family is more like farmland. Just as age identity is guided by the shifting needs of the family, the size and composition of an orchard or a field is largely - though not completely - flexible in response to the needs of the people working it and the seasons of the year. The different bodies and capabilities of family members shape both their needs and their contributions, as does the work that they do while they are apart and out of the house.

While school is structured around working on assignments, at home the time for studying is found between the requirements of the morning toilette, the evening meal, and the care of younger siblings. And even those tasks depend on finding time at home between the schedules given by employers and school districts. If mealtimes are the quintessential activity of the home, they are nevertheless wholly constrained by the public (and often state-structured) schedules of the participants. The 7am-2pm school-day schedule of Colegio Conquistador make it more likely for students to do their homework in the evenings when their parents are nearby, but parents generally expect their 10th graders to manage their homework on their own. At I.T.S.E. Maestro, the 1:30pm-7:30pm schedule usually means that homework is done in the morning or very late at night, and in either case the free time they have to study at home was entirely without adult supervision (with the rare exception for those students with a stay-at-home mother). This is not to say that students are isolated in their home-based school responsibilities, but to 82 point out that their student responsibilities at home are both more variably scheduled and un-surveilled compared to school. Maestro students leave for school around 12pm, and thus their mornings at home are a time for solitary labor (cleaning house, homework, making lunch) and leisure (especially playing on one’s phone). Maestro students arrive home from school around 8pm, and the families of Maestro students eat dinner at

8:30pm. In other words, even when youth are not studying, the constraints of their (age- based) commitments as students impact how and when they fulfill their other home-based obligations.

The moments of leaving and returning home are often quite explicitly marked, as I noticed when I took the schoolbus home with Estefany after school. When we arrived, she knocked on her own door and she stepped to the threshold when her mother opened it. There she inclined her head to receive the benediction her mother muttered and gestured above her head. It was a little formality made meaningful in its utter familiarity, for all that it was the first time I had seen it happen. The blessing - which is also common upon leaving the house - was to mark the return home,32 not simply from a quick errand or a visit, but for the day. It did not depend on the return being from school, but it did mark the time away at school as more than just an errand for the household, and it ritually situated the still uniformed youth to being truly home. The transitions in and out of the student identity are part of what make home meaningful, and while the home is not the obvious setting for a student identity its very contrast with school gives both spatial and temporal depth to the student identity.

32 It’s just as common for this to be something parents do when their kids leave the house. 83 I saw - or rather, I heard through a curtained doorway - a more intimate picture of that same transition while I was living at Angel’s house for a week. At 5:15 the alarm on 15 year old Angel’s phone went off and he rolled out of the bed he and his brother shared, without disturbing his parents in their own bed pressed against his. He quietly showered, put on his uniform, and shouldered his backpack, before his mother murmured an inquiry on the state of his homework. Cleaning out my oatmeal bowl in the house’s only other room, I heard her whisper a groggy but tender admonition to work hard at school. The intimacy of the moment - from their shared bed, in the dim before dawn, with no outsider visible - was in no way lessened by the fact that they were talking about school. Angel’s student identity was full invoked in that moment and in an inescapably everyday way, thoroughly bound up with his mother’s love and hope for him. The familial closeness of that moment bloomed within the constraints of school schedules, and it was a central aspect of obligations that defined Angel’s age identity.

At home, my young informants’ routines are interdependent with the needs of the rest of the family. Studying was certainly an important part of my informants’ time at home, but the shape of that activity changed according to need. Parents report being “on top of” their children’s studying, but a parent who actually reviews their child’s homework is rare, and many students turn instead to nearby cousins or siblings for help. Does someone need dinner? Angel’s mother was very proud that eight years old, Angel had made dinner for his older brother when she was not around to cook. In their family, the cooking is a responsibility shared between mother and sons, and a child who chooses to take it on has demonstrated maturity. Still, that maturity may be lost when he chooses to sit and watch

Columbian soap operas on YouTube or chat with crushes on Facebook instead of 84 something more “responsible.” Does a diaper need to be changed? A number of the girls in my study with younger siblings took on significant childcare responsibilities at home, and this was explicitly framed by both the girls and their parents as a role which caused them to grow up faster than their peers. One mother cried as she told me that a psychologist had informed her that allowing her daughter, Alicia, to take on so much responsibility at home was “robbing her of her childhood.” But it appears that this was not an irreversible aging, and now she asks less so of her daughter with the implicit understanding that this will allow Alicia to experience “more” of her youth. At home, age identity is both being a student, a daughter, an older brother, a birthday-girl. These many subject positions are interwoven in a socially variable amalgam that shapes the experience of the quotidian present.

As with Bledsoe’s emphasis on contingency, which I discuss at more length in chapter one, the idea that age identity might be more contingent on bodily capability than chronological time is of obvious relevance here. While Bledsoe’s point that aging could be “time-neutral” was looking at age and time at the scale of life course trajectories stretching far beyond the present (something I will examine more closely in the next chapter), the disconnection between chronological time and aging Bledsoe found in

Gambia are also relevant to understanding my informants’ experiences at home. Of course, when time is not taken as an a priori layer, it can no longer be understood to have a “neutral” relationship with age. But by examining the age horizons of my informants as made meaningful through orientation to guideposts, we can begin to see how the contingent age identities negotiated at home relate to their experiences of time. First, while the patterns of home rarely revolved around the clock or any measured, 85 substitutable set of tasks, who was home was indeed constrained by each family member’s chronological obligations to work and school. In this respect, the regular time of school served as a “background” - not unlike Bledsoe’s description of it - to the time at home. In other words, just as Merleau-Ponty’s description of the horizon would suggest, even when the guideposts of school are not the focus of your attention, you are still aware of where they are in the background, and you know where you are in relation to them.

Unlike the hierarchical visibility of the substitutable regularity of the guideposts at school, the quotidian guideposts of home were not about accountability for a bureaucratically measured position along a line of development so much as they were a position within a shifting interdependent network of capabilities and needs. Many of these needs changed in response to capabilities related to physical development and senescence - a caregiver’s need for attention to diapers, for example, with children or grandparents. Other physical needs were relatively constant and provided their own temporal rhythms, like the need for food and sleep. In other words, the interdependent temporal rhythms of the quotidian home were contingent on the embodied capacities and needs of the collective family.

These experiences of age and time were no more free of power than those at school, however different they might be. Laws against child labor and laws mandating school attendance, for example, constrained the possible configurations of the rights and responsibilities of each family member. Most families were far more egalitarian than the adult-child relationships of school, but the physical rhythms of need and ability were just as deeply steeped with the power of family obligations. And just as school-time remained 86 in the background at home, my informants brought the quotidian, flexible (contingent) experiences of being youth at home with them wherever they went.

The City Between

What I am calling “the city”33 is less of a third place, and more of a convenient way to acknowledge that home and school are only part of where everyday student subjectivities are is constructed. One important experience of the city is moving through

“the street.” Most students must navigate the street every week day on their way to and from school. For my informants, the street is always already assumed to be morally and physically precarious.34 The paved roads choked with cars and exhaust and navigated by vendors with babies on their backs and fruit in hand are the street. The markets with attendant muggers are the street. The wide avenues where regular political protests spill into the parks and main squares are the street. It is the street where the kids who don’t go straight from school to home are hanging out: maybe fighting, maybe drinking, maybe hooking up, but certainly suspect. But not all public places and contexts are so burdened with negative connotations. In its more positive aspect, students encounter the city through its parks where families play “healthy” sports together on the weekends, the cramped school bus that many kids take to and from school, city sponsored events and community work-parties (mingas). My informants told me some about the time they spent in the city on the weekends, but I myself spent no weekends with families, and

33 In the interest of simplicity, I will mostly ignore the fact that people living in the outskirts of Quito talk about having to go to the city (ir a Quito) and use the same two terms - the street (la calle) and the city (la ciudad) - to refer to all the public spaces kids and their families inhabit in daily life. 34 There is a rich literature addressing “the street” as a liminal space that is both semiotically and literally dangerous (e.g. Anderson 2000). Caldeira (2000) shows how this makes it a neat metonym for the citizenship experienced by the people who are identified with it. 87 must leave their impact on student identity for another researcher to discuss. Instead, I focus on the time that my informants spent in the city on their way to and from school.

All of the 14 students who participated in the triple interviews took either the school bus or the public bus, but I also knew at school students who were picked up and dropped off in cars, or who walked from their homes nearby. Some students changed public buses twice, or switched from school bus to public bus halfway through their route, some rides took hours each way. School buses can the same distinctive yellow buses we usually encounter in the U.S., but many are just large vans. Parents privately pay the drivers to pick their children up at the door and drop them off within the school’s gates. Students and their families have a relationship with the driver, who watches out for them to make sure they don’t get left behind, and who are trustworthy chaperones in contrast to disinterested public bus drivers. Students hang out and talk with each other on the school bus, but students on the city bus have to deal with people of all kinds.

For most students, regardless of their form of transportation, the time riding buses to get to and from school is a kind of liminal time. It can be dangerous, exciting, or boring

(particularly for those stuck in a schoolbus for hours at a time). For students who go straight home from school, the hours spent in transit may not be very significant in comparison with the obligations and freedoms of school and home. For students who take the school bus, it may be simply a time for socializing with school acquaintances, moderately constrained by the presence of adult teachers and/or drivers. The experience is also unconstrained by the responsibilities for productivity found in home or school. It can appear as one final period of a heavily surveilled day of school combined with the flexibility to talk with friends or do some homework. In this respect it functions the same 88 way that Mircea Eliade (1959) described rituals mediating the transition between ordinary and mythical time, that is, it removes the dangers (literally, here, as well as figuratively) of the time between times cf. Nuzum 2004). Here, instead of ordinary and mythical time, it provides what Eliade called the "solution of continuity" between the regular progression of school-time to the intimate flexibility of home-time. As a solution of continuity, it is less of a third aspect of the quotidian present than a mediation of the first two.

However, the liminal time in the city can also be transformative. In an interview with

Angel, the different choices about how to take a bus to school are connected quite explicitly to their different, and changing, age identities. Angel’s account of why his brother is so immature compared to himself suggests that the degree of independence of movement in the city gets credit for both cause and effect of maturation.

And no, like, yeah, there was a big difference [between us] because he always

depended on our parents and they didn’t really let him mature. He took the school

bus until 10th grade, which dropped him at the door of the house and picked him

up from the door of the house. And I had to go out and walk four blocks to go and

catch the [public] bus. And I went alone. And I think that even things like that a

person starts to mature more quickly. And from my point of view I am more

mature than my brother and my brother is 19 years old [4 years older]. And he

still thinks like a child. He still doesn’t even have a life goal.35

35 Y no(f), osea, sí fue, fue una distancia tan grande porque siempre dependía de papa y no le dejaron madurar mucho. El tuvo recorrido hasta décimo curso que le dejaba a la puerta de la casa y le llevaba de la puerta de la casa. Y yo tenía que salir a caminar cuatro cuadras ir a coger el recorrido. Y iba solo. Y creo que hasta en esas cosas uno se va madurando un poco más rápido. Y a mi punto de vista yo soy más maduro que mi hermano y mi hermano ya tiene 19 años. Y todavía piensa como niño. Todavía ni tiene ni un proyecto de vida. – (Angel #1) 89 It is no coincidence that he ends his discussion on the maturity afforded by taking the bus with a reference to life goals (proyecto de vida). This indexes the school’s primary function and frames the “good student” identity as a vehicle of social mobility. Taking the city bus, as opposed to being dropped off in a personal car or taking a school bus, is one of many difficulties that are used in discourses that suggest working class people “grow up faster” than their wealthier peers.36

I took that city bus to school with Angel one morning. We walked through the neighborhood to get there, and he pointed out places where I should be more alert. We waited together on the side of the road and he fielded questions from neighbors interested in hearing about his wayward brother. Slightly standoffish, he declined to share any of the sordid details with them, afterwards whispering ferociously to me that they were gossips.

It was a display of familial loyalty that was utterly consistent with his character, and inconsistent with the long list of complaints about his brother he had previously shared

(including the quotation above). He had been polite - they were adults, after all - but he kept his chin in the air enough that I wondered what he imagined - or knew - those same gossips had said about him. Then we got on the bus and found a place where we could sit until we made it to the stop a block away from the school. From the walk through the neighborhood, to coping with the neighbors, to being easily heard talking on the bus as we sat between students of other schools and adults on their way to work, I was aware of a new level of visibility that I had not experienced when I rode the bus alone or joined other students in school bus rides. Angel’s high degree of comfort with it all seemed like

36 The theme of “growing up too fast” runs throughout the literatures both describing (e.g. Willis 1981) and proscribing (e.g. Westman 2009) adolescent behavior. Lesko (2012) productively connects this discourse to broader social anxieties about modernity. 90 part of his performance as a good student: competent, almost defensively proud, wearing his well-respected uniform, ready to brush past any distraction from his goals.

Some students, however, choose to take the public buses to engage with exactly what

Angel was concerned with avoiding. Tomas, for example, told me that he prefers to see more of the city and does not like to take the school bus because the teachers take them too. He explained that he takes a roundabout route so that he can meet up with friends from another school. It’s a little weird, he continued, how he became friends with those guys. They were from another school, and that school had problems with I.T.S.E Maestro, so this group of guys were basically a gang37 that was bothering him and Patricio, another

Maestro informant of mine, with whom he was riding the bus. So, Tomas explained, he called on a bunch of his friends (from Maestro) and they fought it out, the students representing Maestro versus the students representing their rival school. He explained that after time passed and they kept running into each other, they got close to each other.

From enemies to friends, he concluded. Now they hassle other kids together.

Although Angel and Tomas each emphasize the maturity needed for managing “the street” by himself, and both stories are related to their identities as students, those student identities are clearly not the same. The depiction of the spatial negotiations of student identities as signifying dis/alignment with school ideology in Eckert’s classic school ethnography Jocks and Burnouts (1989) is neatly applied here as well. The “burnout”

Tomas is a boy who comfortably describes himself as someone who was held back a year, and as someone who likes to drink, party, and have sex; no surprise that he actively

37 literally, “una banda,” but this also tied into his previous explanation that gangs were more likely to be people representing their school against other schools than highly organized groups like the Latin Kings (which is a whole other story). 91 prefers the freedom of the street. Angel, the “jock,” is on the basketball team of his top tier school, and is a committed student and mama’s boy;38 he implies the street is a place where he would rather not be, but must risk to move between the more morally upright school and home.

For those students who combined their symbolic markers of school affiliation (i.e., their uniforms) with equally visible symbols of toughness (big hair, earrings, stitched up uniform legs), city subjectivities may become more central to their student identities than anything they do behind the high cement walls of their schools or their homes. High school students who form gangs to “fight to defend the school” perform their everyday aggressive visibility in the clothes they wear, the loudness of their voices, and the space they take on the buses. These more common expressions of their performance of their student identities are occasionally punctuated by more memorable brawls with old rivals at soccer games or on the street. For this group, the social experience of the liminal time in the city is a negotiation of the range of threats represented by strangers.

As he told it, I understood Tomas to be trying to help me to understand his quotidian present (the story of the gang fight was his response when I asked him to tell me about a normal day) but also as a story of transformation. This moment of physical contest was an unplanned (if not wholly unanticipated) and almost ritual challenge to his identity as a

Maestro student. As he fought he transformed into a particular kind of student, both aligned with (repping the colors of his uniform) and against (breaking the rules of conduct) his school. And despite the grandiosity of what I think of as Tomas’s coming of

38 The term is literally “daddy’s boy” (hijo de papi), but that just doesn’t imply the same thing in English. It’s particularly worth clarifying the term he preferred because he was constantly read as gay (which he was, but he was still mostly closeted at that time). 92 age rite, it is not really all that different from the less dramatic challenges that Angel saw as advancing his own maturation. In both cases, the boys exist in a state of perpetual readiness for trials which may or may not occur. These tests, and how they potentially transform the subject’s age, are beyond the control of the subject. But it is the radical conditionality of their potential to shape students’ age that gives meaning to the temporal rhythms of the quotidian present in the city.

The Changing Present

This chapter lays out how temporal guideposts in three key sites shape the age horizons of my informants. The guideposts of school define the relationship between age and time as regular, measured, and universal. The guideposts of home define the relationship between age and time as sequential, interdependent, and constrained to the boundaries of institutional (school and work) time. The guideposts of “the city between” define the relationship between age and time as radically conditional on the context and performances of subjects interacting, and as potentially constrained by the demands of home and school.

By identifying the key guideposts on my informants’ horizons of age, we can begin to see what causes variation in both age identities and subjectivities and how they are sutured together. This approach affirms the relevance of Johnson-Hanks’ “vital conjunctures” and Bledsoe’s “contingency” to the experience of age identity and the shape of the life course. But its main contribution is that it shows how how practices organized by age identity shape the experience of time, which provides a theoretical foundation of the rest of the dissertation. This chapter shows that the flexible, relational 93 home-based experiences of time prioritize the regular, progressive rhythms of school- based experiences of time, and that the time in the city between can reinforce the relationship between school and home or disrupt it. More broadly, it illustrates how power infiltrates embodied experiences of age identity through the temporal guideposts of quotidian subjectivities. This approach lets us separate out what about age identity is amenable to change without recourse to a misleading “objective” versus “constructed” dichotomy and ultimately allows us to analyze how power permeates the life course.

Why it matters to be able to do that is something that I take on directly in Part 3 when

I look much more closely at schooling shapes age identity as a form of citizenship. The temporal guideposts of schooling that I introduce in this chapter will be examined in far greater detail as unidirectional, discontinuous, and impermanent, and each of these aspects will be examined as an incitement to national belonging. In other words, I will examine age as a political project in which school-based infrastructures and policies are mechanisms of government. But without the context of the age horizon, these guideposts would appear not as mechanisms imbued with power and acting on other experiences of age, but as a natural and self-evident process. Beginning with the age horizons of students shows the relationship between age and time to be both contested and inextricable and lays the foundation for exploring the relationship between age and citizenship.

In the next chapter I will continue the analysis of how the temporal guideposts of schooling shape my informants’ age horizons by looking far more closely at the context of home and family. But rather than focusing exclusively on the production of the quotidian present, as I do in this chapter, I will look at how shared subjectivities of time stretch across the life course. 94 4. The Intergenerational Stakes of Sharing Subjectivity

Consider the movement of our Solar System through the expanding universe.

While we can know and anticipate the daily spinning of earth and predict our relationship to other planets and moons, we also see that the Earth never passes through the same space twice. We are circling a star that is moving through a galaxy which is, itself, traveling through space at 600 km per second. This concept of movement through time and space is a useful metaphor for the previous chapter’s discussion of how subjects experience the quotidian present in relation to unceasing movement through a larger horizon that remains, despite our best efforts, largely unknowable. A closer look at the student identities of Ecuadorian 10th graders suggested that age can shape time by coordinating dynamic - and largely unpredictable - subjectivities into coherent identities.

Without the omnipotence of knowing exactly where we are going or remembering where we have been, age identities allow us to understand where - and when - we are. Like our

Solar System, we can perceive our present, quotidian subjectivities within not only our own life courses, but within the passage of time and the world around us.

This chapter will continue to explore how age identities shape the perception of the self in time, expanding the focus beyond the present and into the past and future. To extend the celestial metaphor, consider the gravitational balances that give us the orbits of moons and planets in relation to each other and their stars. Sometimes our planet is closer to the Sun, and that relational movement gives us seasons. Our spatio-temporal relationship with the moon gives us the motion of the tides. Our planet's orbit changes speeds as it gets closer to and farther from other large bodies whose gravitation keeps it 95 from flying off in a straight line of its own. Similarly, age grounds our experience of time in constellations of changing social relationships. We do not expect to move through ages at the same rates across a life course: for example, while a child changes ages quite dramatically from infancy to adolescence, her mother’s change during that same period is less apparent. But we know that some constellations of ages are closely (if not inextricably) tied to each other: for example, a man becomes a grandfather when his child becomes a parent. Through this lens, time is experienced through intersecting planes of intimate interdependencies.

This chapter explores how families collaborate in constructing age identities and how that collaboration is experienced subjectively through time. The impetus for this chapter's exploration came from the second and third interviews with my informants.

Unlike the participant observation in schools and the first round of one-on-one student interviews, the parent-student dyad interview and the “core network” interview made it very difficult to think about “student identity” in terms of an individual’s various identifications and alignments within a disinterested universe. Whether they were parents or extended family or friends, all of these core network informants cared deeply about the

10th grader who had invited them there. In the dyad interviews, the parent who participated in the second interview was the one with whom the 10th grader had a greater intimacy (with the exception of Pablo, who told me at the outset that he would prefer to have his mother in the dyad and group interviews, but whose father assumed that I would prefer to hear his opinions instead). In the core network interviews, the intensity of this intimacy was variously amplified (as in the cases of Benjamin and Patricio) as love and aspiration created links not only to the 10th grader but between many of the other 96 participants as well, or somewhat diminished (as in the cases of Alicia and Lucas) as they stepped into familiar and well-worn patterns and hierarchies for how to sit around talking together. In both instances, the stories told were as much for each other as for me, and my resulting analysis has similarly veered towards highlighting the shared aspect of their reflections.

The exegesis begins with two parents’ accounts of their own parents when they were the same age as their 10th grade children. These stories, which focus on youth transitioning out of school, illustrate a common genre for talking about the passage of time and subjective change, a Bakhtinian chronotope in which “student becoming” is a collaborative and simultaneously overdetermined metamorphosis. These “generational histories” of parents provide a blueprint for the futures that they envision for their own children. From there I examine the variously interdependent and autonomous life course imaginaries of three 10th graders and contrast them with the more common analyses of

“youth becoming” in sociology, psychology, and anthropology. The chapter closes with a

12 year old’s description of what changed when her favorite cousin went off to high school and an analysis of how age identities reflect changing degrees of autonomy and hybridity in subjectivity through time.

The two metaphors of space-time that I used to open the chapter are equally

"real," in that they both describe empirically measurable interconnected movements through time and space, and yet each metaphor characterizes those movements differently as they relate to different subjects (the Solar System versus the Earth). In his famous essay, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," Bakhtin makes a similar point about the ways that subjects' change through time and space is depicted in narrative. 97 He argues that novelistic characterizations of space-time reveal temporal genres, or

"chronotopes," which form the ground - the horizon, if you will - upon which a plot can unfold. His first example of a chronotope is the “adventure-time” of the ancient Greek romance in which a whole lot of adventures happen but the passage of time “is not registered in the slightest way in the age of the heroes” (Bakhtin 1981:90). By comparison, the theme of metamorphosis in novels like the Satyricon and The Golden Ass occurs within a mix of adventure-time and "everyday time," in which time unfolds

“developmentally,” as “a knotted line.” Bakhtin stresses that chronotopes must be read as representations, not insights into the "real" experience of time, and argues that none of these chronotopes can link subjectivity to time as it is “really” experienced. As he explains it,

If I relate (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the

teller (or writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the

event occurred. It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my

own “I,” and that “I” that is the subject of my stories as it is to lift myself up by

my own hair. The represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be

chronotopically identical with the real world it represents, where the author and

creator of the literary work is to be found. (1981:256)

In other words, a speech event (and in this particular case, a narrative in a novel) must inevitably remain anchored in the moment of its production, whereas its author continues to exist in an ongoing and socially evolving present. In line with this, those who use chronotopes in ethnographic discourse analysis tend to look at characterizations of space-time as a shared resource for articulating one’s identity, and discuss how 98 speakers draw on various qualities associated with those times and align themselves with and against other speakers using related chronotopes.39

The point that speech about change through time should not be taken naively as direct insight into "real" perceptions and experiences of time is well taken. However,

Bakhtin also notes that much of the analytical value of the chronotope comes from its embeddedness within the real world as it is experienced by both authors and readers

(1981: 254). At the risk of leaving myself bald and earthbound, the majority of this chapter explores how a dialogic horizon is constituted through my informants' accounts of intergenerational student identity changes through time. Within this dialogic horizon, fluctuations in the connectedness of subjectivity through time are made meaningful as age identities. Chronotopes, as I use them here, retain their primary value as temporal frames that can be compared with each other, but do not therefore imply that the author of the chronotope must (or even necessarily can) be found outside of it (as Bakhtin insists).

Generational Guideposts

The first of these temporal frames, what I call "generational time," was a chronotope repeatedly invoked by parents to describe students in their own family.

Parents of both Conquistador and ITSE Maestro students gave similar accounts of the generational differences in student experiences that took the following shape: 1) a parent or grandparent transitioned prematurely from student to adult laborer (either for money, or as a mother, or both), 2) they consequently came to value being a student, 3) they then

39 Agha 2007 takes on the work of translating Bakhtin’s concept out of the context of the novel and into the “cultural” realm and Davidson’s 2007 is a particularly straightforward example of chronotopes as a shared dialogic resource for identity construction. More recently, Blommaert and de Fina 2016 offered an analysis of all “identities as chronotopic.” 99 generated the possibility for their own student-aged children to remain students longer.

This typical story came up in the parent-student interview with Lucas, an always-smiling kid with braces and slightly glassy black eyes who had been one of the first kids to come and talk to me when I started conducting participant observation at ITSE Maestro. Sitting on folding chairs among the construction dust for her new home-orthodontic practice,

Lucas’s mother explained that,

My mom, when she finished elementary school her father sent her to work. He

didn’t want my mother to keep studying. My mom says that no one ever

encouraged her to study, no one ever said, look at this profession, it’s a good idea,

never! So she left and went straight to work. Until she met my father a bit later.

My father, on the other hand was a different kind of man because my

grandparents, like my father’s father, my grandfather, wasn’t well-schooled or

prepared. But he always encouraged his children to get a degree. So my dad was

always a promoter for us to follow a career path, to study, to get ahead, and to

have a profession.40

Lucas’s mother’s account demonstrates the flexibility of the generational time chronotope by applying it twice! She situates her own values around being a student, as well as her son's opportunity to focus exclusively on schooling, in relation to both her mother’s and her paternal grandfather’s lost schooling years. Her narrative begins with a

40 Mi mami cuando termino la escuela su papa les mando a trabajar, no quiero, no queria que siga estudiando mi mama. Mi mami dice que a ella nunca alguien le incentivo el estudio le dijo mira es una profesion eso es bueno jamas! Entonces ella salio directo a trabajar. Hasta que despues le conocio a mi papa. Mi papa por el contrario era un hombre diferente por el hecho de que, mis abuelos, osea el papa de mi papa, mi abuelo, no era estudiado ni preparado, pero el siempre le incentivo a los hijos a que ellos estudian una carrera. Entonces mi papi siempre fue impulsador de que sigamos una carrera de que estudiemos de que salgamos adelante y que tengamos una profesion. Eran en la misma casa habian las dos diferencias. (Mom, Lucas #3, 41:52.8) 100 grandmother being forced out of childhood by her own unfeeling father (in other interviews the unfeeling father is sometimes replaced with an oppressive husband or new parenthood). The grandmother sacrifices her own dreams of a better future life in response to this parental pressure, but when she marries, she has a new context for understanding that early experience as a lost opportunity (implied by the reported exclamation). The second story also begins with the man who recontextualized the grandmother's experience: Lucas's maternal grandfather. His story begins without an explanation of the circumstances for his lost opportunity to study, but implies that this lost opportunity created a motivation to support his children as students, concluding that her own experience as a student - and subsequently as a parent - was shaped by this value being passed down to her father and the to her. This, in turn, shaped the opportunities that

Lucas now has, thanks to his mother’s commitment to his education.

Some version of this narrative was also told (in order of interview) by Angel's mother, Estefany's mother, Valentina's mother, Jeaneth's mother, Pablo's father, Aurora's mother, Michael's father, Liliana's mother, Tomas's mother and father, Alicia's mother and uncle, and Patricio's aunt. In fact the only exceptions were Benjamin - with whom I was never able to conduct a parent-dyad interview, in great part because his parents worked such long hours (at a variety of jobs, including taxi drivers) - and Luz, whose family had been comfortably middle class (if recently indebted due to some staggering medical bills) for at least three generations. Some of these accounts appear in later chapters as well, but rather than continue to prove the existence of the chronotope, the real value here is in considering its characterization of change through time. 101 It is useful to start by reading this plot through the lens of Bakhtin’s (1981) discussion of “metamorphosis” in the context of Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass. As in

Apuleius, the transformation is a “mythological sheath” that replaces a more complete biography and informs the audience of the fate and disposition of the subject’s whole life

(113). In this case, the transformative moment that helps us to know the “whole life” of the protagonist is the moment in which s/he loses his/her student identity. These narratives are concerned with explaining “how an individual becomes other than what he was” (115). He was a student, he became a laborer. She was a child,41 she became an adult. He was unsupported by his parents, he became a supportive parent. She lost an opportunity to study, she decided to fight for her children to have that same opportunity.

Unlike the "metamorphoses" of Bakhtin's analyses, however, the transformations taking place when previous generations lose their student identities not only transform the protagonist’s self, but transform the possible selves of her children. In that respect, this sort of narrative is grounded in a very different time than the ancient “adventure novel of everyday life” in Bakhtin’s analysis. Whereas stories like The Golden Ass are about an individual’s fate “cut off from both the cosmic and the historical whole” (114), the “early working parent” narratives I discuss here are set in what I am calling “generational time.”

The metamorphosis of the parent-protagonist is tied to the histories of the generations that came both before and since, particularly the legacy of the protagonist as it lives on in the present-day narrator (a parent or alloparent) and the narrator’s own 10th grade child.

That larger temporal arc begins with the parent-protagonist’s lost opportunity to study.

41 the parents featured in these stories are usually about 12 years old in the narrative, but their chronological age is not necessarily the most important indicator of childhood, as I indicated in chapters three and four. 102 The secondary denouement occurs in the present when the parent-narrator gets another shot at a student identity through their children. This time, the parents of the student

“know better,” value the opportunity to study, and are providing the support their children need. In short, these narratives of a parent’s too-early exit from school recontextualize the present - the position from which narrator is speaking - as the denouement of a secondary metamorphosis. The participants move cyclically through the familial roles of child and parent.

The parents’ actions, meanwhile, are rooted in the experiences they had when they were children. The student's futures are always simultaneously uncertain and overdetermined by the actions of their parents. There are no random metamorphoses, and in this temporal framework, it is hard to defend an exclusively individualistic reading of any transformation. The larger temporal background is neither a homogenous time set apart (like Bakhtin’s adventure time), nor a regularly proceeding development through time (like Bakhtin’s biographical time), nor even a line “that unfolds not so much in a straight line as spasmodically, a line with “knots” in it” (113). Although the moments of transition from student to laborer, and then again to parent-of-a-student are highlighted and the intermittent time collapsed in ways that are not inconsistent with the metamorphosis chronotope's "line with knots" metaphor, the characterization of time as a line (even a spiraling, knotty line) fails to do justice to the multiple agentive forces who act on each other through that time.

Instead, this depiction of change through time implies something that exists more between actors than as the single arcs Bakhtin described. Ironically, the larger dialogic phenomenology in which Bakhtin situated his discussion of chronotope provides a useful 103 alternative to the linear conception of time he presents in his actual examples of chronotopes. In that larger philosophical frame, the chronotope (like the narrative itself) was always a multivocal representation, a speech act that depended on pre-existing speeches to give it form and substance, and which in turn influenced future speech. That is, for Bakhtin, while the chronotope could not reflect real time or individual subjectivity, being a mere representation, it was possible to see that "the real" is experienced between rather than within subjects by examining utterances and speech acts (cf. Jung 1990).

Similarly, the chronotope of "generational history" insists on the experience of change through time existing between, rather than within, characters in the narrative.

While emphasizing agency's location between subjects is a helpful starting place, we can make it far more useful in combination with the phenomenological concept of

"horizon," introduced in the last chapter. Thus speech by multiple actors may be only one way of constructing relevant identifiers and guideposts. Although Merleau-Ponty always frames the horizon through the perception of a centered subject, a more dialogic horizon makes room for the guideposts to be collaboratively constructed between multiple subjects, tying their experiences of both pasts, presents, and futures together.

This is not to say that generational histories are any less representational or more

“real” than any other chronotope. It is only to suggest that the transformation of actors in time depicted by generational history requires something more multidimensional than a line (i.e., a horizon) to depict the temporal agency of multiple actors as their transformations overlap and overdetermine each other. The value of complicating this description is not an abstract improvement on our understanding of what chronotope can 104 be so much as it allows us to better understand the subject of the narrative, namely, age identity.

The spiraling guideposts of generational time are told as part of a story of being

"student-aged." The metamorphosis of grandparents and parents from student to laborer set expectations about the kinds of interdependency that student identities require: lacking their own parents' support, those earlier generations were unable to stay in school.

Parents’ explicit contrasts between their own transitions from youth to adulthood with those of their current 10th grade offspring are meant to highlight the importance of parents' agency within their children's student identities, and reinforces that marker of student-identity as an interdependent role. Furthermore, all of the relevant actors are constantly moving in relation to these guideposts, and age identities are less about placement along a line, than they are temporally moving positions among the larger constellation of guideposts that form a horizon. In other words, this chronotope represents age as a collaboratively constructed identity that is also collaboratively encountered.

In(ter)dependent Futures

When my informants talked about the current 10th graders' futures, they also highlighted the transitions that would take place as they graduated, literally and metaphorically, into new age identities. Unlike the spiraling configuration of guideposts of past, present, and future that characterized “generational time” in their parents’ narratives, however, the 10th graders’ accounts generally began in the present and reached into the future. Like their parents’ narratives, the students pointed to key points of interdependency between generations, but did not stop by pointing out parental agency 105 in supporting a child’s transformation. Instead, the key temporal guideposts of the chronotope I will call "socially mobile youth" began with students depending on parents and ended with students doing the supporting.

Like their parents, 10th graders did not generally explain the importance of staying in school as something that they accomplished independently, but as something that was made possible by the efforts and contributions of their parents. Liliana, an aspiring doctor whose mother was a housemaid, touched on this point directly when she explained,

If I’m studying now, or say, I don’t want to study and I leave, it would be terrible

for my parents because they have been doing me the favor of letting me study.

They give me food, a place to live, clothes, books, and that I would tell them I

don’t want to study anymore is like they lost all that money. And it’s a, a

disappointment, because, because instead of advancing my future and having a

great chance for leaving the country, to make more money and all that, I could

[have to] stay here with no job.42

Although she begins with the material considerations - no small thing given her family’s financial precarity - it becomes quickly clear that the real blow would be not a metaphorical loss on a financial investment, but the future adult daughter she could be.

Her student identity is the prerequisite to a future unconstrained by the barriers inequality in Ecuador in which she could have a comfortable upper class life. And failing to hold

42 Si ahorita estudio o y digamos no quiero estudiar y me salgo, fuera terrible para mis padres porque desde mucho tiempo me vienen dando el estudio, me dan comida, me dan vivienda, ropa, libros, y para que yo les diga ya no quiero estudiar es como que perdieron todo el dinero. Y es una, una decepcion, porque, porque en vez de seguir avanzando mi futuro y tener grandes posibilidades de salir del pais, de [?] mas dinero, y eso, podria quedarme aqui sin trabajo. Liliana #1 (38:34) 106 onto that identity until its expected telos would not only relegate her to a bad job, but might preclude any job at all, extending the burden of her current joblessness into changeless perpetuity. The rosy future holds not merely independence, but a shift in the possibilities of reciprocity for the family connections; now they carry her through her student identity, but if she can continue along the path of successful student, she can one day hope to have the resources to carry them. In either case, great or abject, her future is not simply constructed in dialog with her parents, but is actually their future as well.

When she looks ahead to the ages waiting for her - graduate, university student, professional, international success story - she is organizing time in relation to a networked identity.

For my female43 informants in particular, the sense of shared future was not only expressed in an abstract filial obligation to be successful, but in the intention to literally bring their parents with them as they moved socially upward. For Aurora, who lived with her mother and baby brother in the basement below her mother’s hair salon, a profession was how she would be able to buy her mother a house: somewhere bigger, nicer, and more secure. When I asked Liliana when she would move away from home, she said,

“Maybe when I get a job? But no, I wouldn’t leave then if I couldn’t take my mom, I wouldn’t want to go by myself.”44

43 It is worth noting that all of the girls who mentioned a desire to take care of their parents upon growing up had families in somewhat insecure familial and/or economic situations. 44 Cuando, no se, cuando ya, ya tengo un trabajo. Bueno, pero tampoco me fuera de aqui - si le llevara a mi mami tambien? S: Si?

L: Si, pero no me fuera asi yo sola.

Liliana #2 (18:41) 107 For Luz, whose family were professionals but struggling with debt,45 a profession was the means to helping to improve their whole situation. When talking about the job she imagined for herself, she said,

I mean, I’d like, if I make a good living, to give half to my folks and take half for

myself, until they pay off their debts. Or, I don’t know, I would buy them

something in thanks, like food or a new refrigerator, I don’t know. Or something

so that they could be more comfortable.46

Later Luz added that she would be sure to take care of them and make sure they are not abandoned in a nursing home. Others wanted to ensure their siblings would be taken care of. In short, my informants imagined futures in which they would become responsible for helping support their parents.

Parents and siblings were not the only family that 10th graders imagined supporting. Although a couple of them (Liliana and Michael, specifically) were not interested in having children, the majority looked forward to having babies, and saw their student identities as contributing to making that possible, but also constraining the timing on offspring. The girls generally imagined starting to have kids in their early 30s after finishing their graduate degrees, and the boys generally imagined starting earlier in their early 20s while they were beginning their careers. Everyone agreed that having a kid generally means a girl will be leaving school to take care of the child and possibly work

45 An unusual situation resulting from work loss and medical bills after major injuries in a car accident. As Liliana’s mother explained it, banks won’t lend to poor people, so you have to be comfortably middle class before you can go into debt. 46 J: Osea, quisiera, si gano bastante, doy la mitad a mis papis y la mitad cogo yo. Hasta que [lo que?] pagan sus deudas, o no se en agradecimiento les compraria no se un alimento otra refrigeradora no se. O algo para que se sientan mas comodos. Luz #1 (58:48) 108 (whether47 in high school or university). Liliana explained that getting pregnant as a student is bad because you won't be able to get a dependable job because you left school early, and if your baby gets sick it might die because you can't afford medical care. In other words, it’s not just your future riding on the success promised by the “correct” completion of a student identity, nor even just the family who have supported you thus far, but even the family that does not yet exist. That family - and the most vulnerable possible embodiment of that family moreover - will literally live or die depending on the timing of your transition out of your student identity. In short, for the 10th graders, the end point of their future imaginaries was not autonomy, but a new form of interdependency.

Graduations were an important aspect of 10th graders’ discussions of the changes they anticipated to their age identities, but rarely was the age identity of "dependent- student" immediately followed by the role of "dependable-provider". Instead, most families expected a period of increased independence separating the two ages. In general this more independent age identity was imagined to take place shortly after graduating from high school, and hopefully as a full time university student, just as Liliana hinted at above when she mentions studying abroad and the hope of making more money. In fact, the trope of travel abroad was a common theme in discussions of a desire for youthful futures characterized by increased autonomy. During our second interview, sitting in their clean and spare living room, Michael's equally clean and spare father contrasted his hopes for his son's future against his own experience.

47 Although there were pregnant girls in other 10th grade classes at both schools who were not dropping out, and at least one other local high school had a daycare attached to facilitate mothers’ continued attendance. 109 I probably made things difficult for myself, at 23 I complicated things a lot. I

already had a son, I already, I now need a job, I need a house, yeah? I need a wife.

But on the other hand, I raised them [my children] in such a way that studies

come first. Later, they can try and get a job with a good salary, that allows them

to have a better life. They should get to know the world, they should travel, they

should do the different things that befall a person. That is, I, 23 years old, I was

already a father, you know? So I didn't want for them to be in the same

situation.48

This description of his preferred order of events for his children came only a few minutes after this reflection,

They should enjoy what life offers while they are alone, when they are single. It’s

good, it’s beautiful. Because the responsibility of a wife, and then the children

that come, that kind of impedes growth and learning, like I said, getting to know

the world, getting to know life.49

Luz's father had a similar wish for his daughter, which he explained in his slow, gentle way one birdsong filled Saturday morning at their house,

48 A lo mejor, yo me complique, a mis 23 años yo me complique mucho. Decia, pero ya tengo un hijo, ya, y tengo que necesito un trabajo, necesito una casa, si? necesito una mujer. Pero en cambio en ellos yo les formo de una manera en que primero, primero el estudio. Despues, traten de tener un trabajo con una buena remuneracion, que les permita a tener una mejor vida. Que conozcan, que como viajen, que hagan cosas distintas a lo que uno cayo. Osea, yo, 23 años, ya fue ya fui padre, no es cierto. Entonces yo no quisiera que ellos osea que esten en ese mismo tema. Michael #2 (1:18:40)

49 “Que distruten las, lo que la vida les ofrece cuando estan solos, cuando esten solteros. Si, es bueno, es bonito. Porque tomar una responsabilidad ya una una mujer una esposa, ya despues vienen los hijos y eso, impide un poco el crecimiento y de conocer, como digo, de conocer el mundo, conocer, conocer la vida.” Michael #2 (1.00.30) 110 I would hope that she not depend on other people to have her resources, her

money, her things. Rather that she would be able to buy, to be able to, if she

wants to travel to be able to travel. But not with the fruit of her labor also. That,

more than anything, that she be self-sufficient, that she not depend on anyone.50

That hope, he continued, was complicated by marriage, noting that this was often a reason for people (although I am sure he meant women, specifically) to leave their work. His was by far the clearest articulation of a desire for autonomy for his daughter's future that I heard from any of my informants, but other girls shared his concern that marriage, and children would chip away at their ability to become the kinds of professionals they hoped to be. Aurora specifically noted that women, when they marry, are expected to care for their husbands and therefore should wait until finishing school to do so.

All of these future imaginaries fit easily in the context of the social scientific literatures on “youth becoming,” but the chronotopic depiction of “lines” toward the future are not nearly as straight or as independent in my informants’ accounts as these literatures would lead one to expect. Rather than describing a steady linear temporal trajectory in which a person gradually becomes more and more autonomous, or even a single step graduation of an individual "throwing off his self-incurred tutelage," as Kant put it (1997[1784]), I understand these changes within a dialogic horizon where temporally located guideposts - connected to the subject via age identity - are sometimes

50 Yo quisiera que ella no no depende de otras personas para para tener sus tener sus recursos, su dinero, sus cosas. Sino que ella pueda comprar, se pueda, si quiere viajar que pueda viajar o si. Pero con el fruto de su esfuerzo tambien. Que, mas que todo eso, que sea autosuficiente, que no depende de nadie. Luz #2 (50:15) 111 stridently independent, sometimes neutrally interdependent, and sometimes undeniably one-sided in the flow of support. All of these interdependent futures rested on a platform of a successfully completed time as a student, the imagined outcome of a national promise of social mobility in exchange for hard work in school (something I discuss at more length in Part 3). But the socially mobile youth futures imagined are only comprehensible as individuals joining others on a horizon that is collectively constructed.

From this perspective, the category of age not only maintains the coherence of interpersonal networks of expectations as we move through time together, it lends meaning to the moments when our identities transition to becoming more autonomous or more interdependent.

Lost and Becoming

Bakhtin (whose dialogism and basic concept of chronotopes I have shoehorned into Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological horizon to make the above argument) is, as I noted at the outset, less concerned with subjectivity itself than with its representation. In other words, while he makes a strong argument that the ways that we reveal ourselves in speech are inextricable from the other discourses and voices that frame these productions

(cf. Irvine 1996), he makes no real attempt to interpret subjective experiences beyond their portrayal in language (the experience of touch, for example, is only relevant insofar as someone is discussing it). There are obvious advantages to this approach for those

(few) anthropologists who are deeply invested in the reliability and replicability of their analyses, but there are also major implications - perhaps not immediately apparent - for the analysis of time. In short, centering a temporally fixed production of speech organizes 112 time such that it can be empirically measured.51 In other words, what an author52 says is influenced by conversations and interactions of the past, and provides foundations for some number of discourses in the future (even if only the discourses of that self-same author’s future self). And yet, Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope does not immediately appear to suffer from such a relentless sequentiality, perhaps because he allows it to be far more disconnected from "the real." Bakhtin’s dialogic phenomenology is valuable in demanding that we account for the relevance of multiple agents and voices in constructing our experience, but in focusing so closely on the particular voices it becomes more difficult to identify what real social patterns might be reflected. Genres like chronotope thus remain firmly in the realm of representation, and those interested in seeking patterns in how those representations might impinge upon the real are reminded to beware of the futility of picking oneself up by the hair.

By contrast, Elizabeth Grosz’s ontology of becoming allows for more multidirectional agency through time by emphasizing the “nicks” that allow us to experience time as emergent (2004). Following her philosophy across multiple works also provides an alternative source of analysis to Bakhtin's focus on speech by switching attention to more corporeally experienced subjectivity. Here I return to the theme of changes in autonomy and interdependency, but move away from the frameworks of chronotope and dialogic horizon to consider how age identity shapes temporal

51 While there is some overlap with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of time here - he, too, was focused on the present as the site of the perceiving subject, and saw time as extending out in multiple directions from that point - Merleau-Ponty’s “ontology of becoming” (to build on Grosz’s analysis in Time Travels) left room for a subject to reshape the past whereas Bakhtin’s approach allowed only for a subject to reinterpret it. 52 I choose the word “author” here rather than speaker because that is how Bakhtin introduced the concept (in the context of literary analysis), but clearly he and his circle included all speakers in this category. Author, thus, is more of a participant role that can overlap with speaker than an exclusive category. 113 subjectivity by applying Grosz's more corporeal lens to a story of a memory of one student heading off to high school.

As the family interview with 10th grade Conquistador student Benjamin began, his 12 year old cousin Dominga sat in a chair across from me in a narrow, green-walled room that extended out from a small kitchen. On her left, 15 year old Benjamin hunched forward with his arms comfortably crossed over the quiet 2 year old nephew that sat in his lap, and on her right Benjamin’s 23 year old sister Marjorie leaned back in her metal chair to ease the weight of her past-due pregnant belly. Dominga’s mother, Benjamin’s 36 year old sister-in-law, sat next to me on another metal chair, leaving the whole understuffed and faded green couch to me, my recorder, and the brown leather purse I’d just pulled my field notebook and pencil from. We were only a few minutes into the interview, having walked up all together through the mechanic shop on the first level, past various familial suites, and up a set of steps to a walkway that wound around the second floor and eventually ended here. It was already dark out, and while the five of us talked, my driver, Ana, had been warmly invited to join the rest of the family inside the high metal gates that differentiated the safe home from the risky streets of south Quito.

They were a large and genial family, and so it was no surprise that I felt just as relaxed and welcome as I had in my first introduction - even though Benjamin was the only one of the eight people I’d had dinner with during that initial meeting that was also present for this interview. Dominga seemed especially pleased to be participating, and sat tall and confident as she listened to me and each of the others speak. After I asked about a time when their relationship with Benjamin changed, Dominga began a story in a 114 deliberate timbre that sounded familiar after listening to 10th graders answer teachers’ questions every day.

Let’s see, when I was in second grade and he was in fifth, I had recently started at

the school and he, everyday he would take me holding my hand, he waited for me

outside my class. And sometimes, when I got out early, I would go to his grade,

and the lady would let me come in, and, right there at his side, I would sit next to

him and spend the whole day in his class until it was over. And when we

separated was when he left and -

And here I interrupt the account because her voice and face changed so dramatically and unexpectedly that it demands an equally jarring retelling. I can only say that her voice crumpled, she began to cry loudly, and her breaths became gasping sobs as she continued without pause,

- he went to high school. And it hit me really hard because it left me totally alone

and I didn’t have him at my side {loud breath} and it hurt a lot because {gasp}

we stopped seeing each other and he got home late and he wasn’t with me

anymore, and it hurt because he was like my brother {gasp}, he had been with me

and it hurt a lot that he would not be with me anymore. So that day, when he said

goodbye, he {choke} left elementary school, and I was in fifth and he wasn’t

there anymore, so, I had to stay there alone with no one for company, and yeah it

really hurt that he wouldn’t be with me anymore..53

53 “A ver, yo estuve de cuando estaba en segundo y el estaba creo que en quinto, y entre yo recien a la escuela y el todo los dias me llevaba de la manito, me esberaba afuera de mi grado, y a veces yo entraba cuando salia temprano entraba al grado de el, y la señorita de me hace entrar, y yo al lado de el, sentada al lado de el, todo el dia recibiendo clases [hasta?] la ultimas hora. Y cuando ya nos separamos fue cuando el salio y [voice immediately changes to tears] se fue al colegio. Y a mi me golpio muy duro porque me tope me solita y no tenia el a mi lado, [breath] y me dolio mucho porque {gasp] nos dejamos de ver y el llegaba tarde y ya no estaba conmigo, y: eso me dolió porque el era como mi hermano {gasp}, [me había] 115 By the end of this, Dominga was not the only one with tears running down her face and even I felt my own eyes glistening in sympathy. Later, I could only smile at the mercurial mood that seemed to have taken us all, but at that moment we were all present to Dominga’s emphatic pain over a transition that was three years past, but no less real.

Dominga’s narrative of transformation is most familiar as part of a genre of stories about

“student becoming,” in which youth (and particularly high school and university students) go through meaningful changes, especially changes that result in them being more autonomous. Like the U.S. trope of “empty-nest syndrome,” the central moment of becoming in Dominga’s story revolves around the high school student’s (Benjamin’s) change, i.e., literally, physically, and figuratively leaving both elementary school and her.

And yet, it would be a mistake to suggest that this story was only about Benjamin - or indeed, only about Dominga! To the contrary, to the extent that this is a story of autonomy, it is an autonomy predicated on a loss of something shared.

After Dominga reached the end of her story, I muttered apologetically that I had not meant to cause such pain but her mother quickly reassured me, insisting that this was good for all of them, “because one gets out what one has inside, what one feels, what one has not been able to say for a long time.”54 Her framing of Dominga’s pain as internal was particularly striking to me las I reflected on the exchange later. It certainly felt like she had shared a burden that she had been carrying too long, and the idea of the feeling she had “inside” was made more meaningful by the idea that she had been unable to say

acompañado y me dolió mucho que ya no esté conmigo. Entonces ese día cuando el ya se despidió, el ya {chokes} dejó la escuela, y yo, estaba en quinto y el ya no estaba, osea me tocó quedarme yo solita y nadie me acompañaba, y si ya me dolió mucho que ya no esté conmigo.” (Dominga, Benjamin #3, 14:28)

54 “Es bueno porque uno saca lo que, lo que tiene adentro, lo que siente, lo que no ha podido decirlo, eeh, durante mucho tiempo.” (Cuñada, Benjamin#3, 16:15) 116 it. Not only was there relief to be found in making such a loss social and spoken, but her mother’s frame highlighted for me that Dominga’s pain was one of loss, of loneliness, of separation. It was a pain that came from standing alone where she had once stood hand in hand with Benjamin.

Her sharp breaths and gulps were an insistent reminder of the physicality of her speech long after our interview had lost its sharpness in my own memory, and her pain- filled interjections punctuated images of physical intersubjective closeness and then isolation in newly impersonal walls. What Dominga described was a visceral change: an experience of Benjamin’s loss when he left for high school that was all about the change in how she physically experienced school and home. But the idea that this experience would naturally be experienced alone, in the memory and the mind of a single individual, as in the familiar Freudian psychoanalytic approach, did not fit the experience Dominga described. Instead, her performance of grief reminded me of Merleau-Ponty’s collapsing of introspection and extrospection in the case of an infant who experiences the absence of its caregiver as “a sensation of incompleteness” (1963: 164). Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist revision of that particular aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology concludes that

Merleau-Ponty does not go far enough in describing shared subjectivities (1994).

Building on the work of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Grosz contests the universality of subjectivity as an inherently individual experience. She revisits Merleau-

Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, and particularly his emphasis on the interdependence of feeling and being felt, in order to destabilize the dominant Western binaries of mind and body. “The subject can no longer be viewed as a pure positivity or simply as an aggregate of sensations,” she summarizes, continuing on to emphasize 117 linkage over boundaries. But, Grosz argues, Merleau-Ponty fails to incorporate those sensory experiences that are not also experienced by men, particularly those located in wombs. Merleau-Ponty does not, she notes, discuss the fetal development of hearing.

Grosz notes that, “Chronologically between the touch and seeing, hearing, while relying on tactility, cannot hide its earliest feminine/maternal origins: the music of the womb, the precondition of both sound and meaning” (1994:107).

I understand Grosz to be articulating the limits of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in its inability to move beyond mere linkages to a more hybrid, blurred, and shared subjectivity. Grosz draws on Irigaray to add a feminist psychoanalytic layer to the corporality of phenomenology as she demands attention for the particularly maternal disruptions of subjectivity. Julia Kristeva offered a similar (if more poetic) explanation almost a decade before in the following “flash” of maternal experience in her essay,

“Stabat Mater,”

My body is no longer mine, it writhes, suffers, bleeds, catches cold, bites, slavers,

coughs, breaks out in a rash, and laughs. Yet when his, my son’s, joy returns, his

smile cleanses only my eyes. But suffering, his suffering - that I feel inside; that

never remains separate or alien but embraces me at once without a moment's

respite. (1985: 138)

Schmied and Lupton (2001) pointed out that these feminist phenomenologies of shared subjectivity are not necessarily either pleasant or empowering, despite some suggestions to the contrary (e.g., Chodorow 1978), then highlight the experiences of alienation and even disgust experienced by the breastfeeding women in their anthropological study. And yet, Schmied and Lupton’s emphasis on subjects’ reports - 118 unlike Kristeva’s reflection - necessarily minimizes (if not outright excludes) the “voice” of the infant. Developmental psychology’s explorations of the development of the infant’s subjective self (e.g., Fonagy et al 2007, Gergely 2007) do not do much better: they acknowledge that the self is made through interdependent relationships with caregivers, particularly in infants’ utilization of maternal perception in lieu of their own, but they still frame infants as having a pre-subjective state rather than considering the possibility of a shared subjectivity.55

Taken in aggregate, the implications of these philosophical, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic perspectives for understanding subjectivity across a life course are potentially profound. If maternal and fetal experience can be so profoundly blurred (and I confess that my own experience of motherhood has entirely predisposed me to this interpretation), then the expectation of an autonomous phenomenological subject - even the chiasmic being-to-the-world autonomy offered by Merleau-Ponty - must be rejected as a default state. If both a baby and a mother can share subjectivity, even when they do not share a body, then the underlying assumption of autonomy of perception cannot be assumed for anyone. The alternative - when taken within the context of a life course - is not a default of a shared subjectivity, but of a subjectivity which may be variously autonomous or shared. If we can understand the infant as wholly sharing a subjectivity with her mother very early in life as well as a mother partially sharing a subjectivity with her infant much later, why would we assume that, say, an adolescent might not at least partially share a subjectivity with his father, or a grandmother with her daughter?

55 Daniel Stern (2000) is a well-known exception to this, but, as he himself notes, as a psychoanalyst as well as a developmental psychologist, he is more ready to risk inferring incorrectly from the observational and experimental data on infants’ subjective lives. 119 While these psychoanalytic and phenomenological discussions of the self highlight the body’s role in breaking down the barriers of autonomy (and this is most striking in Schmied and Lupton’s account of the mothers who find breastfeeding alienating), the nature of phenomenological subjectivity is to interweave the mind and body rather than hold up the bodily as primary. This is a particularly important point for this chapter’s use, which explores the way that discursive (intergenerational, familial) age identities shape subjective experiences of time. This chapter, in particular, builds on the idea that perceptions of the self through time need not depend exclusively upon the sensations and ideologies of the individual, but may be collaboratively experienced between family members.

Of course, Dominga is neither fetus nor mother, but if we take Merleau-Ponty and

Grosz seriously, does this not throw the assumption of a hard line between introspection and extrospection into question? The pain experienced by the separation of siblings is certainly well documented in developmental literatures (e.g., Bedford 1989, Leathers

2005), and certainly we anthropologists are ready to see their relevance even to fictive siblings who are technically cousins. This separation and loneliness is generally portrayed as part of a process of subject formation - a linear, unidirectional process of becoming that lines up neatly with the Kantian ideal of “the escape of men from their self-incurred tutelage.” But Dominga’s loss was not so different from the loss that Benjamin’s older sister Marjorie described minutes before - even using the same word “un golpe,” a physical blow - to describe her own separation from Benjamin’s daily life following her own departure from the household when she got married. In other words, their separation is not an overdetermined reality of youth psychological development, so much as the 120 result of a personal relationship changing form in response to structural changes of age identity (new school, new marriage/home). While these losses could certainly be described as part of a process of growing autonomy, it does not follow that such closeness is gone for good (although elementary school and pre-married age identities are certainly no longer available). In other words, if we do not already assume, as the majority of accounts of “youth becoming” do, that Dominga’s transition is an increase in subjectivity, we can hear her saying that what she has experienced is a change to being more alone rather than more herself.

At a minimum, Dominga’s account of a key moment in Benjamin’s “youth identity” formation does highlight the ways that his story of “becoming” is not only a

“critical period” of his own life, but for those whose life courses are intertwined with his.

Not only does this suggest that such changes in shared or autonomous subjectivity may occur multidirectionally across the life course, it also helps to illustrate what Elizabeth

Grosz refers to as “nicks” in time (2004), a moment that stands out and allows us to temporally locate ourselves. Dominga’s loss of Benjamin offers a variation on the classic trope (and chronotope) of the modern “youth becoming.” Instead of describing the metamorphosis of an individual among other individuals, as one might expect given the emphasis on youth as a critical period for developing autonomy, these accounts suggest that “youth becoming” is less of an individual gaining a sense of autonomous self along a unilinear path, and more of an intersubjective becoming: between “subjects,” between ages, and between times. As with new mothers, Dominga’s articulation of loss makes it possible to talk about a phenomenological experience that can otherwise be quite difficult to name. 121

The Stakes of Age Horizons

As in the last chapter, this one takes a phenomenological framework, centering the perceptions of the aging subject within a Merleau-Pontian horizon populated by temporal, social, and bodily guideposts and identities. By incorporating Mikhail

Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (and the dialogic phenomenology that made it a broadly applicable concept), we have relocated the concept of the age horizon to understand how it is constructed relationally between subjects, rather than simply revolving around an individual. Including Elizabeth Grosz’s ontology of becoming and corporeal feminist phenomenology has helped us conceive of this collaborative experience not only through speech (as Bakhtin does), but as bodily experience. These approaches reframe "youth becoming" as an intergenerational process of shifting interdependencies rather than an individual's journey of increasing autonomy. Most radically, by exploring this from a phenomenological angle, age can be seen as an embodied experience of the self a subjectivity which is more shared or more individual at different moments of the life course. And more practically, this approach contextualizes normative developmental narratives within the high intergenerational stakes for distributing responsibilities across a family by age identity. In this chapter, I explore these stakes as they are presented by the families of Lucas, Luz, Michael, and Liliana, particularly in terms of families' "investments" in their children and their hopes for a more secure familial future.

The next chapters analyze many of these same chronotopes and discourses of

(student) age, using this more fully fleshed concept of the "age horizon" to contextualize 122 the normative identities that constitute the "citizen life cycle." School infrastructures and policies, discourses of "progress," chronotopes like "unidirectionality," "discontinuity," and "impermanence," and being a "good citizen" or a "bad kid," can all be considered as guideposts that make up the age horizons experienced by my informants and their families. And by framing them as guideposts, once the age-based governmental and disciplinary techniques have been identified, it is finally possible to consider meaningful solutions to the problems they create.

123

Part 3: The Citizen Life Cycle

Image 3. A student-made anti-pregnancy poster that reads, “Your youth is beautiful, your curiosity unimaginable, and that’s why your responsibility must be constant. YOU DECIDE YOUR FUTURE!!”

The next three chapters explore the relationship between educational infrastructures, normative aging, and the boundaries of national belonging. This section argues that mechanisms like school grades, chronological-age based rights to access, enrollment policies, curriculum standardization, and "school discipline" all contribute to the normalization of youth age identity as moving steadily towards a major graduation into adulthood. The techniques for normalizing the "unidirectionality" of students' aging rationalize the discourses of "national progress," and help us to understand the social stakes of normative sequences of age. The "discontinuity" between youth and adulthood that is grounded in the graduation from high school undergirds state claims of promoting equality, and an increase in discontinuity has been an intended effect of recent educational reforms. However, this discontinuity also produces and obscures the differentiation of populations by gender, class, and race. And finally, my informants desires for their school be stricter reveal how the impermanence of (age) identities are used to justify the restriction of rights in the name of, eventual, full membership. I argue that this pattern exists in the attenuation of rights across the life course, and propose this use of age identity as a new application of the concept of biocitizenship. 124 5. Making National Progress with Unidirectional Aging

I wasn’t surprised when Michael’s dad suggested that school-aged kids like his son were going to help the country move forward. It’s a common line of conversation, as much in Ecuador as in the U.S. contexts I grew up in. The role of youth in the improving of the nation came up indirectly in many interviews, and was named most clearly during the dyad interview with Michael and his father. An earnest low-level bureaucrat and single father with two children at the public university in addition to my 10th grade informant, Teodoro explained that the improvements in education that Michael was experiencing were not just good for his son, but for the country. Ecuador, he concluded, was improving, and the education policy changes were both evidence of that improvement as well as the mechanism for improving the nation through its school-going youth. Addressing both me and Michael from the chair across from our couches in his sunny and spare living room, Teodoro described his perspective,

The youth that exists at this point in time, that still has to go I don’t know how

many years [before graduating], these youth that are going to finish [school] after

five or ten years are going to, we are going to have progress in this country, I

think. Because [of a] better selection of people.56

In Teodoro's comment, students’ scholarly success will result in a better educated adult citizenry in the future, which will ensure more rational governance of the country.

56 “Osea la juventud que está ahorita en esta época, que todavía le falta no se cuantos años, pero en esta época van a-, Estos jóvenes que van a terminar después de cinco o diez años, vamos a tener un progreso en el país creo. Porque mejor selección de personas.” (Teodoro in Michael #2, 1:44:07) 125 But beyond this future-directed discourse of youth becoming,57 Teodoro also hints at the mechanisms through which the temporal frame of “progression” is produced. Youth, here, is not merely a symbol of national progress, national progress is made materially real through the educating and aging of youth populations. When youth are framed as "school aged,” changes in age identity across a life course are framed as “progress” towards a better, more rational adulthood, and linked to national identity such that historical change is also framed as improvement through the aging of the population.

There is nothing surprising about the fact that the state ties access to social rights (like education and social security) to chronological age identities as a way of ensuring equality despite differences in gender, race, and class. Despite this common knowledge, the relationship between age identity and citizenship is rarely taken as a theoretical concern as the measurement of age is often taken as self-evident. This is unfortunate, as the next three chapters will only scratch the surface in demonstrating how deeply youth identity, time, and the nation are interwoven for my informants through their school- based experiences. Part 3 examines three temporal aspects of youth becoming that give shape to the citizen life cycle: unidirectionality, discontinuity, and impermanence. As the first of these, this chapter examines the relationship between youth and national progress to explain how schools construct unidirectional aging as a key to good citizenship.

Following a summary of the work I draw on in this chapter, the Disciplinary Age section begins with an analysis of how the normative “temporal architecture” of school- based age grading incite my informants to experience their own age identities

57 The terms “future-directed” and “becoming” are used by Nancy Lesko to refer to the discursive link between youth and national progress. See more in the discussion of Lesko below, but also Patrick Alexander’s 2014 discussion of “age imaginaries.” 126 unidirectionally. Analyzing the construction of school-age using Foucault’s concept of

“disciplinary time” within a life course approach suggests that age identity and discourses of national progress are mutually constituted through their shared temporal elements, and particularly through frames of time as unidirectional. In the Aging Like a Citizen section

I argue that the naturalization of youth as a unidirectional process of aging incites populations to “maximize” normative experiences of youth as a way of “maximizing” preparation to contribute to the nation as citizens (adults). This chapter analyzes school- based temporal architectures as both guideposts of age and as disciplinary mechanisms that incite Ecuadorians into a unidirectional citizen life cycle.

Governing the Life Course

Back in the 1920s, anthropology made a place for itself among the social sciences by arguing against the idea of biological determinism. In opposition to the wild popularity of deterministic theories of biological and psychological development, the big names in anthropology argued that childhood and adolescence were necessarily experienced differently cross-culturally (Mead 2001 [1928], Malinowski 2001 [1929]). Their ethnographies looked to disprove the idea that youth was universally experienced as a period of storm and stress (Hall 1904, Erikson 1994 [1968]) by looking beyond the

“modern” context.58 Since these pioneers, many of us accept that the dominant definitions of childhood and youth - and, by extension, age more generally - in the U.S. and “the

West” are particular, and not a reliable way to measure age cross-culturally. As LeVine

(2007) pointed out in his genealogy of ethnographic studies of childhood, this positioning

58 It is, however, worth noting that, despite their conclusions, whether adolescence is “universal” is still being debated. 127 of anthropology as an oppositional paradigm left us without our own consistent approach to age analysis, leaving those of us who continue to study age stuck using the same models of age (such as the developmental life cycle) that we are critiquing. This makes it difficult to discuss many of the broader implications of cultural variation in youth and childhood, particularly in more familiar contexts (like formal schooling). However, by making the relationship between biology, culture, and time an object of inquiry in the examination of age, the life course approach eschews both the misleading biological determinism that continues to haunt many more “developmental” approaches to studying childhood and youth and transcends the limitations of the most exclusively social examinations of time and age. In short, the holism of a life course approach provides a solid - if wide-ranging - analytical ground on which to conduct a more theoretically coherent cross-cultural analysis of age identity.

In contrast to a life stage paradigm, which remains dominant in many social sciences

(particularly psychology), the life course approach takes a whole life as its unit of analysis (Leidy 1996, Pike 2005). This approach avoids reifying definitions of age as objective chronologies (cf. Fry 1990, Bledsoe 2002) or averaged biological/psychological development (cf. Lock 1993). Anthropologists have made good use of this in analyzing non-Western logics of aging that privilege contingency over chronology (inchoate in

Mead 2001 [1928] and thoroughly theorized by Bledsoe 2002 and Johnson-Hanks 2006).

Although some people also refer to a life course as a "life cycle,” I follow Leidy in using the "life course" to emphasize a contingent and overlapping whole life in contrast with a "life cycle" of "rigid age categories and developmental stages" (1996: 700). In other words, the term "life cycle" is mostly used to describe a series of a priori 128 psychological and biological life stages (e.g., "Infancy, Childhood, Adolescence,

Adulthood, Old Age”). Rather than rejecting the idea of the life cycle, a life course approach makes it possible to analyze how clear boundaries between ages are drawn in social practice and discourse, and how they shape our experiences of our bodies and social contexts through time. This chapter explores the construction of a "Citizen Life

Cycle," emphasizing how boundaries between stages, or "age grades," are constructed through mechanisms for governing populations' relationship to the state. While

“unidirectionality," or the idea that you can only "age forward," or get older, as time passes, is taken for granted within a life cycle paradigm, this is not necessarily assumed within a life course approach and is directly interrogated below. This chapter provides one possible explanation for how the familiar framework of the life cycle comes to feel so "natural" to those of us (like my informants) who use it by examining the temporal structures that shape our individual life course trajectories and tying them to our sense of larger social belonging.

I define “age grade” in alignment with Ruth Benedict’s use of the term in her article,

“Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning,” that is, as a synonym for discontinuous changes in responsibilities, status, hierarchies of authority, sexual roles, etc, across a person’s life. Separating age strictly along the lines of discontinuous and continuous cultural change has its limits: as Benedict uses it, for example, it already assumes unilinear aging. Furthermore, the boundaries between grades, even when they remain only implicit, can only be culturally specific anchors for age identities (whether etic or emic). Those boundaries can be as gray and wide as the “line” between childhood and adulthood, or as clearly defined and narrow as a graduation from 10th grade. Thus, to 129 speak in terms of age grades is to acknowledge that some events are more meaningful than others in understanding the cultural construction of age through time.

How age grading fits into the larger “life course” approach depends a great deal on who you ask: Elder et al. went so far as to introduce the Handbook of the Life Course with the statement, “we view the life course as consisting of age-graded patterns that are embedded in social institutions and history” (2006:4). However, Benedict’s discussion of age grading highlights the ways in which “age grades” are far from universal. In the following three chapters, I seek to examine how the age graded patterns of formal schooling naturalize unidirectional, discontinuous, and impermanent temporal frames of the life course, and ask how those mechanisms differentiate the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The preceding chapters, where I have emphasized horizons and contingent subjectivities, build an analysis of the life course as a horizon, and in Part 3 I explore the guideposts marking a single path through that horizon, which I refer to as the citizen life cycle. In this chapter, I begin with an analysis of how age grading in Ecuadorian schools produce an experience of the nation as moving “forward in time.” I take age grading as a technique for normalizing age identities through both contingent and fixed aspects of physiological and temporal change. In other words, I draw attention to the ways in which directionality is socioculturally constructed through bodies and time.

My informants’ experiences of high school as a life stage in urban Quito aren’t exactly the same as U.S. 10th graders, but it’s more like comparing Granny Smiths and

Fujis than apples and oranges. They frame schooling as a sequence of achievements that culminate in a transition between two life stages that happens at graduation from school, 130 very like what is so common in the U.S.59 School, as a social institution, connects daily activities to larger graduations through series of age-specific accomplishments, in ways that encourage students to imagine future identities - particularly professional ones - as predictable based on how closely aligned one is with the citizen rights and responsibilities associated with each carefully calculated age along the way. Major school graduations (ideally from a professional degree, but at minimum from high school) don’t just represent “one more accomplishment,” but function as boundaries of adulthood.

Individuals are held accountable for their life course trajectories, which can either be the virtuous normativity of a "Citizen Life Cycle" or one of the myriad abject life trajectories that results from deviating from this normative path. These ways of understanding age shape how people think about their rights and responsibilities to each other and to the nation.

Discourses linking youth to national progress are common not only in Ecuador, but worldwide (e.g. Coe 2005). Nancy Lesko, who has provided the most thorough and insightful analysis of the phenomenon, argues that in the U.S. and other modern nations,

“youth are invariably talked about as our future. Adolescence is an emblem of modernity, and time is its defining mode” (2012: 136). Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s discussions of modernity as a progressive and disjunctive present, Lesko argues that social interventions to ensure the appropriate development of youth into future citizens function as a discursive space where adults can “endlessly worry about” the transformation of “the modern social order and citizenry” into a “more self-determining, individualized, and reasoning” population and national identity (2012: 5-6). In contrast to the argument that

59 See Greene et al 1992 for a study on how U.S. high school students perceive the life course. 131 adolescence is a life stage particular to modern societies (cf. Bucholtz 2002), Lesko’s depiction of the relationship between adolescence and modernity characterizes the age identity as “a technology to produce certain kinds of persons within particular social arrangements” (2012: 42, her emphasis). This chapter builds on Lesko’s argument for a governmental relationship between age and national identity in exploring how infrastructures like schooling weave age identity and (modern) national identities into a

“citizen life cycle.”

Disciplinary Age: achieving national progress through temporal architectures

Age grading is a key technique through which modern schooling governs populations into age identities and is part of what Sylviane Agacinski refers to as “the temporal architecture ... [through which] the technical hegemony of the West expresses itself all over the world” (2003:6). As a piece of temporal architecture, school grades work through and on the populations who attend them. By anchoring the beginning and end of school grades in an "objective" chronology, school grades naturalize age grades as unidirectional. Through populations’ embodiment of this characterization of time as progressive it also becomes possible to see national progress as a rational, even natural, result.

The linking of school grades to chronological age, the mandating of first through tenth grade, and the simultaneity of the end of high school with the age of legal majority

(18 years old) are some of the most familiar large scale mechanisms that incite populations to frame their experiences of aging as unidirectional. As in the U.S.,

Ecuadorian school attendance is mandated through years-old (chronological age), and 132 requires state certified documents with a birth date for enrollment. When students turn 15, mandatory school attendance ends and youth are legally permitted to enter the labor market. Assuming that the student has not failed any of the assessments that allow them to graduate each year, at that age they should be finishing their Basic Education (10th grade). These are some of the basic structures of modern schooling, and they quite explicitly link age to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship globally (e.g.,

Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989) as well as nationally (e.g., 2009 Ministerio de Educación).

Schools normalize particular patterns of physiological and behavioral development by tying the chronological (“objective”) organization of school years to imagined averages of biopsychosocial development. The linking of school year, chronological age, physiological development, and social behavior at school and home was particularly visible in the account of an ITSE Maestro school psychologist of kids in high school as in a “difficult age”60.

In year eight the kids are more or less between 12 and - they’re about 12 years

old. In ninth the kids are aged 13 and when they go to year ten they are between

14 and 15 years old. So in year eight the kids come to the school, they come, and

they’re still children! They are still the little ones that do what they’re told. Yeah?

But on the other hand, by ninth the kids are already suffering the changes of

puberty, biological changes, changes in height, in pubic hair, voices dropping, and

60 This came up in his description of his job, in which he said, “It’s quite a struggle because the kids are at a really difficult age: the psychological changes, so rebellious, reactionary, stubborn, hysterical.” “Es una lucha bastante dura porque como los chicos están en una edad bien difícil: los cambios psicólogos, tan rebelde, reacios, necios, histéricos.” (5-13-15 ITSE Maestro school day, counselor’s office) 133 the kids are also changing their way of thinking, leaving behind their childhood

and converting a little into youth. And as youth they think they are the owners of

the truth. Dad, mom, they’re antiquated now. The males also don’t obey easily. In

tenth [grade] is when the psychological changes are strongest because they are

coming to that part of adolescence. Where the adolescent is by nature, by nature

is rebellious, is reactionary, is stubborn, hysterical, in this age, in tenth [grade] -

15 years old more or less - the kids don’t want to obey easily at home with their

parents.61

The psychologist's characterizations of adolescence as a temporary period of rebellion against authority will be familiar to the reader, but I want to draw the reader’s attention to the ways he links averages of biological, psychological, and social attributes to chronological measurements of age. He weaves together 1) a sequence of uniform school grades (first eighth, then ninth, then tenth), 2) the progression of chronological age (first

12 years old, then 13 years old, then 14 to 15 years old), 3) a series of average biological changes (height, hair, voice), 4) social-psychological changes (“their way of thinking” and the list of rebellious adjectives), and 5) a variety of terms for age identities (children, kids, childhood, youth, adolescence). The psychologist’s normalization of this “average”

61 En octavo año los chicos mas o menos están entre en lo a los 12 están en la edad de 12 anos. En noveno están en la edad 13 años y cuando van al décimo año están entre 14 y 15 años. Entonces en octavo año vienen los chicos de la escuela, vienen, todavía son niños! Son los pequeñitos que ellos todavía hacen caso. Si? Pero en cambio en noveno ya los chicos sufren los cambios a nivel de la pubertad, cambios biológicos, crecimiento en talla, [beociar? {becoming stupid?}], cabello púbico, cambio de voz, los chicos también están cambiando su manera de pensar, van dejando detrás la niñez y se van convirtiendo un poquito en jóvenes. Y como son jóvenes ellos piensan que son los dueños de la verdad. Papa mama ya que era anticuado. Los machos también no quieren obedecer fácilmente. En decimos cuando los cambios psicológicos son mas fuertes porque viene de tal parte es la adolescencia. Donde el adolescente por naturaleza es, naturaleza es rebelde, es reacio, es necio, histérico, en esta edad, en décimo, que viene a ser décimo de grado, 15 anos mas o menos, los chicos no quieren obedecer fácilmente en a los padres en la casa. (5-13-15 ITSE Maestro school day, counselor’s office) 134 series of age grades depicts the passage of time as an objective, regular, and unidirectional process that populations pass through more or less homogeneously. When the boundaries of graded cohorts remain constant as years pass, historically distinct populations are produced as substitutable across time. 10th graders are understood to be

14-15 year olds every year, not just this year, and next year they will be one year older, chronologically, physically, and “educationally.” At the intersection of ahistorical age grades and aging populations, time itself comes to be experienced and normalized as progression.

A changing embodied subject is the sine qua non of this definition of time. The passing years are made intelligible through the imagined aging bodies of citizens. In other words, time is not only embodied by populations, it is predicated on a population whose bodies have specific, statistically representable, changes that can be chronologically represented (e.g., visible markers of puberty at age 13). This averaging of bodies presents age as ahistorical, universally experienced, and measurable biological change, but this depiction is actually a historically and culturally specific way of identifying populations in time that is amenable to calculation and government. Tying the institutional interventions (e.g., sex education) closely to these averaged bodies produces a relationship between time and age as predictable, calculable, normal and natural.

The steady unidirectional progression of regular, repeated, and substitutable units of time (minutes, weeks, semesters) is most obvious at the level of school grades. Each grade follows the numerically identified grade before in a regular sequence, each school year is the same length, and each year (supposedly) builds on the knowledge accumulated by the student in the previous year in order to bring them closer to an eventual 135 graduation. And this kind of school-based age-grading scales all the way down to daily classroom activities. Lucas (an ITSE Maestro student) brought my attention to this scalar relationship when he explained to me how school grades are organized by starting at the largest age grade (high school) and ending with the smallest (biweekly grades): To graduate high school, the students must graduate each year; to graduate each year they must pass each semester as well as an end of year exam to add the last 20% of their grade; each semester has three periods; each period has five grades, of which the first four are learning assignments and the fifth is a quiz. Not only are the grades broken into a clear unidirectional sequence culminating in graduation from high school, the class topics covered three-quarters of the way through the semester often build on the ones covered earlier in the semester (e.g. binomials precede trigonometry in math class). This cumulative aspect of school grading grounds students’ experiences of time as “moving forward.” As Lucas’s neat breakdown of the school year highlighted for me, the temporality of schooling is not only visible in the abstractions of an observing anthropologist, but is also part of students’ own conceptualization of what school was all about. Lucas’s emphasis on how particular kinds of assessments organized the passage of a school year also helps us see how time is made meaningful to students through material interactions (such as taking quizzes) rather than only existing as an a priori sense of time.

This regulated relationship between daily and annual age grading also helped me to interpret students' reactions to missed classes after my participant observation at Colegio

Conquistador. I had been surprised and disturbed by the number of classes that were cancelled (a short-term result of teacher shortage related to some educational reforms), but the students were far less concerned by this than I. Their nonchalance did not seem to 136 match their frequent complaints about the loss of their school’s “pressure,” or the eagerness for school days to be more challenging. I came to believe that their relative indifference to lost class time was not just youthful insouciance and the enjoyment of a break from busywork and authoritative oversight, but offered insight into how they saw the value of their class time. Since they were still completing the five grades of the period on the other days, and their class-times were not otherwise contributing significantly to their comprehension of the material they were being graded on, the lost content of the cancelled classes was negligible to their progress. In other words, only the classes that actively contributed to forward movement through the bureaucracy of the school grading really “counted.”

Foucault gave the name "disciplinary time" to the process through which schools (as part of a larger governing apparatus) train populations to experience time in this sort of regularized, productive way (1996 [1975]). Using examples of students’ bodily routines around the sounding of the school bell (a sequence of standing, kneeling, crossing arms, lowering eyes, standing, saluting, and finally sitting) and the marching of soldiers,

Foucault argued that these temporal mechanisms were crucial to the creation of “docile bodies.” As he put it, through these mechanisms, “time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power” (1995[1975]: 152). While Foucault was more focused on how disciplinary time produced the virtue of “non-idleness,” he also observed in passing that this was accomplished in relation to age:

It is this disciplinary time that was gradually imposed on pedagogical practice -

specializing the time of training and detaching it from adult time, from the time of

mastery; arranging different stages, separated from one another by graded 137 examinations; drawing up programmes, each of which must take place during a

particular stage and which involves exercises of increasing difficulty; qualifying

individuals according to the way in which they progress through these series.

(1995 [1975]: 159)

As with other disciplinary techniques, the temporal architecture that Foucault is analyzing “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes” (1995[1975]:183). School infrastructures homogenize youth identities through unidirectional accumulation of specific social measurements and accomplishments, from years-old to school-grades. This is not to say that progress is inevitable - as I will explore below, students and their families have to work hard to stay on track with the prescribed sequence - but as school-grading produces the cumulation of

“training” as normal and natural, the idea that a normal youth identity might not be framed as preparation for a future adult identity is almost unthinkable. Although Foucault does not reflect further on how disciplinary time contributes to the experience of aging, his argument for how time “penetrates” the body not only explains how docile bodies experience the passage of minutes, but how they experience the shape of the life course.

The temporal architectures of school-based age grading go a long way towards entangling normal youth identities with the progress of the nation. The normalization of a particular sequence of unidirectional cumulation, or "progress," links citizens' age identities to their rationality and even their virtue as responsible members of society. As

Foucault's concept of "discipline" would lead us to expect, people hold themselves and their fellow citizens accountable by differentiating between life trajectories and creating hierarchies of age identities. In the next section, I analyze two examples of how my 138 informants' alignments with the citizen life cycle are disciplined by themselves and others.

“Stealing Her Childhood” and Punishing Irrational Age Identity

The problem of "growing up too fast" is a common problem of youth citizenship, but in this section I examine the discourse of “stolen childhood” as an effect of disciplining the “youth becoming” stage in the citizen life cycle as unidirectional. To do that, I look at specific age-based rights and responsibilities being transgressed and at who is being held accountable for them.

The mothers of Jeaneth (from Colegio Conquistador) and Alicia (from ITSE Maestro) were both "corrected” by psychologists for causing their daughters to grow of up too fast.

Coincidentally, both girls were the oldest of three siblings, the daughters of single mothers, and recently settling into a period of relative stability after many years of moving around. Jeaneth’s family's movement had been to escape her abusive father, who was now back in their lives with the oversight of a family therapist. Alicia's family's movement had been to allow her mother to search for a context (in Spain, then Ecuador) in which she could sustainably balance childcare and wage labor.

Like many of my informants with younger siblings, both Jeaneth and Alicia considered themselves more mature than other kids their age because of their childcare responsibilities. But Jeaneth reported that her own role as caregiver had been diminishing ever since her mother had been reprimanded by their psychologist for "significantly damaging" her (“me perjudicaba bastante”), 139 She [the psychologist] told me that for my age I am much more mature than I

should be for a girl at that age. And she told me that I had matured very rapidly

because my mom, before, my mom would leave me in charge of my little

siblings.62

Alicia’s mother had a similar story: after telling me about how much she admires her daughter for offering to “take so much weight on her shoulders” by cooking and cleaning and helping out with her baby sister, she choked up. Tears welling, she took Alicia’s hand and confessed that a psychologist had told her that she was stealing her daughter’s childhood (“le estaba robando la infancia de ella”) by moving so much, and explained that this reprimand convinced her to settle down in Ecuador. Underneath the discourse of the "stolen childhood" is an idea of age as a unidirectional temporal progression, which makes even a temporary distraction from the normal/best age identification an opportunity lost. As in the case of Jeaneth, the responsibility for deviating from this apparently natural sequence of age identities (produced, as I argue above, through temporal architectures like school grading) is attributed to individual agents (in her case, parents). It is worth noting, as well, that while it is the child/youth identity that is being highlighted as the problem needing resolution, this is accomplished by disciplining the parent. Just as the temporal architectures call Alicia's mother into an identity as parent-of- a-10th-grader, she must align herself with the age-based hierarchies that demand her to be independently responsible for child-raising or face the social punishment of psychologists and peers for deviance.

62 Osea me dijo que yo para mi edad, soy mucho mas madura para lo que deberia ser una chica de la edad que yo tenia. Y porque me dijo que yo habia madurado muy rapido porque me mami osea antes me dejaba a cargo de mis hermanos. (Jeaneth #1, 54:40) 140 "Slow maturation" is tied to a set and sequence of age-specific responsibilities of school-age youth and their parents, and the psychologist has identified Jeaneth’s right to mature slowly as having been disrupted by her mother. Jeaneth's mother was thus deviant not only by failing to be independently responsible for her children's care, but also by threatening Jeaneth's alignment with the "normal" rights and responsibilities of "a girl at that age." Slow maturation, here, highlights the unidirectionality of aging - an age grade skipped cannot, in this framing of age, be recovered later. Jeaneth's responsibility for being in charge of little children appears here as a threat to her right to be as dependent as

“a girl her age” should be. Whereas "rebellious" youth who reject dependence on their parents are the ones held accountable for their deviation from the citizen life cycle,

Jeaneth is not held accountable for the transgression of too little dependency because she has only taken it on out of obedience (her "normal" age-based responsibility) to adult authority (her mother). What makes youth dependence on their parents a citizen responsibility will be examined more closely in the next chapter, but here I want to highlight that aging "normally" along a particular (citizen) life cycle is not merely governed through temporal architectures but also through the kinds of punishment that a

Foucauldian approach would anticipate.

Taking words like “slow” and “maturation” out of the analysis helps us see that there are certain kinds of learning which are specifically normative and preferred for youth and that can only occur during youth (ie., studying and the development of the autonomous self, as I will discuss more in chapter six). Thus it’s not just that youth are “unprepared” to be caregivers (as the stigma of teen mothers usually suggests), it is that the kind of learning that is valued in youth is framed as linear cumulation. Youth is teleological not 141 in the sense that, when they accomplish all that learning, they will be adults. It is teleological in the sense that, at the point that they become adults they will also done with learning, and therefore will only be as good as how far they progressed as youth.

The ways that people are held accountable for normative age identities within a citizen life cycle are also part of how age identities contribute the experience of national progress. This became particularly apparent to me after the core network interview with

Tomas and his family, during which his parents (Mireya and Jairo) offered some revealing evaluations of how the experiences of youth have changed across generations.

Tomas and his family lived in the top apartment of a concrete building with aunts, uncles, and a grandfather living below. The unmarked door to their house was crowded among many others on a long street in the smoggy southern valley of Quito. The extended family shared a linoleum tiled room on the ground floor with mirrored walls and no windows where they were preparing for a party the very night I arrive for the third interview. Reggaeton music thumped as little cousins cleaned and I passed by up the three flights of stairs. The large rooms and huge screened Mac desktop in the bedroom that Tomas had all to himself let me know they were better off than their neighborhood might lead me to believe. Sitting at the glass dinner table with Tomas, his cousin, his two- and twelve-year-old sisters, and his parents, I asked how expectations about youth had changed. Mireya, a bartender now back in school to become an elementary school teacher, responded with a story about how her mother and her siblings had all been forced to go to work as “very little children” by their neglectful father.

In the case of my mom, her mother passed away and my grandpa really neglected

her and the rest of his family. And they had to leave to seek their future, as they 142 say. Even being the little kids they were, all my mother’s brothers left to seek

their future and began to work as very little children. My father has the same

story. He also had to leave and work when he was very very little to be able to

survive. Mhm.63

Mireya nodded solemnly as she finished her account. The distress in her tone and her emphasis on how little they were (“en los pequeñitos que eran,” “muy niños,” “muy pequeñito”) suggested that perhaps they might have been even younger than the subjects of similar stories I had already heard from other families, maybe even as young as the very small children who approached me at coffee shops begging for money. Her story contrasted the vulnerability of their childhood with their father’s abuse of his power, manifested in the neglect that thrust them into the adult world of work and responsibility for a household. Mireya’s emotional description of her parents as “little children” implied that current concerns about the vulnerability of children should reasonably be applied to the childhoods of their parents. The more precarious economic circumstances of the last generation and the far more limited access to schooling were downplayed in her account of “how things have changed for youth,” which instead suggested that her parents began working abnormally young as a result of “neglectful” caretakers. In her account, the idea that children should be in school rather than working was true regardless of the historical circumstances.

63 M: En el caso de mi mami, su mama fallecio y mi abuelito se descuido mucho de ellos, de ella, de su familia. Y tuvieron que ellos salir a buscar, como quien dice, su futuro. Osea en los pequeños que eran, digamos, todos los hermanos de mi madre salieron a buscar su futuro y comenzaron a trabajar desde muy niños. Igual es el caso de mi padre. El tambien tuvo que trabajar desde muy pequeñito para poder sobrevivir. Mhm. (Tomas #3, 45:00) 143 After Mireya finished her story, I followed up by asking if the key difference was that she and her husband did not have the same (economic) necessity as their parents. At that,

Jairo jumped in to correct me.

I think it was mostly because they had so many children. Like, before they did not

worry much about taking care of them. They had 10, 11, 12, 8 children, so two

parents could both work but still not make enough to support everyone. So the

oldest, what did he have to do? He had to leave to work to help his parents. So he

had to stop studying. And that’s how it went with the next, and the next, and the

next. And so they were all more focused on having children. Almost all of them,

imagine, having 12, 10 children!64

Even more explicitly than Mireya, Jairo’s account directly blamed the last generation for irresponsible parenting, shifting the attention away from external considerations and focusing on the agency of parents. Mireya and Jairo’s stories emphasized leaving school before formal graduation as a premature end to the protections that their vulnerability as children merited. And yet, neither Mireya nor Jairo are suggesting that this view of childhood was shared by their parents - quite the opposite! The unspecified “they” that

Jairo is indicting for irrationality is referring to the generation that raised their parents.

“We know better,” his account seems to suggest, “and we are all better for it.”

When the normative hierarchy of age identities represented by the current citizen life cycle is presented as ahistorical (such as when “child” is depicted as a natural and

64 No mas creo que era porque tenian muchos hijos. Osea antes no se preocupaba mucho en cuidarles. Los hijos tenian de diez, once, doce, ocho hijos, entonces no, los dos padres que tenian trabajaban pero les alcanzaban para todos. Entonces el mayor que tenian que hacer, salir a trabajar para ayudarles a los papas. Entonces ya dejaba de estudiar. Y asi era con el otro, y con el otro, y con el otro. Y entonces va sigan mejor dedicando hacer hijos, casi todos, imaginase, 12, 10 hijos! (Jairo in Tomas #3, 45.00) 144 universal life stage) different ways of identifying and managing age (such as the ways their grandparents experienced childhood) appear irrational. In Jairo’s assessment, for example, the idea that his parents would have had more opportunities if they had been protected from wage labor during childhood is implicit in his condemnation of his grandparents. His parents were telling me what was, by that point, a familiar story, as at least one parent or grandparent had dropped out of school young65 to work to support their household in most families I spoke with. Ecuador was a very different place even one generation ago, and I was not at all convinced that having fewer children would have significantly changed access to education and social mobility. Nevertheless, by treating childhood as if it were naturally a time for school, the responsibility appears to rest on parents to provide economic support and children to commit to studying. Thus, by contrasting past and present treatment of age identity, both individuals and whole populations can be seen as "improving” their rationality. In other words, we have improved our rational assessment of "real" age and we have responded with an improvement in rational management of that age. This logic extends to the state as well: we know now that children are "naturally" vulnerable in the labor market and have responded by making wage labor illegal. However, as Mireya and Jairo's interweaving narrative shows, accountability for creating a population of correctly age identified people lies largely with individuals’ alignment with the citizen life cycle.

These stories frame age as progressive in two ways: 1) they depict the life course as a progression of natural stages, and 2) they depict a progression in how rationally

65 “Young” varied and I didn’t always ask parents to reframe that chronologically, but the fact that comparison with their 10th grade children was the consistent reference point (supported by those who did mention chronological ages) led to my conclusion that 13 years old was likely the approximate median age in these drop out stories. 145 Ecuadorians manage each of these age grades. These frames of age as progressive are central to the “citizen life cycle,” in which citizens are responsible for unidirectional movement through a sequence of age-specific rights and responsibilities. Each age identity in the cycle is depicted as both natural (normal) and contingent on individual foresight and rationality. Insofar as national progress means a process through which the nation collectively becomes more rational, more efficient, and more moral, this is happening on both fronts simultaneously: school aged populations are progressing through the citizen life cycle, and the fact that adults now “know better” and “do better” at aligning themselves and their children with that “natural” cycle “proves” that Ecuador has improved through the generations.

Implications of a Citizen Life Cycle

The idea that age identities are tied to citizenship - and particularly the transition from youth into adulthood - is not a new one. Jones and Wallace (1992), for example, depict youth as a teleological identity whose end is citizenship (full national belonging). Hall et al (1998), on the other hand, warn against over-identifying youth with (undifferentiated) citizenship lest ideal versions of age-based rights and responsibilities obscure the ways that age is shaped in intersection with gender, race, class, and religion. The “citizen life cycle” incorporates both of these points: citizenship produces a normative unidirectional sequence of age identities and this hierarchy of age identities and life course trajectories fits within a much more complex horizon of age identities within a life course. While this chapter has focused on the mechanisms that teach youth that their bodies and identities are in a process of “becoming,” the next chapter will consider how policies aimed at 146 changing the relationship between class and citizenship act on and through these same mechanisms. In chapter seven, the age identities built into the citizen life cycle are interrogated for the ways that they act to produce and mask inequality in intersection with other categories of identity.

Exploring the citizen life course suggests that the experience of time, grounded in the temporal architectures of governmental mechanisms like school and disciplined through social belonging, is a crucial link in the relationship between age and citizenship. In recognizing the ways that bodies are penetrated by time, we can see how populations docilely mark the time of the nation through their life cycles. The importance of age identities to belonging is visible in the ways that citizens hold themselves and others accountable for correctly performing them.

In Part 2, the phenomenological analysis of my informants age horizons provided a theoretical approach to understanding the temporal valences of age as produced through

“guideposts” which people identify themselves in relation to. By incorporating the emphasis on contingency that has been the most significant contribution of the anthropological life course approach to date, the concept of age horizons challenged the reification of age as necessarily directional, as inherently graded, or as principally impermanent. But this approach not only values the analytical relevance of contingency, it also allows for an analysis of what is produced by defining age as a universal sequence of stages in a life cycle (ie., as a unidirectional, discontinuous, and impermanent citizen life cycle). This chapter begins that analysis by identifying school grading and “stolen youth” as the guideposts that tie unilinear aging to the quality of the nation. The implication is that calling for the end to stigma against people who don’t align themselves 147 with normative youth identities can’t be solved with an alternative explanation for their behavior. Instead, changes to temporal infrastructures of education are needed to reframe deviant youth identities into variation in age identities. On the more radical side, this could look like decoupling formal from chronological age grading, or it could simply look like continuing to add accommodations for parenting and working students.

As I have pointed out, it is not just the unidirectionality of the citizen life cycle that links Ecuadorian citizenship to normative youth identities, but that unidirectionality in conjunction with the naturalization of youth as a period of learning. In the next chapter I will explore the juxtaposition of the rights and responsibilities of youth with adulthood as part of the “discontinuity” of the citizen life cycle. Like guideposts of discontinuity and

(in chapter 7) impermanence, the guideposts of unidirectional aging help show how

“youth becoming” is part of a political project that differentiates citizenship through the government of age. 148 6. School Reforms and the Equal Right to Discontinuous Aging

During my first day of participant observation at ITSE Maestro, the only boy to come over and say hi was Lucas, his smile full of braces and his laugh warbling with pubertal change. There was already a cluster of girls peppering me with the standard questions about where I was from and how old I was. One girl informed me that I looked tired, which I was, having only returned to Quito - jetlagged, a little altitude sick, and with a three-month-old baby in tow - the day before.66 Drawn, it appeared, by the crowd of girls,

Lucas approached and announced that the girl talking to me had “a boyfriend who sells potatoes,” throwing the rest into a fit of indignant denial and laughter. "Like the women in the street," another girl snorted, adding effeminacy to the scorn for poverty, indigeneity, and rurality I had already understood were part of the joke. Only later did it occur to me that the fact that this guy-who-was-not-actually-her-boyfriend was also being teased for having the wrong kind of age identity: among other things, the potatoes meant that he was working, and working meant he probably wasn’t a student.

While the U.S. actively promotes youth labor as a kind of training (both through programs like their “Summer Jobs +” and public discourse on "youth employment"),

Ecuadorian teens are warned that jobs are a threat to their career aspirations. In the

Conquistador and Maestro classrooms, signs decrying child labor decorated otherwise bare walls and hinted at a country that struggles to consistently enforce its laws against

66 In fact, I laughed to myself about how different they sounded from the barrage of compliments I had received at Colegio Conquistador the year before. This might actually be a subtle indication of differences in class aspirations between the two schools, rather than a dramatic decrease in my beauty. Placencia (2011) found marked socioeconomic differences in how women expressed social solidarity in universities, with more upper class women giving more emphatic compliments (generally revolving around looks, although that was not analyzed separately) and giving them more frequently. 149 child labor. Like the student-made collages of pregnant schoolgirls with bulging backpacks balancing third trimester bellies, the child labor messages warn that students must be protected against inappropriately adult responsibilities. For my informants, studying was, without exception, the most important responsibility they felt they had, and many felt it was their only real responsibility. Their parents agreed, despite the fact that - or perhaps because - many of them had begun working when they were younger than their 10th grade children were now. Working, parents and youth explained, was something that should come later, after graduating from high school.

The separation of youth as a period of learning from adulthood as a period of economic provision for families has become more normal in Ecuador in the last generation. By exploring how that has happened in Quito, and why, we can see how predicating the rights and responsibilities of adulthood on graduation out of youth as a time of learning is a citizenship project that frame age itself as a remedy of social inequality. This chapter shows how the discontinuity of “youth becoming” is a mechanism produced through enrollment policies (i.e., “sectorization”) and curriculum standardization as part of Ecuador’s Educational Revolution. I begin by demonstrating that youth is experienced as discontinuous by my informants through its conflation with

“school-age.” I go on to argue that identification with the citizen life cycle, and particularly youth as school-aged, is normalized as the policy of sectorization expands access to schooling among Ecuadorian 12-19 year olds. I show how curriculum standardization is framed as a mechanism of social equalization and argue that standardization constructs high school graduation as an equal playing field for competition for university enrollment and the labor market. The emphasis on high school 150 graduation frames the “normal” transition to adulthood as universal while simultaneously downplaying age’s intersections with other identities (e.g., race, class, gender) as irrelevant to an individual’s access to full citizenship. In other words, when youth is normalized as “school-aged,” age itself is framed as a remedy of social inequality. The result is the individualization of accountability for unequal opportunity in adulthood that erases the ways age-based educational access fails to resolve race, class, and gender inequality.

Although the value of a high school education is hardly a new idea in Quito, there have been significant changes in educational access both in the last generation and the last decade. Between 1982 and 2001, the population of 6-11 year olds attending elementary school rose from 69% to 90% while 12-17 year olds attending secondary school rose from 30% to 45% (Diaz 2009). In 2009, the bureaucratic reorganization of school grades that replaced elementary and secondary school with “Basic Education”

(1st-10th grade) and “Bachillerato” (restarting at 1st-3rd grades) disrupted comparisons with earlier attendance statistics. Nevertheless, by the time I began my participant observation in Colegio Conquistador in 2014, the government had declared success in its goal of “universal attendance” with 96% enrollment in Basic Education and 69% in

Bachillerato (Rendición de Cuentas 2015).

Ecuador’s education reforms are a central pillar of the Correa administration’s

“Citizen Revolution” and have met with widespread international approval. In 2015,

UNESCO recognized Ecuador’s education system as the most improved in Latin

America, while in 2016 UNICEF called it one of the seven most inclusive education systems in the world (Sosa 2016). The policy changes of the Educational Revolution 151 layer new ways to be good students and good parents on older educational practices.

What is meant by “good students” and “good parents” ends up being a great deal more than an individual child’s success in her school or a particular parent’s relationship with his son. As the content of these labels change in response to new conditions of national belonging, what the normative life course trajectory (“citizen life cycle”) looks like changes too, making the labels appear objectively rational, if not wholly predetermined.

In the familiarly modern schools of urban Quito, life stages, such as adolescence or youth, are relevant and ubiquitous discursive frameworks of age. A life course approach unsettles common sense definitions of age so that their familiarity can be productively unpacked. Just as “an analytics of government removes the 'naturalness' and 'taken-for- granted' character of how [political] things are done” (Dean 2009: 50), a life course approach removes the ‘naturalness’ and ‘taken-for-granted’ character of how age is timed.

Thus, I use the term “age identities” as an inclusive descriptor that acknowledges the contingency of biological, sociocultural, and temporal negotiations. “Age grades,” by contrast, emphasize firm boundaries that separate and sequence age identities. As I explained in the last chapter, this term comes out of Ruth Benedict's 1938 article for the first volume of Psychiatry. While my focus in the last chapter was on the role of age grading in producing unidirectional conceptions of aging, here I want to draw more attention to Benedict's discussion of “discontinuous cultural conditioning” where she observed that,

age-graded cultures characteristically demand different behavior of the individual

at different times of his life and persons of a like age-grade are grouped into a

society whose activities are all oriented toward the behavior desired at that age. 152 Individuals "graduate" publicly and with honor from one of these groups to

another (1938: 165).

In other words, the terms “age grades” and “life stages” reference periods of the life course whose borders are more strictly socially enforced (e.g. the year of “10th grade” as well as “the age of legal majority”). Here my use of "age grading" here signals an emic

(and particularly school-centric) frame of age identity, in which the boundaries of age are being actively (globally and locally) produced. As Benedict points out in the quotation above, this discontinuous cultural conditioning is most visibly represented in the importance of social rituals around "graduation." In this chapter I am particularly concerned with the broad age-grade that begins at 12 years old and 8th grade and ends at

18 or 19 years old with graduation from the bachillerato, a period which I gloss as

“school-age.”

In his 1977 ethnography, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working

Class Jobs, Paul Willis’s analysis of British working class “lads” suggests that formal schooling contributes to the reproduction of class positions rather than serving as the social remedy of equality it promises to be. His observations and analysis help show how, even as his informants resist the hierarchies of labor that devalue manual labor, the dominant (capitalist) ideologies conflate adulthood and wage labor. To reframe it in terms of the “Citizen Life Cycle,” while working class lads challenge the idea that preparation for white collar jobs is the best path to adult citizenship, they continue to see youth as a natural period of preparation for the adult responsibility to provide for one’s family through wage labor. While Willis convincingly shows why the “wrong” life course 153 trajectories make sense for the lads, what makes the “right” life course trajectories rational (for upper class students) is supposedly self-evident.

Similarly, in her 1989 ethnography of the class dynamics in a U.S. high school,

Penelope Eckert showed how identification with schools led upper class “jocks” to maintain more tightly age-graded social networks even as working class “burnouts” valorized non-school “adult” identities and formed social networks with far more age diversity. Like Willis, Eckert depicts the “resistance” of “burnouts” as a logical consequence of the disciplinary mechanisms of formal schooling that compare and hierarchize their student populations. And, like Willis, the age-grading of jocks is explained as normative because of their alignment with their school, although why the school might rely on tighter age-grading is left unexplored.

The connections that Willis and Eckert drew between age and class identities demonstrate the value of taking a life course approach to education. Both authors provided nuanced accounts of their informants’ negotiations of institutional ideologies and revealed some of the complex effects of the disciplinary techniques of formal schooling that stretched far beyond their student identities. By focusing on the groups who “deviate” from normative life course trajectories, they challenged the naturalization of hierarchies of age identities. In Act Your Age!, Nancy Lesko further denaturalized these hierarchies by examining how ideologies of age emerged alongside racial and colonial discourses and how adolescence functions as a technology of citizenship. She argued, as I note elsewhere, that youth who deviate from normative life course trajectories by

“growing up too fast” offend public sensibilities because they are aging “out of order.”

The “desire” for “adult responsibilities” described by Willis and Eckert fit this 154 explanation, too. But with Lesko, as with Willis and Eckert, this makes it difficult to go beyond affirming that there is a publicly understood “correct order” and acknowledging that populations are disciplined in relation to it. They do not ask why that order, and not another, has gained the spot at the top of the hierarchy of normative aging.

Research with marginalized groups has helped theorize age by making the boundaries of exclusion visible, but this dissertation explores how normative age identities are produced for those whose inclusion is (relatively) unchallenged. My informants, although mostly working class, attend very good high schools and are fully invested in the promises of class mobility tied to being good students. Their privileged positions offer a different angle on how the disciplinary mechanisms of formal schooling link age identities and good citizenship. This chapter goes beyond the argument that being a good student makes a person a good citizen through better preparation for the labor market and the adult responsibility to provide for one’s family. Instead, it challenges the naturalness of the juxtaposition of childhood-as-a-period-of-learning and adulthood-as-a-period-of-providing. By examining the impact of the new policies of sectorization and standardization on youth age identity, this chapter argues that ideologies of equal citizenship are produced through the normalization of discontinuous age identities. Understanding how age identities produce and mask the differentiation of citizenship suggest new pitfalls and solutions in the efforts to ameliorate social and educational inequality.

Juxtaposing students and parents 155 When I started observing at Colegio Conquistador in 2014, I was surprised to learn that none of my informants worked or even really considered working until after they had graduated from high school. Instead, they considered university to be an appropriate age to start to split their attention between their studies and some non-professional work (like being a secretary), and even then they expected to continue to depend on their families for food and housing. This expectation was contrasted with accounts of family members who left high school to start work. For example, two of my informants had “wayward” older brothers who had given up their schooling and were now working lower status jobs

(as a mechanic and as a security guard) which my informants implied showed their siblings’ failure to handle the youth responsibilities which they themselves managed to fulfill (among which staying in school was paramount). Working was not only something that they associated with adulthood, it was a sign that there was a problem with the youth.

At Maestro, where my informants had classes in the afternoons instead of the mornings, I heard the same stories. Although one girl helped out her mother in her cleaning job and another boy had spent a month at a summer job the year before, none of my informants had even part time work during the school year, and only one even considered the idea remotely appealing. If anything, the Maestro families were even more vocal about wage labor as a threat to staying in school than the Conquistador families had been.

The juxtaposition of youth as a time for learning and adulthood as a time for economic provision is something that came up again and again in interviews with parents.

Whereas the 10th graders generally emphasized their responsibility to study hard, parents regularly framed their children’s learning in relation to parents’ responsibilities to keep 156 children free from the “distractions” of economic necessity. The discursive opposition of youth and adulthood was especially apparent during the third (multigenerational) interviews, when I asked older family and friends how their experiences of youth had been different from those of my 10th grade informant. The answers ranged by gender, generation, and any class mobility the family had experienced, but one of the most common generational differences related to the appropriate time to start wage labor in relation to schooling.

In my second interview with Lucas, I asked his mother, Mirabel, how she would respond if her son told her he wanted to get a job but planned on staying in school. She wrinkled her nose and shook her head, saying she wouldn’t like it. When I asked her why not, she said,

I told him before, “I prefer that you play sports, live your life. You are young, you

need to live life, [live your] youth. It’s beautiful. That age will not come again.

And, if for some reason you need something, we are here to help you, to support

you.” Things like that. I wouldn’t like it, I really wouldn’t like it. I would like him

to study first, prepare himself, finish high school. And if after, like he says, during

university he has time, doing something [like work] would be okay, yeah.67

For an analysis of age, two things stand out in Mirabel’s reply: 1) the common themes of leisure and learning in the virtues she identifies with youth, and 2) the depiction of

67 Una vez le dije, ‘yo prefiero que haz deporte, vive tu vida, estas joven necesitas vivir la vida la juventud. Es lindo. Esa edad no se va a volver a repetir. Y, y para, si algo te falta, necesitas, nosotros estamos para ayudarte, para apoyarte,’ cosas asi. No quisiera, no quisiera en realidad. Quisiera que primero estudie, se prepare, termine el bachillerato. Y si despues como el dice en la universidad, tiene tiempo y horas, algo para hacer alguna cosa estaria bien, si. … (Lucas #2 42:45) 157 youth as a “life stage,” which is to say an age identity that has a limited time window, has clear boundaries differentiating it from other ages, and is part of a larger sequence.

First, for Mirabel, playing, studying, and “living” are the norms of youth; they are the right of youth, the responsibility of youth, and and the virtue of youth. When she said

“living” (vive tu vida), I understood Mirabel to be arguing that exploration and learning were made possible by freedom from economic responsibility, given that she followed this exhortation to “live” with a declaration of her commitment to keeping Lucas from any necessity that might interrupt such leisure. I heard similar statements from other parents, such as Michael’s dad, who lauded youth as an opportunity “to grow and to get to know the world, to get to know about life” (conocer la vida).68 In other words, the virtue of learning also explains why playing sports and “living life” are virtuous norms, rather than neutral options, for youth (cf. Choi 2016).

Second, Mirabel’s line, “that age will not come again” (esa edad no se va a volver a repetir) not only depicts age as unidirectional (see chapter five), it depicts it as discontinuous. “Playing sports” and “living life” are depicted as limited opportunities, despite the certain fact that adults can and do play sports and enjoy leisure time. But her point is that leisure (and learning) are both a right and responsibility of youth, whereas for adults they are neither.

Mirabel’s statement suggests that youth is a life stage with clear boundaries: her son’s key rights and responsibilities as a youth will change once he graduates from high school.

High school graduations don’t just represent “one more accomplishment,” but function as gates to a normative adulthood and a symbolic end of youth.

68 "el crecimiento y de conocer, como digo, de conocer el mundo, conocer, conocer la vida” (Teodoro in Michael #2 1:01:00). 158 The idea of graduations as gatekeeping between age identities works in conjunction with the depiction of aging as universal and natural to be a powerful way to reinforce existing hierarchies. Mirabel is not framing schooling as simply a different site for labor, as some discussions go youth citizenship argue (e.g., Smith et al 2005). No, from her wrinkled nose to her repeated statement that she “wouldn’t like it” if he worked before graduating, Lucas’s mother is suggesting that the economic responsibilities associated with adult wage labor are inconsistent with how she understands a normal and virtuous youth. Should Lucas feel the need for anything that might make him consider going to work, Mirabel reports she has told her son, “we are there to help you, to support you” (si algo te falta, necesitas, nosotros estamos para ayudarte, para apoyarte). In other words, learning and leisure in youth are protected and made possible through an complementary commitment to economic responsibility by adults, not only for oneself but for one’s non- adult children.

Despite the ubiquity of concerns about youth labor, it is important to clarify that the problem for these families is not labor in and of itself, but the relationships between labor and learning. Teodoro, Michael’s father, is most useful in clarifying this point. He had allowed (although not, he clarified, encouraged) his 14 year old son Michael to work last summer at a foundry, but at the end of the summer the owners had refused to pay him.

Teodoro concluded that it didn’t really matter, and that he would even allow Michael to try again with another workshop because “he is at that age for learning” (es de el éste una edad de aprender). But that was only something that he was comfortable with if Michael would “take it as learning and not as a responsibility” (lo toma como conocimiento no como responsabilidad) because young people who take work as a responsibility very 159 often end up abandoning their studies.69 In short, it is the distraction of economic responsibilities from learning that represents the real problem with youth labor, and informal learning is both normal and virtuous as long as it is clear that the learning taking place in formal schooling is most important.

Tomas’s parents’ reflections on the “right time” for their children to go to work clarify how the discipline of discontinuous age works differently from the frame of gradual preparation. His father began, “For us [the right time to work is] when they are already a person already, when they have their field of study. Economic stability, the ability to maintain a family, then yes.” To this his mother added,

That’s a parent’s great desire, I suppose. Or, at least, it is our great desire as

parents that they [our children] become professionals. That they graduate, they

they study, and from there that maybe, as I say to my son, then when you are

working and have your things, you could look for a woman and form your home.

So that he would be a full-grown man in his own right.70

69 “If he did it with another person who could teach him - well, because he is at that age for learning - if another person took that on, well, still, I would let him because he would take it as learning and not as a responsibility. Because if he takes it as a responsibility, he will take it as - there are lots of people who learned to work very young and they no longer, their studies, they drop them.”

Pero si lo hiciera con otra persona que que lo puede ensenar - osea porque es de el este una edad de aprender - si lo toma otra persona, osea igual no, si, lo dejaria porque lo toma como conocimiento no como responsabilidad. Porque si lo toma como, como responsabilidad, el va a tomar el - hay muchas personas que aprendieron a trabajar muy jovenes y a los estudios ya no les, los dejan.

- Michael #2 (1:09:30)

70 D: Por nosotros cuando ya son una persona ya, cuando tenga su estudio. Estabilidad economicamente, puede mantener una familia. Alli si. … 160 In other words, for Tomas’s parents, education determines the prerequisite ability to be economically stable. Graduation from education (cuando ya son una persona ya, cuando tenga su estudio) is graduation into manhood (un hombre hecho y derecho). And it is only after that graduation that it is reasonable to dedicate oneself to the host of rights and responsibilities that full adulthood both allows and demand. Of course, contrary to this discourse, an effort to remain identified with school is not enough to guarantee that everyone will graduate from university with a professional degree (una profesión), and

Hall et al. (1998) rightly warned social scientists to be wary of the ways that the universal graduation from youth to adulthood is used to support an ideology of citizenship equality among adults. However, in order to effectively stop conflating age and citizenship, as

Hall et al. call for, we must first understand how it is happening.

The first step in interpreting the discontinuous age grades my informants describe is recognizing this interdependent opposition of child and parent is far from universal. In fact, one of the most poignant counter-examples can also be found in Ecuador in Laura

Rival’s (1996) ethnographic account of the introduction of formal schooling in a Waorani community in the Amazon. She described how conceptions of age in the community - where full membership had been a matter of gradually increasing participation in social activities like getting and sharing food, making tools, and chanting together - shifted

M: Eso es el anhelo de un padre, me supongo. O bueno, es nuestro anhelo como padres que se hagan unos profesionales. Que se graduen, que estudien, y de alli, que ya talvez como yo le digo a mi hijo ya cuando estes trabajando ya tenga sus cosas, pueda buscar a una mujer y formar su hogar. Lo que el ya sea un hombre hecho y derecho. Mhm.

- Tomas 3 (45.00) 161 dramatically from egalitarian to hierarchical once a school was established. She explained,

Another direct consequence of schooling is the remaking of the social space, with

the creation of a public sphere, and the introduction of a new division of labor

based on the redefinition of production. These developments bring two new social

categories into being: "children" and "parents." "Children" are those who go to

school and become dependent consumers. "Parents" are those who produce food

and do not go to school.

Not only did the social expectations of “childhood” and “parenthood” change, the new school structures redefined the (newly sedentary) Waorani age identity as both discontinuous and co-constituent. The new school reassigned the rights and responsibilities of the community in ways that made age identity newly meaningful, and the distribution of responsibilities made the two new age grades simultaneously mutually exclusive and interdependent. Children could not go to school without their parents becoming the sole providers (since they could no longer contribute to finding food), just as parents would not be sole providers without their children going to school. Rival’s account encourages us to consider school as the lever that separates families and communities into two discontinuous categories of age.

Because formal religious schooling got a foothold in Quito as part of colonization in the mid-1500s, it is difficult to talk about what age identities might have looked like in the city before schooling. However, Laura Rival’s chapter offers a valuable contrast.

Although the new schools created new age graded categories of “children as dependent school-goers” and “parents as food producers and non-school-goers,” not all the school 162 structures functioned as imagined: the attempted use of school uniforms to distinguish school-going children from (uneducated) adults was subverted when Waorani of all ages began wearing the uniforms. Modern citizenship was irrevocably established when adults in communities that had previously been off the grid were now required to get identity cards and birth certificates, to vote, and to fulfill a host of administrative formalities for their student-children. Rival’s research threw into relief what those of us who grow up within modern school systems take for granted: age identities are governed by schooling with the goal of creating modern citizens. But it also highlights the ways that alternative modes of community membership, such as the children providing their school uniforms to the adults, create meaningful alternatives to the hegemonic inculcation of age identities.

A similar example of “continuous” (rather than discontinuous) aging in Ecuador comes from the (already sedentary) indigenous groups of the Sierra, in which even very small indigenous highland children are expected to contribute their labor to their households, communities, and agricultural systems by shepherding, cooking, and harvesting as their physical abilities change with age (Pribilsky 2001). Thus, in contrast to the UN’s definition of 18 years old as a universal graduation out of childhood, “in

[this] indigenous construction of childhood, maturation is dependent on an individual’s level of responsibility” (Swanson 2010). Indigenous rights activists successfully advocated for exceptions to the modern language around child labor in Ecuador’s 2003

Código de la Niñez y Adolescencia (Swanson 2010). Thus, while Article 82 of the code explicitly sets 15 as the minimum age for all wage labor, Article 86 adds the “exception for educational [formativo] labor conducted as a cultural practice,” so long as it “respects 163 the physical and psychological development of the adolescent” (among a few other caveats).71 While sanctioning this more continuous version of aging for indigenous (but not mestizo) citizens, Article 86 makes it clear that the law does not see this way of aging as so closely aligned with the “physical and psychological development of the adolescent” as the school-then-work citizen life cycle.

Sectorization normalizes age grading

A map hanging on the wall at Conquistador had a dot at the center representing the school surrounded by a blue circle with a 4 kilometer radius. The circle represents the are within which a portion of Conquistador students admitted under the new sectorization policy were supposed to live. The transition away from a wholly scores-based system to a geography-based lottery was intended to increase less privileged students’ access to high quality education in institutions near them, and to mitigate the exclusivity that the scores- only enrollment system had produced. Under the previous system, there were far more applicants who completed elementary school with the required high scores than there were enrollment spots in high school. As a result, everyone believed (probably correctly) that best the way to ensure a spot in a desired school was through nepotism and valuable social connections. The new system did not entirely do away with score-based enrollment

- 50% of the new students were drawn from those whose scores and awards (most

71 Art. 86.- Excepción relativa a los trabajos formativos realizados como prácticas culturales.- La limitación de edad señalada en el artículo 82 no se aplicará a los trabajos considerados como prácticas ancestrales formativas, siempre que reúnan las siguientes condiciones. 1. Que respeten el desarrollo físico y psicológico del adolescente, en el sentido de asignárseles solamente tareas acordes con sus capacidades y etapa evolutiva; 2. Que contribuyan a la formación y desarrollo de las destrezas y habilidades del adolescente; 3. Que transmitan valores y normas culturales en armonía con el desarrollo del adolescente; y, 4. Que se desarrollen en el ámbito y beneficio de la comunidad a la que pertenece el adolescente o su familia. 164 importantly, the “abanderados,” or valedictorians, of their elementary schools) classified them as “first priority” for what the government called “pre-registration.” It was only the second 50% who entered each school via the sectorization lottery.

The 10th graders I observed were thus among the very first to enroll under sectorization. They had first enrolled in 8th grade in 2011, the year following a disastrous pilot run in 2010.72 Most of my 14 student informants scored high enough that they would likely have been able to attend under the old system as well, and many lived as many as two or three hours away from the school by bus. As I will discuss further in the following chapter, these students and their families often complained that sectorization had resulted in an influx of students with “bad habits” that infected their peers and had a negative impact on the educational opportunities for the whole student body.

Sectorization was blamed for graffiti, alcohol, and drugs, and the loss of their schools’ good reputations. But in addition to changing the make-up of the student body, when geography replaced elementary school ranking, high school was rewritten as a time for equalization rather than competition. As youth school attendance justified discourses of a level playing field, individual students became ever more accountable for the opportunities and constraints of their life course trajectories.

As Rival’s example discussed above helps illustrate, the simple existence of modern schooling is enough to introduce and produce an age graded framework of youth. But, as

I illustrate in Part 2, the age graded guideposts of the citizen life cycle are only part of how my informants experience their age identities. As the mental picture of a Waorani grandmother in a school uniform reminds us, even when age grading is imposed on an

72 According to El Universo, July 28, 2010 165 entire community, it does not necessarily follow that discontinuous age grading is the most important way that age identity is experienced. Since I have thus far spent this chapter presenting evidence that my informants do indeed identify youth as primarily discontinuous (and far moreso than the generations before them), the question must then be, why would that be? Although not as robust as a comparison offered by a much larger longitudinal study - ideally, one that began while my informants’ parents were in school - my informants’ reflections on how the policy changes of Ecuador’s Education Revolution have impacted them offer insight into how this process can take place.

While discontinuous school-graded versions of aging already existed as normal and

“top of the hierarchy” ways of experiencing youth, when sectorization made high quality schooling more accessible, it made school attendance (although not necessarily success in schooling) a more homogenous experience. The change, then, was not the arrival of a youth-adult juxtaposition as “new,” as it was in Rival’s example, but in the redistribution of who had access to that “citizen life cycle.” That my informants perceived the increased accessibility of sectorization as a threat to their status helps show the transition in youth and student age identities that took place.

Discontinuity as rational foresight

With high school (newly) identified as a universally accessible right,73 graduation was generally seen as primarily contingent on the efforts of the student to apply themselves to their schooling. This was clear every time one of my 10th grade informants explained that their main responsibility was to study so that they could graduate and then go on to get

73 The “real” universality of high school is debatable, but no doubt the expansion of access has been significant. 166 their professional degrees and dream jobs; each stage was a necessary foundation for the next. As school access became (at least rhetorically) universal, graduation into normative adulthood became more closely tied with citizen accountability: the rational foresight of the student.

The “rational” imperative to commit oneself to a school identified life course trajectory was particularly clear in my first interview with Liliana, a Maestro student who wore her straight black hair long with a red bow. When I asked Liliana what she could do to make her parents proud, her answer began with her own agency in the present and then quickly shifted to the future she intended for herself. She explained that she needed to be

“trying harder” (esforzándome más) in high school. She worried about competition for available university spots, but she was clear that trying hard enough would allow her to achieve the necessary qualifications. Then Liliana launched into an almost rhapsodic description of the opportunities offered by President Correa: a new local university, scholarships for a full ride, fully funded opportunities to study abroad, and even the opportunity to be paid like a laborer for studying medicine - all contingent on her achievements in high school. Since Liliana came from a family where food insecurity was still a relevant concern, scholarships like the one she described resolved an significant threat to her ability to remain focused on her education after high school.

Liliana’s effort (esfuerzo) formulated her present youth identity as a necessary preparation for a life course trajectory that could buoy her above her country’s limited economic opportunities.

Liliana brought home the disciplinary implications of this when she followed this ideal life course trajectory with descriptions of a number of more abject trajectories. In 167 our first interview, when I asked her what things would disappoint her parents, her first answer was “anything” that resulted in leaving school early. When I asked her why someone might drop out, she answered that girls most often leave school because they get pregnant, often at 13 or 14 years old (that is, a year younger than Liliana). The first problem after that is the babies:

You are just a child trying to care for a child, and you don’t have the kind of

steady opportunities to make a living. If your baby gets sick, you don’t have the

options that other people who have money have to go to a doctor quickly. So, you

have to look for other ways to make money, and sometimes you don’t have any,

and that’s why there are babies who die at a very young age.74

One interpretation of this narrative is offered by Nancy Lesko, who described teen mothers’ “violation of the order of proper development” as a problem of “all-at-once growing up,” and emphasized the importance of youth as a period of gradual development throughout her book. But what she calls “gradual” I would argue is better described as a unidirectional sequence of age grades constituting a “school-age life stage,” which culminate in a (discontinuous) graduation to adulthood, at which point the forbidden activities are all allowed all at once. The problem with teen motherhood as described by my informants (who regularly brought teen motherhood up as a social problem) is less of an issue of the speed of change than a problem of transition between discontinuous age identities. The problem isn’t a failure to “go slow,” the problem is

74 “A mi parecer, es como que veo mal que se quedan embarazadas esta época, porque, tu siendo niña {laughs} a cuidar a otra niña, no tienes posibilidades así fijas para tener una vivienda. Si tu hijo se te enferma, no tienes dinero no tienes trabajo, no tienes posibilidades como como otras personas que con dinero rápido un doctor. Entonces to tienes que buscar las formas de buscar dinero, a veces no hay, o por eso a veces hay, bebes que se mueren a muy temprano edad.” - Liliana #1, (40:53) 168 inhabiting the wrong age grade for the specific responsibility. Her statement, “just a child trying to care for a child,” indicates that the problem is one of having failed to graduate to adulthood. 75In other words, pregnancy and parenting, along with other freedoms and obligations primarily identified with adulthood, are rights and responsibilities that are predicated on graduation from a time of learning. These are not continuous changes, but a clear juxtaposition of adulthood and childhood.

Where changing identities depend on individual agency, the unidirectionality and discontinuity of age identity become an incitement to rational self-government. The right way to do things, Liliana explained a few minutes later, is to introduce the person who you are dating to your family and only spend limited time with each other when your parents can supervise you. She mentions how she appreciated the gestures of her last boyfriend, who did homework with her, bought her teddy bears, dedicated songs to her, and did not treat her like “just a friend,” but like someone special. She described a chaste romance that was “like it used to be, not losing the details,” which subtly prioritized the responsibilities of school.76 Like youth labor in Liliana’s narrative, it is not that romance is inherently damaging to school-age youth so much as it is a potentially dangerous distraction. And, since more intense romantic attachments have foreseeable consequences for future age identities, Liliana (like most of the other kids I interviewed) thought it was up to the high schoolers themselves to be rational about having the right kind of relationships and to take the initiative to seek out parental oversight.

75 see Jessica Fields’ 2005 analysis of the discourse of “children having children” in the U.S. 76 It was clear to me that she intended to index formal courting as more chaste, more attentive, and less platonic, rather than suggesting that the there used to be more emphasis on schooling in the past. 169 This shaping of age identity is a negotiation of contingencies that are made predictable, and therefore susceptible to rational action through time; e.g., if youth romance can result in irresponsible parenthood, focus on school instead of dating.

Citizens are encouraged to identify with certain age identities (e.g., chaste student, self- sacrificing mother) through the application of rational foresight, and organized into a hierarchy of normativity and deviance. Another way to say this is that unidirectional age is a technology of citizenship, a mechanism for governing populations’ rights and responsibilities. Here, citizenship is an analytic of belonging that incorporates Foucault’s observation that regimes of government work by inciting populations to regulate themselves (Dean 2009), rather than as a prescriptive relationship with the state (e.g.,

Marshall 1950). This analysis of rational foresight is particularly indebted to

Cruikshank’s argument that all citizenship must also entail subjection: that in the moment of identification with citizen rights, one also becomes accountable for and subject to regulation of that identification (e.g. Garcia 2005, Shaw 2012). Age identity, in this model of citizenship, is both subjectively experienced and collectively negotiated within a governing apparatus (cf. Levinson 2005). Taking unidirectional age as a disciplinary technique, Liliana’s indictment of young mothers reveals age identity as accountability for a rational choice constrained by the foreseeable directionality of age. Their youth identities make them accountable for who they will become, and, even more important, they hold Liliana accountable, too.

Liliana’s predictions for the repercussions of graduating school versus dropping out not only imply unilinearity, but emphasize the benefits of discontinuous aging. Waiting for romance and waiting for work are a price she is more than willing to pay to stay 170 primarily identified with school, because she sees school as the solution to the barriers of social inequality in adulthood. Although Liliana primarily discusses school as a remedy for her own social mobility, she also praises President Correa for the ways that his education reforms make it newly possible for Ecuadorians with fewer economic resources to achieve the same things as people with money.

Liliana’s celebration of the positive impact of the right to education fits rather neatly into T. H. Marshall’s argument that a “social right” to education corrects the inequality produced by the “civil right” to free labor choice. As discussed in the first chapter,

Marshall argues that,

Fundamentally it should be regarded, not as the right of the child to go to school,

but as the right of the adult citizen to have been educated. And there is here no

conflict with civil rights as interpreted in an age of individualism. For civil rights

are designed for use by reasonable and intelligent persons, who have learned to

read and write. Education is a necessary prerequisite to civil freedom. (1992

[1950]: 16).

As others (e.g., Roche 1999) have pointed out, this prescriptive definition of citizenship not only defines it as the purview of adults, it frames adulthood as a period that both inevitably follows childhood and is wholly exclusive from it. In other words, the rights of adult citizenship are not dependent on a lifelong or gradual right to education, but a discontinuous one. The idea that civil (and political) rights follow a period of education is built upon the idea that adulthood follows childhood. This is, in other words, not a homogenous conception of rights and responsibilities across a whole life course, but a “citizen life cycle” whose most tense moment of transition is from school-age to adult 171 age. School-age is a period for remedying social differentiation by ensuring universal access to education, thus discursively producing a level playing field of adulthood such that all adults can be held equally accountable for any inequalities they face.

Complementing the individual accountability for rational foresight, the universal distribution of discontinuity between school-age and adult-citizenship tied to graduation from high school is the social remedy for generations of institutionalized inequality.

Curriculum standardization as a remedy

My informants discussed the changes wrought by the standardization of the curriculum primarily in terms of the equalization of school reputations and the new content of the national high school degree, the bachillerato unido. As I will explain, the former represented a change from high school as a period of identification with a school name to a period of identification with the larger institution of schooling. The latter represented a shift from high school as a period of professional differentiation to a period of unspecialized equalization.

For students at the city-run Conquistador, the new standardized curriculum was discussed almost exclusively in terms of loss: the loss of valuable classes and the loss of reputation. The biggest loss for students at Conquistador was a decrease in the variety of classes they could take (e.g., philosophy, art and sports classes). Since Conquistador was already focused on preparation for university rather than technical professions, many students complained that standardization came at the expense of their successful programs, bringing them down rather than raising up worse programs. They had placed at the top of their elementary school classes, many even elementary school valedictorians, 172 in order to get a spot at Conquistador in 8th grade. They felt they had earned the nombremiento, the name-recognition or reputation, that they would have graduated with under the old system, and they knew it would have helped them to both get into a university and eventually find a job. In a country where the high school you attended still says more about you than which university you attended, this loss is particularly signifiant. The students I spoke with found it universally frustrating.

Students at I.T.S.E. Maestro were also concerned about the loss of special classes and school reputation, but they felt more positive about the new breadth of future career paths, and they hoped the reforms would lead to a more level playing field at the time of university admittance. In Maestro, still a better than average school, there was both indignation at lost reputation and celebration of the new opportunity to compete with students of other schools based on individual test scores. One student reflected that even wearing uniforms (to represent your school affiliation) made less sense now because all the schools were the same. In both cases, the leveling of school reputations increased the substitutability of the high school experience, and encouraged individual identification with (and accountability for) general rather than particular structures of education.

The introduction of the bachillerato unido at Maestro accompanied the end of their nationally recognized accounting program. Although their school motto remained the same, “First Gentlemen, Then Excellent Accountants,” the new curriculum precluded the specialized training that gave the school its reputation. While the loss of special training was lamented by students at both schools, there was general agreement that finding a professional position with only a high school level certification was unlikely. Thus, while the change in curriculum reinforced an understanding of high school as a time for 173 preparation for university, that expectation was already widely shared among my informants. However, before the standardization, different schools emphasized different strengths and made high school a time to begin to differentiate oneself based on different career paths and interests. In other words, the new curriculum made secondary school’s central theme of “becoming” an explicitly general endeavor. Now, Tomas’s father explained approvingly, “everyone can study anything they want.” Instead of flexible schedules and accounting classes, 10th grade schedules at I.T.S.E. Maestro (and

Conquistador) now reflected a standardized number of hours for Language and

Literature, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Computers, and Physical

Education. Specialized learning was reframed as the arena of the university, and I.T.S.E.

Maestro’s education was reframed as a time for more universal foundations.

Is Age a Remedy for Social Inequality?

Hall et al (1998) called for the separation of youth and citizenship in order to reveal the ways that citizenship is differentiated by race, gender, class, etc. This conflation is not just lazy analysis, but rather is produced through school-based techniques, like curriculum standardization and sectorization, that normalize a school-based discontinuity in the citizen life cycle. By tying high school to a particular range of chronological ages, and tying graduation from school to graduation into adult citizenship, discontinuous aging is portrayed as both natural and universal. However, as Liliana’s warnings reveal, the rights and responsibilities of normative, school-going youth are experienced very differently by different people. When graduation is normative, but pregnancy is only a barrier for girls, rational foresight holds “girl becoming” accountable for more their 174 future and present belonging to the nation. When indigenous families have more age- egalitarian expectations of children and youth’s economic contributions to their households and communities, any future barriers to national belonging can be laid at the feet of making an “irrational” choice. In short, by making the privileged transition into adulthood more accessible families whose economic conditions were once a barrier, the normative discontinuity of the citizen life cycle is confirmed. But as the diversity of life course trajectories shaped by other guideposts of gender, race, and class is erased, variation in life course trajectories is reframed as deviation from a rational path to becoming.

The techniques framing age as social remedy may indeed prove to enhance social equality, as they intend,77 but this chapter shows that the conflation of a discontinuous transition from youth to adulthood with a right to “equal citizenship” is a political project that holds individuals accountable for how closely their experience of age fits with the normative, school-based transition. Education policy reforms aimed at creating "universal attendance" function as a proxy for universal and equal citizenship rights through the

“un-specialization” of high school age identities. This chapter begins with exploring the boundaries of current Ecuadorian school age grades and their implications, continues with a discussion of Ecuador’s expansion of school access and the implications of that for both age identity and citizenship, and concludes with an analysis of changed perceptions of school-age rights and responsibilities. The school reforms experienced by my informants as part of Ecuador’s “educational revolution” reveal how age identity grounds national membership in supposedly equal and universal distribution of rights. As the

77 although the evaluation of that success is a task for a careful longitudinal study and far beyond the scope of this dissertation 175 “educational revolution” has explicitly attempted to expand the social right to schooling to all youth, the shape of Ecuador’s “Citizen Life Cycle” has changed. Attending to these changes allows us to examine how citizenship technologies work through age identity, and particularly how they ground national ideologies of equal membership (and mask inequality). To understand how the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are differentially distributed, we must begin by recognizing the ways the concept of citizenship as something that should be equally available to citizens is predicated on the idea that age is normally a standard experience. This chapter brings together my informants’ discussions of changes to Ecuador’s education policy with their assessments of the responsibilities of youth and parents in order to show how the government of educational citizenship also works through and on age identity. 176 7. Bad Kids and Biocitizenship in Ecuadorian High Schools

On Angel's 15th birthday, he invited me to celebrate with him, his best friend

Benjamin, and five girl friends in their empty classroom after the final bell. Laughing and taking endless selfies as they set out large bottles of Sprite and the makings for ham sandwiches, the small group hung out at desks they pulled into a circle in the middle of the room. Outside, the rest of the students went out as a tide towards the school buses, through the basketball courts, through the main gates, into the streets. But Angel and his friends, who lived too far apart from each other for easy visiting, stayed. A skeptical teacher briefly peeked in, but they were all good enough students that they registered no threat and were allowed to stay. Standing on a chair in the middle of the empty classroom, Angel theatrically thanked his friends for throwing him the party, mixing defiance and gratitude as he declared himself “sexy” and his friends “gorgeous.”

The next day we had our first interview in my apartment after school. He employed the same unapologetically dramatic style as he denounced the Ministry of Education for negatively impacting his experience at Colegio Conquistador.

It’s all the Ministry of Education’s fault. ... Look, in Conquistador, Conquistador

was always known as the best high school in the country. Always. They chose the

kids with the best GPAs and first they did a behavior assessment of the kid. With

this sectorization, on the other hand, they don’t care about keeping up with the

discipline and let in anyone, and so [those kids] got in. The kids here weren’t

thugs, they didn’t use bad words ... And with this sectorization some things

started to come in, and very, I call them idiots, thugs, jerks ... and it’s not that I’m

criticizing them for being what they are, but all kids are like their parents, and 177 their parents are another bunch of thugs. So it’s like, no. That’s like no, that’s

going to hurt us. In our high school, in 10th grade, sectorization was the new fad.

And 10th grade is stereotyped as the worst. All the 10th graders. We are

stereotyped as the worst because they say that’s where the worst kids are. There

are people taking drugs, that drink, and that’s the majority. ... And I think that it’s

because they have a machismo complex, you might say. They have this complex

... and they have this ideology that, if I don’t do this thing I’m not a man, or

something like that. That if I don’t drink I’m not a man, that if I don’t smoke I’m

not a man, and etc. So it is like reeeeeeeally annoying at the same time, you

know? They really stress you out. Me, at least, they stress out.78

Angel’s stress about these cursing, drug-taking, drinking, smoking kids (he added slutty to the list when we talked about girls a few minutes later) was personal. As his critique of the machismo associated with these damaging behaviors hinted, he was experiencing regular bullying for being effeminate and “gay.” But his commitment to school was just as personal. Academic success at Conquistador meant a chance at a scholarship to the public university and a professional path that could lift his whole family out of economic precarity. This was a point that his mother, who balanced three

78 Todo es culpa del Ministerio de Educación. ... Vera, en el Conquistador, el Conquistador siempre se caracterizó por ser el mejor colegio del país. Siempre. Escogían a chicos de buenos promedios y primero hacían un seguimiento del comportamiento del chico. Y vuelta con esto de la sectorización, no les importo coger con la disciplina que tenian con la que sea, y entonces entraron aqui - los chicos aqui no eran patanes, no hablaban malas palabras. ... Y con esta sectorizacion empezaron a entrar unas cosas : y muy : yo los digo maleducados, patanes, majaderos. ... y no es que yo les critique por lo que sean, pero todo los chicos se parecen a sus padres, y sus padres tambien son otros majaderos. Entonces es como que no. Eso no, eso viene a perjudicar. En el colegio de nosotros, en decimo, se puso de moda la sectorizacion. Y el decimo curso es el peor catalogado. Todo los decimos. Somos los peor catalogados diciendo que alli la mayoria [escorias?] alli. Hay gente que se droga, que toma, y son la mayoria. ... Y creo que es porque tienen tambien un complejo machista se puede decir. Tiene eso complejo. ... y tiene eso ideologia que si yo no hago eso no soy hombre o algo asi. Que si no tomo no soy hombre, que si no fumo no soy hombre, y asi etcetera. Entonces es como muyyyy : fastidioso a la vez no? Que estresen ellos. A mi ellos me estresan. - Angel #1 (19:20) 178 jobs, made poignantly when she later told me she had slept in the line outside the

Ministry of Education to try and increase Angel's chances of enrolling at Conquistador when he was entering 8th grade. The attachment to the promise that Conquistador represented made the damage to the school's reputation (“that’s going to hurt us,” eso viene a prejudicar) particularly fraught.

In his frustration, Angel singled out a number of parties for blame: the Ministry of

Education, the policy of sectorization,79 the school adminstrators, the new kids, and those kids’ parents. Although Angel put it more pointedly than most, all of my informants shared his perspective in seeing the Ministry, their policy, and the school administrators as responsible for protecting students, in seeing parents as responsible for raising good children,80 and in seeing (at least some of) the new kids as both failing to embody the appropriate behaviors of good students and putting the rest of the students at risk. Though we may see youth drinking and sex as self-evidently risky behaviors, this chapter unpacks ideas about risk, danger and harm to uncover the particular temporal frameworks of aging which help to normalize inequalities of race, class, and gender as “temporary.” This chapter looks more closely at how “youth risk” governs both youth identity and the larger citizen life cycle by focusing on the relationship between the educational authorities and the students as a negotiation of citizenship.

In the first half of this chapter, I analyze how my informants’ discussions of drinking and having sex reveal age-based vulnerabilities and dangers that are particularly problematic for socially mobile Ecuadorian youth. In the second half of the chapter, I

79 see chapter six for a more detailed description 80 and see Duff’s (2011) The Parent As Citizen: A Democratic Dilemma for a very relevant discussion of some of the frameworks for their responsibilities. 179 argue that my informants’ assessments of the “bad kids” in their schools show how their citizenship is grounded in experiences of youth as temporary. I suggest that the tension between citizenship and subjecthood is sustained through incentives to give up certain citizen rights in the short term for the promise of more complete belonging in the future, that is, through the promise of “becoming.” This chapter brings together my informants' reflections on student subjecthood with Cruikshank's and Briggs and Mantini-Briggs' theorization of the relationship between subjecthood and citizenship in order to explore the idea that “change through time” links race, class, and gender identities to the accountability of individual citizens. This is followed with an exploration of the literatures exploring what “youth risk” reveals and conceals when it intersects with race, class, and gender identities. I conclude with a discussion of how the temporary aspect of youth as a period of becoming shapes the distribution of citizenship rights and responsibilities by race, class, and gender.

Citizens and subjects

This chapter draws heavily on two theories of citizenship: Cruikshank’s (1999) citizen-subject (which I have held up as an exemplar of a governmental citizenship approach throughout the dissertation) and Briggs and Mantini-Briggs' (2003) sanitary citizenship. Traditional definitions of citizenship, reaching back to Tocqueville’s (2000

[1835]) classic exposition, generally juxtapose citizenship as the rights and responsibilities of full membership with subjecthood as the regulatory exclusion from both rights and membership. Barbara Cruikshank challenges this dichotomy by showing how citizenship always entails some degree of subjecthood insofar as citizens are 180 produced through their accountability for the conditions of their membership (1999). In other words, for Cruikshank, no one is a full member anymore than anyone experiences total exclusion, citizens are also subjects insofar as their access to rights is constrained by their responsibilities. Briggs and Mantini-Briggs show how “sanitary citizens” are bound in opposition to “unsanitary subjects.” They point out the ways that identity (and particularly racial/ethnic identity) shapes rights and responsibilities and the ways that mechanisms in turn define identity through those differentiated rights and responsibilities. Briggs and Mantini-Briggs develop their concept of “sanitary citizenship” from their analyses of a Latin American health education program. It shows how the management of contagion reflects and creates racial identities and explores the conditions in which either the state or the citizen is held accountable for preventing harm.

Despite their differences, both Cruikshank and Briggs and Mantini-Briggs have a great deal of common ground. This is particularly clear when you examine sanitary citizenship in relation to biocitizenship.

Rose and Novas (2005) used the concept of biocitizenship to describe how "specific biological presuppositions, explicitly and implicitly, have underlain many citizenship projects, shaped conceptions of what it means to be a citizen, and underpinned distinctions between actual, potential, troublesome, and impossible citizens" (2005: 440).

Although "sanitary citizenship" was developed a few years before Rose and Novas popularized the concept of biocitizenship, Briggs and Hallin later argue that the primary contribution of sanitary citizenship is that it describes "the ways that states read bodies and bodily practices and assess the biomedical knowledge of individuals and populations" (2007). Their approach is easily grouped with the majority of those who 181 take up "biocitizenship" and use it to explore the ways that the “medical management of disease” (or what Foucault calls individual anatomo-politics) incites more public activism around the “public administration of disease,” or biopolitics (Klawiter 2008 repurposing

Foucault, cf. Shaw 2012). In sum, sanitary citizenship, biocitizenship, and Cruikshank's citizen-subjects, are all examples of what I call governmental citizenship in that they explore how rights, responsibilities, and membership are negotiated between citizens and states. They share a Foucauldian emphasis on the distribution of power through discourses, practices, and institutions such as stigma, welfare policy, or public health infrastructure. An analytical lens of citizenship that sees rights and responsibilities as negotiated through institutions and relationships instead of laws is particularly apt in places like Ecuador, where the state is relatively weak (Foote 2006).

I draw on literature exploring the intersections of youth risk and citizenship to discuss how my informants see the bad kids in their schools as contagious vectors of risk behaviors.

Keywords of “youth risk”

Alcohol, drugs, and sex are the trifecta of youth risk in Ecuador (as in the U.S.). For my informants, as well as for their school authorities, parents, and Ecuadorian society more broadly, these three keywords signal youth's vulnerability to unhealthy and dangerous social influences. There are two significant aspects of youth risk that merit further attention: 1) some behaviors are dangerous for youth but not for adults and, 2) youth transmit risk differently than adults. This section explores the first of these assertions, beginning with an analysis of how alcohol and sex are constructed as risky by 182 youth themselves. Accounts from my informants show how discourses of alcohol and sex normalize youth as a “temporary” identity by reframing school-based risk as age-based risk.

That these "vices" - as they were often called by my informants - are also prevalent in

U.S. discourses of youth risk is no accident. Social and biological research on alcohol, drugs, and teen sexuality conducted in the U.S. has successfully branded these as universally "risky behaviors" to which all youth are developmentally vulnerable (c.f.

Hunt and Barker 2001). This perspective was particularly evident in the reflections of

I.T.S.E. Maestro's school psychologist, who told me that,

There were always alcohol, drugs, problems [among high school students], but

today it is starting even more prematurely. … It's certainly because of society. …

But the kids don't have, um, care from their parents. Twenty-four hours a day the

kids are comfortably watching programs that aren't good for the development of

kids. They see violence on television, they see bad examples, they see the

consumption of liquor, the consumption of drugs, gangs, delinquency, so these

messages are reaching our children, our youth, and they are alienating them. …

So all of these these factors, technology, are really influencing our kids, at a very

young age you now hear about drinking liquor, whereas previously you heard

about drinking liquor at the age of, you know, 15 years old and beyond, but now it

is younger.81

81 “Siempre hubo, alcohol, drogas, problemas [entre los estudiantes], pero hoy es mas prematuro ... Justamente es por la sociedad. ... Hoy la facilidad de : eh, pornografia, pero los chicos no tienen es, eh, cuidado de parte de los padres. Los chicos en las 24 horas al día ellos tranquilamente ven programas que no son buenos cuestión a gestión formación de los chicos, ven violencia en la television, ven malos ejemplos, ven consumo de licor, consumo de droga, pandillas, delincuencia, entonces esos mensajes están llegando a nuestros niños, a nuestros jóvenes y están alienándoles. ... Entonces todos esos factores la tecnología influenciando realmente nuestros chicos, muy a temprano edad ya se escucha consumo de licor, antes en 183 His account, supported by youth informants from both high schools who mentioned that drinking started to become popular in 8th grade (the first year of high school), implies that youth face a host of age-specific risks during high school. Despite the school psychologist’s concerns, however, it is worth noting that at least as recently as a decade ago, 1) Ecuadorian youth drink less than Ecuadorian adults (WHO 2004), and 2)

Ecuadorians drink less than any other Latin American country (Pyne et al 2002), and 3) the prevention of youth alcohol consumption and addiction is a “fundamental [health] program” in the Ecuadorian Ministry for Social and Economic Inclusion’s “Youth

Policies” (MIES 2012). In other words, it may not actually be the case that drinking alcohol is a significant cause of problems for Ecuadorian youth, but it is certainly treated as if it does. This is consistent with observations made regarding discourses of youth risks in the U.S.: namely, that these discourses tell us much more about how governments

“understand” youth identity and what a particular society considers “moral” than they do about the actual probabilities of either harm or behavior for a given population (Kelly

2000, Males 2009).

Although my informants also participated in the discourses that alcohol and sex were

“naturally” risky for young people, they were also more explicit about the specific social ramifications of those behaviors. Alicia offered one perspective on what makes alcohol so problematic for teens towards the end of our first interview as we sat together on her bed and she leaned back against a religious mural she had painted on her wall. She had gone through a phase of partying and drinking in 8th grade before wholeheartedly

cambio escucha consumo de licor edad diga usted a los 15 anos en adelantes, en cambio ahora es mas temprano.” - School psychologist, I.T.S.E. Maestro (5:56) 184 embracing evangelical Christianity along with her family later that year after her

(unmarried) mother became unexpectedly pregnant for the third time. Alicia complained to me that her school, ITSE Maestro, had once been “super super bueno,” but now drinking and drugs were having a real impact on student performance since the school became less strict. To illustrate her point, she brought up her friend who was struggling with a drinking problem:

And it’s like, I would want, even if they’re an alcoholic, they should be a good

student. And I have, for example, I have a friend that’s an alcoholic in the school.

And he can’t do anything [about it], he has to keep asking for “water” during the

day. And even like that, he now, his performance has dropped, and he tells me

that it’s not like he even wants to, but like he, it’s just not enough now.82

In other words, even for an evangelical Christian like Alicia, the problem with these kinds of “vices” has less to do with religious morality than it does with a failure to meet one’s social responsibilities, in this case as a high performing student. For kids like her friend (I believe she was referring to another one of my informants, Lucas, but did not push the point), alcohol damages his ability to remain competitive in high school. Even beyond the idea that his bad behavior could “contaminate peers” (as she put it when making a related point), she suggests that his drinking has a negative impact on the collective quality (and reputation) of the school, rather than simply being a personal problem. For Alicia, drinking is a problem for youth because it is a problem for high

82 “Y es como que, yo le pidiera aun alcohólico que sea buen estudiante. Y yo tengo por ejemplo yo tengo un amigo que es alcohólico en el colegio. Y el no puede [ni hacer un deber] algo, el siempre tiene que pedir “agua” durante el día. Y aun así, el ahora, ha bajado su rendimiento, y el me dice que es que no es tampoco porque el quiera sino porque a veces el como que ya no le da.” - Alicia #1 (1:33:54) 185 school quality, which made it a different kind of problem than, say, sex. In fact, towards the start of the interview (before we started talking about the school’s quality) she mentioned that while she regretted her year of drinking and partying, at least her drinking wouldn’t follow her whole life the way that “fornication” would have. Whether she meant religiously or pragmatically was unclear, but any concerns she had about her own drinking were framed as a contained phase whose implications were potentially limited.

The alcoholism she attributed to her friend might have somewhat longer-term implications (particularly via any disruptions to his successful completion of high school) but her real focus was on the (temporally bounded) problems that it presented while he was there.

However, Alicia’s focus on the short-term implications of drinking in high school were not shared by everyone. Lucas’s mother provided the most dramatic contrast in the parent-child dyad interview when I asked her what Lucas might do to disappoint her. The question had not elicited strong responses in interviews with other families, but as she told me about her son’s drinking she was unable to hold back her tears, despite her best efforts. Moments before she had been beaming with pride at her oldest son’s maturity, and I was taken aback by her sudden unwanted tears. “I used to believe in him blindly,” she began before she announced she might cry and then did, “but then I got the call from the school that he smelled like alcohol.” She began reenacting the horror of the moment for me, putting her hands up and shaking her head as she recounted her thoughts, “no, not him.” But it was true, she explained, when she went into ITSE Maestro she could smell the liquor on him herself. “It was like a gut punch,” she said, and now they had to attend regular school meetings to talk about Lucas’s behavior and grades. And yet, despite her 186 first mention of the implications for their involvement in his education, what really made it so distressing to her, she explained, was that both her brother and her father were also alcoholics, and frighteningly aggressive ones at that. It was the idea that her son’s drinking was not a phase, but a step down a path that would extend across his life course beyond his control, that made the inappropriateness of drinking in school so much more upsetting.

Lucas’s mother was not the only one of my informants to mention experience with alcohol-related domestic violence, but my informants’ concerns were that a boy might become an abusive adult, not that he might become a violent youth. Their discussions paralleled the risk literature, in which individual and social risks of alcohol consumption generally focus more on adult illnesses and violence than on any consequences that occur during youth (e.g., Pyne et al 2002). However, in the specific context of literature on alcohol as a risk for youth, the most commonly cited problems are related to alcohol in combination with other behaviors (e.g., drinking and driving, drinking and sexual behaviors), and even these frequently remain unnamed, with many authors taking for granted that their readers already understand why alcohol is risky for youth (e.g., Borsari and Carey 2006). In other words, the evidence suggests that alcohol is more dangerous to adults than to youth themselves. The irony is that while virtually any drinking is perceived as dangerous for youth, light or moderate drinking is not generally considered problematic for adults. Thus “drinking alcohol” is a ubiquitous index of youth as biologically predisposed towards risky and self-destructive behavior, despite being 1) more likely to cause alcoholism and violence among adults and 2) a deviation from school norms, not biological development. 187 The idea that a behavior is risky for social rather than biological reasons is even more apparent when we consider sex and pregnancy. Although Alicia felt strongly that sex belongs in marriage and nowhere else, others I spoke with were generally less conservative. Unlike Alicia, who hoped to marry in her early 20s, most of my informants

(and all of the other girls) thought that their 30s were a good time to consider marriage.

Sex, however, was less tied to such permanent bonds than to committed relationships - something that they generally saw as reasonable after graduating from high school (i.e., during university). My informants further agreed that 1) high schoolers should not be having sex, and 2) high schoolers were definitely having sex. (Tomas, the proud “bad citizen” of my participants,83 was the exception to this, and felt that sex was entirely reasonable in high school as long as both parties were into the idea.)

The concern about sex in high school was, unsurprisingly, much more of a problem for girls than for boys, and girls were particularly censured for sexual activity. Angel, for example, announced that he thought that, "the girls are more bold [lanzadas]” than even the boys, and then continued that, despite acting properly at home, these girls were

“golfas” (sluts).

I have seen lots of cases where the girls are there, looking at [the boys], touching

them, grabbing them, and they don’t have even the slightest bit of modesty to say,

“I’m in the courtyard of the school,” like ... there, in front of everyone.84

Angel and Alicia - who told me that she slapped her friend when she confided to her that she had recently had sex - had the strongest reactions of revulsion among my

83 That’s how he identified himself when I asked about what made people good citizens! 84 Yo he visto en muchos casos que ellas estan alli, viendoles, tocandoles, agarrandoles, y no tienen ni un poquito de pudor de decir estoy en el patio del colegio osea ... alli al frente de todos. - Angel #1 (30:28) 188 informants.85 The majority of my informants, however, focused less on sexual activity and more on what made that sexual activity risky: student pregnancies. This, at least, was a concern to both girls and boys. Pregnant 10th graders in both Colegio Conquistador and

ITSE Maestro were consistently referenced as living lessons by my informants. Lucas, who described Maestro’s visibly pregnant 10th grader86 as a “safada” (crazy, wild, loose) and “avanzada” (ahead of her age) friend, reported that his reaction to first hearing she was pregnant was, “dang, poor thing … it’s a child having another child.”87

While adult women also face censure when they are perceived as sexually bold, the idea that high school is an inappropriate location for flirting makes girls appear even more “shameless.” And, as the discussions of the pregnant 10th graders revealed, getting pregnant is both an expected consequence of such “bad decisions” (as Estefany put it) and further evidence that sex is not age-appropriate for high schoolers. Although this perspective is widely shared in the U.S., the reasons why pregnancy is seen as such a bad thing for youth are also worth briefly revisiting.88 Although the above suggests that at least part of what makes pregnancy “bad” for youth is simply that being a pregnant high schooler is stigmatized (cf. Nathanson 1991, Kelly 1999, Yardley 2008), my informants also offered more practical explanations for why pregnancy was risky for youth like them.

85 For Angel, I suspect that the need to keep a tight lid on his own sexual expression at school was a major contributing factor to this. For Alicia, it was clearly a religious issue. 86 There was also a pregnant 10th grader at Colegio Conquistador while I was conducting participant observation there. 87 “Yo dije, ‘chuta, pobre.’ … Es una niña, va a tener otro niño.” - Lucas #1 88 Worth it because not getting into the whys only serves to reify the idea that this is “naturally” bad for youth. My own political position is that the social conditions that make pregnancy “bad” for youth are simply gender and age based discrimination, but that point has been made effectively by other feminist social scientists (e.g., Kelly 1999, Geronimus 2003, Nathanson 1991) for more than three decades now, so I will not make that argument here. 189 Benjamin, for example, explained that the reason to wait was that sex could cause misery and poverty for youth if it results in pregnancy because you have to leave school to take care of your kid. Michael argued that sex was out of bounds because girls might not use protection and if they got pregnant in high school it would be really bad because, as kids, they don’t have jobs. Estefany said that if she got pregnant she would have to leave school and would not be able to see her friends because her only responsibility would be caring for the baby. Jeaneth reported that they actually had a debate on this very subject in her class at Colegio Conquistador, and that the majority of the class agreed that pregnancy (and sex) needed to be planned for when they had the economic resources to support a child. In short, sex - via pregnancy - could completely disrupt their socially mobile education trajectories.

The idea of sex and romance as disruptive was strongly connected to the idea of high school youth as “unfinished.” The importance of the timing of sex and romance was made explicit in a conversation with Aurora about the best time to start dating. She explained,

I think the age when you have the maturity for a lover is when you are already

done with school and [when] you have diverse opinions and you have a different

way of seeing life. Now [in contrast], we [high school students] all see life like,

oh how nice, life is beautiful. Those of us who study, we just study. … And that’s

why lots of people think that that’s what it is to be mature, or that having sex is

being mature, when really it isn’t.”89

89 Yo creo que la edad para tener madurez para un enamorado es cuando ya eres preparado. Y tienes diversas opiniones y tienes una forma de ver a la vida diferente. Ahora todos vemos la vida como que, [sing-song voice] ay si, que bonita que es la vida, solo estudiamos, los que estudian. … y por eso mucha 190 In other words, for Aurora, romance is appropriate when you have 1) finished your education, 2) have a wider breadth of knowledge to shape your perspectives, 3) aren’t so naive, and 4) aren’t narrowly focused on the task of academic learning. Aurora is suggesting that high school students are simple and unformed (really emphasized by the mocking sing-song in which she voices “life is beautiful”), and that that simplicity leads high school aged youth (“those who study”) to mis-identify what social training is needed to correctly mature. It is not just that youth ought to be studying instead of hooking up, it’s the fact that they are studying that locates them as being in a period of “preparation,” which in turn confirms that they are not “prepared” for such socially complex decisions as choosing a lover. This is not only that youth and adulthood are discontinuous age grades, or simply that youth identity is framed as unidirectional, but that the

“preparation” of youth is necessarily a temporary state that one cannot simply skip.

A similar logic helps make sense of Benjamin’s reflections on his exposure to alcohol and drugs in a “peer pressure” situation, and how he contrasts those experiences with an imagined experience at the age of transitioning out of high school. He explains that,

It’s not that we will never do [drugs or drink], but, not progressing with our

proper selves instead we follow some friendships that take us to parties and

sometimes they tell you to try this and to feel included with the people you say

okay. So, you take it, you try it, and you fall into vice or you can just stop right

there. … I myself, in my life [had my own experience of] that in a party, they

gente cree que ese ya es tener madurez, o tener relaciones sexuales ya es ser maduro, cuando realmente no. - Aurora #1 (1:00:49) Aurora’s word, “preparado,” has more of an implication of “qualified” and “complete” than its English cognate “prepared,” and it is also simply used to mean “done with school” or “graduated.” It is a particularly nice representation of how the concept of high school as a time of actively “becoming” is embedded in people’s discourse. 191 didn’t let me drink and instead they gave me [something] and I tried it. … There’s

a certain age for everything, there’s always [a] time for everything. … Like at 18

years old, you already have more control over your own life and you don’t need to

depend on your parents as much anymore. And you go out to hang with your

friends, you go to clubs, to bars, and you drink and smoke.90

Despite his assertion only moments before that he would be disappointed to discover that any friend of his might be taking drugs or drinking, Benjamin’s tone during his description of his own forays into chemical experimentation remained pretty nonchalant.

His emphasis, here as previously in our conversation, is less on the inherent “badness” of drugs and alcohol, and more on its inappropriate timing. Thus he begins by contrasting the possible acceptability of substance use in the future with the problem of substance use for high schoolers. In the quotation above, it is not the alcohol or drugs themselves that are the problem, but the idea that using them is not a result of (healthy, proper) personal growth (avanzando en nuestra propiedad), but rather a consequence of bad influences in unsanctioned social contexts.

Once he’s identified the source of risk, emphasizing a bad social context over any individual bad actor, Benjamin switches to frame it in terms of the agency that individual youth do have: to continue the behavior or not. Despite initially describing drugs and alcohol as the primary exemplars of a friend “going down a bad path” (andando en malos

90 No es que nunca lo haremos sino que, no avanzando en nuestra propiedad vuelta podemos seguir con algunas amistades que nos llevan a fiestas y a veces te dicen prueba esta y para sentirte incluido con la gente dices bueno. Entonces, coges lo pruebas y caes en los vicios o lo puedes dejar allí mismo. … Yo mismo, en mi propia vida que, en una fiesta no me dejaban tomar y de allí me dieron y yo probé. … Hay una cierta edad para todo, siempre hay tiempo para todo. … Como a los 18 anos ya tienes como con mas de control en tu propia vida ya no casi muchas veces no dependes de tus padres. Y sales a divertirte con un amigo, vas a discotecas, a bares, y tomas, fumas. - Benjamin #1 (15:14) 192 pasos) that would transform a friendship to make it “very bad” (muy mala), Benjamin is clear that it is age that makes the behavior a problem. For him, 18 years old (the last year of high school and/or first year of university) symbolizes a transition that makes these same behaviors less risky and even desirable. Like Aurora, Benjamin’s emphasis on substance use as age appropriate after gaining control over one’s own life paints high school as a period of dependence and narrow goals. And, like Aurora’s discussion of sex, it is not that trying out substance use will inevitably derail your high school goals so much as that the dependent state of youth and the narrowly defined goals of high school reveal youth as incomplete and thus vulnerable to developing in the wrong direction. This idea of youth as in-formation-therefore-vulnerable is indexed both in Benjamin’s initial frame of falling into vice as a result of following bad social influences (malas amistades que los están llevando a probar vicios) instead of following proper development of self

(avanzando en nuestra propiedad) and in his conclusion that substance use becomes potentially appropriate when, at 18, you have more control over your own life (más de control en tu propia vida).

By framing alcohol and sex as “youth risks” rather than “barriers to schooling,” these discourses (and the school-based practices perpetuating them) are key elements of the process through which youth is defined through its “temporary vulnerabilities.”

Having identified these mechanisms, we can begin to analyze how age identities constrain and differentiate national belonging in intersection with gender, race, and class.

Age in Intersection 193 The trifecta of alcohol, drugs, and sex highlight youth vulnerability to negative social influence, and their invocation contributes to the idea of youth as a critical period of sensitivity to social influence on behavioral development. In this section, I begin with a discussion of U.S.-based research examining the intersection of age, race, class, and gender in the context of teen pregnancy, and incorporate their conclusions that age masks other forms of social inequality. However, rather than moving away from age to refocus the attention on race and gender, I use Briggs and Mantini-Briggs’ concept of sanitary citizenship to explore age as an intersectional political project.

As one might anticipate, alcohol and drugs were particularly seen as problems for boys, while sex (and any pregnancy that might result) was seen as more of a problem for girls.91 And Ecuador is not unlike the U.S. insofar as poor youth, Afro-Ecuadorian youth, and indigenous youth are often perceived as more “risky” - more likely to drink, do drugs, and become young parents. This was reflected not only in offhand comments made by kids,92 but also in Ecuadorian health education materials. In her 2008 book about sexual education in the U.S., Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality, Jessica

Fields analyzes rhetorical strategies similar to those encountered by my informants. For example, light-skinned,93 pretty, and slim (but for their third trimester bellies) girls with stylish school uniforms and backpacks dominated the posters on school walls and in the schools’ nurse’s offices warning about the dangers teen pregnancy. As Fields points out,

91 Mitchell et al 2001 analyze a similar dynamic of gender in the governance of “youth risk” in the UK. Alcohol, drugs, and sex are part of a “macho risk taker” identity for boys while pregnancy is part of framed as a failure of “risk avoidance” for girls. 92 see Andrés 2008 and Roitman 2009 for how racist discourses get circulated in Ecuadorian secondary schools 93 The only representation of a darker skinned mestiza youth I observed in the sex education presentations was a girl in a video whose face and voice were obscured as she gave a tragic account of how terrible her experience of teen motherhood had been. 194 such images are designed to draw on the presumed innocence and purity of white girls and idealize white feminine virginity as a way of encouraging sexual abstinence for youth. Rather than African American girls benefitting from the supposed innocence of white, feminine, childhood, in fact such skewed representation serves to reproduce the idea that childhood innocence is, by default, white (Fields 2005). Thus when a child is black, the representation is no longer of “a child” but of a different identity altogether, “a black child.” Fields goes on to point out that when white girls are portrayed as vulnerable not only to sexually aggressive boys and men but to the corrupting influence of "other" girls, "other" is understood as sexually active, African American, and low SES by default.

Although Fields was writing about the U.S., the implications of this rhetoric appear much the same in the socially mobile, urban, Ecuadorian public high schools where I conducted research. My informants often indirectly reinforced the connection between race, class, and the probability of someone turning out to be a “bad kid” by emphasizing that bad behavior resulted in poverty and social exclusion. But my informants believed that many students were already "bad" when they entered the school, which is part of what made high school peer relationships potential vectors for contamination. During our interviews, Angel blamed the bad behaviors of these kids on their parents, but in a passing conversation at school he complained that the one Afro-Ecuadorian student in his class was a bad kid and added, "that's just how those people from the Coast are." ("People from the Coast" indexes blackness, in the same way that "farmer" is usually meant to refer to "indigenous person." As a case in point, the Afro-Ecuadorian boy in question was not from the Coast.) 195 As Fields’ analysis suggests, the rhetoric of the perfectly blameless child ultimately means that the intrusion of intersecting identities (be they race, class, or gender) ensures that real individuals will be held responsible for visible transgressions. Jeaneth confirmed this pattern when she volunteered how much it bothered her that, too often, girls had sex because they felt like it and then got abortions by claiming they were raped.94 Similarly, despite naming her as a friend, Lucas’s description of the pregnant 10th grader as "safada" and "avanzada" suggests that her age identity and her gender identity combined to guarantee her pregnancy would be interpreted as a result of bad behavior along with the

“sluts” that Angel describes seeing everywhere.

The problems with the monolithic reification of “youth risk” have been acknowledged for decades, and there is a significant subset of research that rejects the idea of age as a primary risk factor altogether. Hill and Fortenberry (1992), for example, suggest that Western conceptions of adolescence as inherently risky obscure the more relevant risk factors such as "racism, the juvenilization of poverty, underemployment, inadequate education and declining per-capita resources for dependent children"

(1992:78). Others, like Geronimus (2003), argue that the sexual risk across life course trajectories is calculated for white, middle class girls and women, and do not accurately reflect the risks for poor, African American youth. Geronimus points out that while delayed childbearing is an adaptive strategy that offers white Americans economic and social benefits including access to higher education and career development, African

Americans (and particularly those in high poverty areas) who delay childbearing are not

94 Jeaneth was under the impression that abortion is legal in Ecuador in cases of rape, but in fact abortion is only legal as a last resort if maternal life is deemed at risk, or if it the mother who was raped is legally deemed mentally disabled. 196 generally able to access the same benefits. As a result, the language of “youth risk” stigmatizes what can actually be adaptive reproductive, economic, and social strategies for African American youth, further marginalizing already marginalized groups. Her point is that the label of “youth risk” masks the ways that racism, sexism, and poverty create barriers for teen moms of color by incorrectly attributing social exclusion to

“irrational” life course trajectories (Geronimus 2003).

Geronimus and others who have pointed to the false universalism of youth risk conclude that we must shift our attention to differentiation via race, class, and gender. If the discourse of youth risk assumes that age is a universal (biologically/psychologically determined) life course trajectory upon which “cultural categories” like race, class, and gender are layered, Geronimus, Fields, Males, Nathanson, and others respond, like Mead once did, that age is far less universal and biological than we think. But, once identified, the most socially relevant aspects of age as “culturally constructed” are largely dismissed from analysis to return the focus to the categories of differentiation that “really matter.”

This misses a rather important point. Insofar as age, like gender, race, and class is culturally constructed, it is a political project. It is not coincidence that age identity intersects with gender, race, and class. Rather, age identity is employed both explicitly and implicitly as a governmental technique for managing the diversity of gender, race, and class across populations. In Ecuador’s Educational Revolution, as I discuss in chapter six, the promise of a more equal country is premised on the idea that tying educational access to age provides a solution for persisting inequality across gender, race, and class.

But age is less of a fourth category, and more of a fourth dimension in the same way that time is a fourth dimension in relation to three dimensional space. In contrast to gender, 197 race, and class, the primary strength of age as an analytical category comes when it is examined in time, that is, within the context of the life course. By following that shift, and confronting the tight relationship between age and temporal subjectivity, the analysis of identity (including gender, race, and class) moves away from a model of coherent layers and towards an analysis of the phenomena, or guideposts, that populate a person’s experiential horizon. Age identity, made meaningful in guideposts such as my informants’ encounters with pregnant peers or late-night drinking at parties, helps to explain how the gender, race, and classed aspects of these experiences “become” and are sustained coherently through time.

By laying out these experiences of age as temporal guideposts in age horizons, age can be analyzed through the experiences, practices, and infrastructures that identify some life course trajectories as normal, and others as irrational. The concept of age horizons suggests that age is not a “layer” that can be peeled off to better understand the “real” dynamics of race or biology at play beneath. In the previous section I analyzed youth risk as a guidepost tying a normative youth identity to school-based vulnerabilities. The remainder of this chapter analyzes the ways that youth risk stands as a guidepost that ties race, gender, and class inequality to the temporary resolution of those vulnerabilities.

The only real hope of challenging the patterns through which normative age identities mask race, class, and gender inequality, is to identify the components of the mechanisms tying them together into legible guideposts.

Becoming Bad Kids 198 White supremacy is alive and well and certainly visible in the “stratified reproduction” (and, relatedly, stratified sexuality) of indigenous, Afro-Ecuadorian, mestiza, and white Ecuadorians (Roberts 2012). My informants were all mestizo, and were not direct targets of racism the way their indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian classmates were, but their peripheral relationship to whiteness in addition to their lower- middle class status might lead one to expect them to be more aligned with Geronimus’ assessment of marginalized African American youth than with privileged whites. Elite students have a safety net insulating them from the repercussions of these behaviors, while the most marginalized students still have such limited access to a life trajectory of social mobility that there is not much to disrupt. However, my informants experienced the risks of sex, alcohol and drugs as particularly threatening for them because of their deep investment in being “socially mobile youth.”

Other research on Ecuadorian secondary education supports the idea that racism and classism are part of the subtext around “bad kids.” Martínez Novo and de la Torre

(2010:10), for example, found that in Ecuador,

Teachers expect Black students to act violently, and hence are constantly

surveying their discipline and, even more damaging, giving them negative

discipline reports that … might lead to expulsion from school or difficulty in

accessing other schools, and therefore students, and particularly Afro-Ecuadorian

students, are constantly begging teachers and inspectors not to lower their

discipline grades.

Although there were very few Afro-Ecuadorian students in either of the schools where I conducted research (and only one Afro-Ecuadorian student in each of the classes 199 where I conducted daily participant observation), colorism was noticeable in the classroom, where darker mestizo students were treated by both peers and teachers as having worse attitudes and poorer discipline. None of my informants explicitly said,

“black kids, indigenous kids, and poor kids drink more,” or “it’s worse when girls have sex,” but the sanitary citizenship approach helps us understand why know one needs to.

Briggs and Mantini-Briggs (2003) developed of the concept of “sanitary citizenship” in the context of the Venezuelan cholera epidemic to show how technologies of citizenship work through the identity-construction of populations. They found a sharp dichotomy in how indigenous and criollo patients were "medically profiled" in state sponsored cholera prevention messages and public health management of the epidemic.

On the one hand, "sanitary citizens would acquire the proffered knowledge, display the appropriate attitudes, adopt the desired behaviors, and incorporate them into their routine practices, thereby confirming their rationality and normalcy" (35). On the other hand,

“unsanitary subjects" were incapable of embodying the desired behaviors, thus proving themselves to be irrational, unmodern, uncivil. Unsanitary subjects were thus not only undeserving of citizenship rights not only because they were in need of increased disciplinary protections (e.g., mandatory medical treatment), but also because they were potentially contagious and therefore needed to be exiled from the company of more sanitary citizens (e.g., forced relocation out of the city by government officials). Briggs and Mantini-Briggs note that, “by helping to racialize cholera and by depicting cholera patients as helpless victims in need of state paternalism, reporters and opposition politicians collaborated in making medical profiling seem like a natural and necessary response to the epidemic” (109). In other words, linking a racial identity to vulnerability 200 justifies paternalistic interventions by the state, which, in turn, overdetermine the vulnerability of the population being intervened on.

Briggs and Mantini-Briggs are talking about “bad cholera patients” rather than “bad students,” but the process that links identity construction to citizenship projects is much the same. Replace indigenous migrants seeking safer living conditions with local youth seeking higher quality education and replace criollos who frame their own behavior as the rational norm with my high-scoring informants and you can see how neatly the framework of sanitary citizenship and unsanitary subjecthood applies. Briggs and

Mantini-Briggs show how the concept of sanitariness, or hygienic behavior, works to connect racial identity to rationality and then uses those assumptions about rationality to justify inclusion as citizens or exclusion as subjects. In the context of a high school for lower-middle-class youth seeking social mobility, “risky” behaviors like alcohol use and sexual activity are linked with one group of kids while the other group of kids get linked to meritorious and rational behaviors like studying. Through the language of sectorization, an influx of racially and class coded kids could be framed as “bad kids” who put the “good” kids at risk.

But there are two levels of youth risk here. At the first level, we see my informants pointing out that sectorization has brought in to their school kids who appear less rational because they didn’t manage to get into the good high schools based on their grades, and which is confirmed whenever one is seen demonstrating risky behavior like drinking and having sex. But, on the second level, even the most virtuous youth, as my informants make every effort to be, are incapable of entirely avoiding contamination with bad habits because they are in contact with all high school going youth. Another way of saying that 201 is that the bad kids are risky and all kids are at risk. And when you look at the idea that all kids are at risk, something a little different seems to emerge. Just as Briggs and

Mantini-Briggs predict, the idea that youth are incapable of espousing all of the desired behaviors justifies paternalistic interventions, but for all students and not just bad kids.

And indeed, rather than calling for more autonomous citizenship my informants seemed to welcome subjection, as long as it came with protection and as long as they remained in a period of “becoming.” Because they were committed to acting like rational youth, they framed themselves as less rational than adult citizens and advocated for the attenuation of their own rights. In the next section, I demonstrate how identification with a citizen youth identity - and particularly youth as an “impermanent” age identity - holds students in positions of intersectional subjection.

Protection from bad kids as a citizenship right

Youth risk may define youth as a period of vulnerability and tie it into hierarchies of gender, race, and class, but the analytical implications of age identity are most significant when they are understood within broader age horizons. This section continues the exploration of the citizen life cycle by analyzing how youth risk holds populations in tension between citizenship and subjecthood. This is made particularly visible in my informants’ strong feelings about the importance of disciplina in their schools, and the responsibility of the government to enforce that disciplina among the student bodies.

Angel provided yet another an example of that kind of risk, which he saw the school as responsible for insofar as it failed to prevent it: 202 Last year I had a friend named Darren Acosta, I don’t know if you remember him

but, the funny thing is that he had problems, even with drugs and all that. And so

that’s why, and it’s true that friendships do influence you a lot. Because a lot of

people got hurt because of him.95

By naming Darren as his friend, Angel suggests that it can be difficult to identify whether someone is “good” or “bad” until they have already “infected” you. In this respect, the real problem is that high school makes contact of this kind unavoidable.

Angel’s perspective is also particularly colored by the fact that his 19 year old brother had dropped out of his neighborhood high school before graduation, something his family attributed to the negative influence of friends he made in high school. As he put it,

My brother wasn’t one of those people that hung out in the street. He didn’t go

out in the street. He didn’t even drink! And after, [during high school,] when he

started to hang out with his dumbass friends that I hate, that’s where everything,

like, started. That’s where he started to drink and all that.96

While Angel’s emphasis may be more on the friendship than the timing, it's quite clear that he sees high school friendships as potentially dangerous to otherwise good kids.

This is generally consistent with how all of my informants who talked about bad influences framed the problem. Furthermore, Angel’s excoriation of the Ministry of

Education as to blame for these problems highlights the ways that this is not, in fact, a

95 Yo tuve en el anterior año un compañero se llama Darren Acosta [name changed], no se si te acuerdas de el pero, el chiste es que el tuvo problemas hasta con droga y eso. Y entonces es por eso y si es verdad la amistades si influyen y bastante. Porque muchos se dañaron por la culpa de el. - Angel #1 (25:01) 96 Mi hermano no era de los que andaba en la calle. No andaba en la calle. El ni siquiera tomaba! Y después cuando se empezó a llevar así con sus amigos nacos que me caen mal allí vera empezó todo, allí empezó a tomar y asi. - Angel #1 (53:20) 203 problem experienced equally across the life course, but is a particular result of the context of a high school where students have little choice about who their peers are. His nostalgia for the time when school authorities (or the Ministry) included behavioral assessments to limit enrollment (in the quotation in this chapter’s introduction) should thus be understood as a way to limit the damage that being “stuck” with other kids might cause.

Although the opportunities for social mobility were greater at Conquistador than

Maestro, the sense that the school authorities (broadly including both school disciplinarians like the inspectors as well as expectations set by the Ministry of

Education) were responsible for protecting good students from the influence of bad kids was certainly shared by the Maestro students as well. Alicia, my evangelica Maestro informant, was adamant in holding them accountable. This was particularly striking as the context of her discussion of her “alcoholic friend” quoted above (and elided in the quotation below). Alicia had been explaining that ITSE Maestro used to be an academically challenging school, but that recently its “level” had dropped, something she saw as a direct result of an unfortunate decrease in school discipline.

For example, there are a lot of kids and, like, they have found them with drugs,

with, with, drinking and like that in school. And they give them - they talk to

them, they call their parents, and stuff like that. But they don’t sanction them. Or

at least, one or two or three they sanction, but they don’t expel anyone. And for

drugs, for me that should be expulsion, you know? But like, no, and they keep

permitting them [to continue] and only giving them written warnings. So it’s like,

they keep going, and keep going, and keep going. And they don’t care. And so

the others know that they can’t do anything to us, and confront them, and others 204 keep getting into drugs and drinking and so it doesn’t matter. Like, it doesn’t

matter. … So it’s like they are permitting us to kill our brains. Something like

that.97

By the end of her statement, Alicia seemed slightly uncomfortable with totally attributing her friend’s alcoholism to the school’s failed responsibility, but she does not walk back her larger point: the quality of the school depends on the quality of the students, and the quality of the students is (at least partly) the responsibility of the school.

Discipline (disciplina), whenever it was brought up by my informants (which it was with some regularity), was meant to convey the specific collection of techniques available for achieving that aim. A teacher’s perfunctory “would you please!” (¡tenga la bondad!) might be one end of the spectrum while corporal punishment (no longer allowed, but mentioned with nostalgic approval by a couple of my informants) is on the other. The gatekeeping that Alicia alludes to here, however, is the form of discipline most frequently mentioned by students. Alicia’s emphasis, of course, is on expulsion - a post hoc form of gatekeeping - while Angel’s was on preventing entrance of students likely to transgress, but from both perspectives the exclusion of dangerous students to maintain school quality

(i.e., both school reputation and educational environment) was clearly a responsibility of the school.

97 Por ejemplo, hay muchos chicos y es que les han encontrado con drogas, con, con, bebiendo y así en el colegio. Y les dan, les hablan, les llaman de los papas así. Pero no les sancionan. O al menos yo, a uno o dos que tres hasta que les han sancionan, y a ninguno le expulsan y por drogas, para mi si significaría expulsion, no? Pero como no, y les siguen permitiendo y solo les ponen como memorandos. Entonces es como que siguen, y siguen, y siguen. Y no les importa y así entonces y los otros sabían que no nos pueden hacer nada si así enfrentándoles, y a otros siguen metiendo en drogas y beben y así no importa. Osea no importa. {Y es como que… ya no le da.} Entonces es como que ellos permiten que nos matemos el cerebro. Algo así. - Alicia #1 (1:33:54) 205 Foucault also defined “exclusion” as one of the main tasks of punishment within the regime of disciplinary power (along with comparison, differentiation, hierarchization, and homogenization), as part of a larger goal of “normalization” (Foucault 1995[1975]:183).

Anecdotes like Alicia’s are not dissimilar from the examples he used to illustrate his argument. That Alicia was calling for more discipline rather than less, even for someone she identified as a friend, fits easily into Foucault’s larger points about mechanisms of normalizing judgment and the flow of disciplinary power through populations. But while

I have no argument with any of this, pointing out the ways that Alicia is herself participating in these disciplinary techniques does not highlight what makes her indignation so interesting: that is, she is resisting the individualizing effects of student accountability (as discipline) and instead leveraging identity-based rights that hold the school/state responsible. In other words, while Foucault’s argument leads us towards thinking about how accountable individuals are produced from populations, Alicia and

Angel are both suggesting that it is the school, rather than they themselves or even the transgressing student that must really be held accountable.

The kind of gate-keeping that Angel and Alicia are demanding to protect the youth at their school would be wholly out of place in most adult workplaces. That youth are generally not held accountable for the same set of responsibilities as adults is taken as self-evident in studies of youth citizenship and children’s rights (James and James 2012).

If you stop there, there is little reason to examine why a school is held responsible for protecting children from a risky social environment, rather than holding individual youth primarily accountable for their own risky behaviors. The answer, if you stop there, is simply that “the rules are different for youth.” However, if we engage in a more nuanced 206 analysis of what it is that makes the age identity of youth apparently transform our logic of citizenship, the particularities behind the demand for increased gatekeeping provide a valuable insight that has implications far beyond the context of socially mobile

Ecuadorian 10th graders.

Given my informants' emphasis on gatekeeping, including their fears that the bad kids were "contagious" (as Alicia and Lucas put it) and that the school itself was full of negative "influence," it would be easy to argue that my informants see themselves as sanitary citizens and their riskier peers as unsanitary subjects. And that is true insofar as they identify themselves as rational and appropriately behaving and their peers as generationally predestined for being jerks (per Angel's description) or simply lacking ambition (per Estefany's description). However, ending the analysis there would not account for the ways that my informants are calling for increased discipline not only for their riskier peers, but for themselves. Alicia, for example, is in favor of expulsion, even if impacts one of her close friends. Similarly, Patricio reflected on an inspector he had the previous year who asked at the end of every period which kids weren’t doing well and then hit the students who weren’t. He explained that even though it’s bad for teachers to hit kids, that kind of discipline is still good because students benefit from attentive school authorities. Lucas also noted that while the new “rights of the child” protected kids from corporal punishment from teachers, students used to learn better when teachers “taught angry” because there was more discipline.

The “right to protection,” as it is illustrated by my informants’ enthusiasm for increased disciplina, is particularly useful in understanding how citizenship simultaneously produces individual accountability and identity-based subjecthood. There 207 are a number of possible explanations for why my informants see these kinds of discipline so positively. One possibility is internalized racism and classism that identifies

“people like them” as in particular need of regulation. Rojas’ (2007) research suggests that the emphasis on discipline, along with teaching morality, is among the most important school qualities sought by lower-to-middle class families, and perceived as key to social mobility. Ironically, elite schools often explicitly reject these more authoritarian disciplinary styles in favor of less hierarchical teacher-student relationships, consistent with a general attitude of embracing North American and European pedagogies.98

However, whatever other motivations might exist, it is clear that my informants want to see increased discipline primarily because they believe that their high schools are improved by increased regulation of students. The students, in this assessment, benefit from the increased regulation not only because of a generally improved reputation and educational environment but also because they, as young people, lack the rationality, knowledge, and self-control to be successful otherwise. In short, my students embrace the increased paternalism of unsanitary subjects on the grounds of their (temporary) identities as youth.

There are two ways that youth citizenship and the relationship between age identity and national belonging are clarified by my informants’ reactions to the bad kids at their schools. First, my informants justify the attenuation of their rights based on their identities as youth, whether that is the prohibition of alcohol and sex or increased punishment from school authorities. More specifically, they justify it based on the idea

98 This theme was confirmed in a number of informal conversations with teachers, administrators, and alumni from a number of American-style elite schools. See also Andrés 2008. Martinez Novo and de la Torre note that, “Perhaps the most common practice in some elite schools in Ecuador is to degrade what is national and to overrate what is foreign” (2010:7). 208 that these particular forms of subjecthood are only relevant during their youth - that they are temporary - and that these sacrifices ultimately empower them to become ideal, autonomous, and accountable citizens in the future. The second way that my informants’ concerns lead us to a better understanding of the relationship of identity to national belonging is by examining their concerns as a right to protection.

As Briggs and Mantini-Briggs illustrate, adults also hold the government accountable for protecting citizens from bad influence and dangerous environments is something you would find in the distribution of something like public health. Their analysis, like my own, focuses more particularly on how identities are produced through the contingent distribution of social rights, rather than civil or political rights. Marshall argued that while civil rights are for the protection of “individual freedoms” that are critical to the perpetuation of a capitalist economy (1992 [1950]: 8), social rights balance these out with the inverse and complementary goal of class-abatement and “modifying the whole pattern of social inequality” (28). Schooling is the exemplar of social rights, but social rights also include any “social service,” whether targeted at ameliorating economic inequality, health, or “the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (8). Social rights are about protecting citizens’ welfare rather than their autonomy, and as such, must be balanced against civil rights rather than necessarily contributing to them. Thus, rather than perpetuating the creation of a population of substitutable individuals (as civil and political rights do), the distribution and enforcement of social rights actively creates social identities. Similarly, Cruikshank points out that, “the stereotype does not justify or legitimate welfare practices; rather, those practices justify stereotypes” (106), the 209 repercussions of alcohol, drugs, sex is what produces youth as an identity, rather than something innate to youth that makes those alcohol, drugs, and sex problematic.

Cruikshank's broader argument is more focused on the ways that subjecthood and ultimately produces individual citizen subjectivities grounded in accountability, rather than broader identities.

Cruikshank effectively used the classic example of the welfare queen to argue that the governmental technologies by which citizens’ freedoms are ensured also necessarily entail the subjection of citizens. She points out, “If we were to end our critique with the claim that welfare cheats were excluded from democratic politics, racially stereotyped in the media, and scapegoated by politicians, we would fail to see that the appearance of this mythical queen was premised upon her accountability, not her race, class, gender, or kinship" (1999:106). That’s because “technologies of citizenship, such as those aimed at empowering ‘the poor,’ link the subjectivity of citizens to their subjection, and link activism to discipline” (1999:67). In other words, “the welfare queen” is only a legible identity because of the ways she is being held accountable for rights designed to empower her to “correct” her unequal position in society.

This same framework explains why my informants, and Ecuadorian society more broadly, frame alcohol, drugs, and sex as the threat to their national membership, rather than seeing age-based rights as marginalizing. None of my informants was so well off that they could afford to pay to attend one of the (few) elite private universities, and were depending on the same good grades that got them into their high schools to get them into university. And, as my informants explained above, alcohol, drugs, and sex all threatened to derail that trajectory. But it is not just the practical barriers of sex-pregnancy- 210 motherhood to being a student that make it unappealing, these behaviors are also attributed to a youth identity that more generally rejects school affiliation. For example,

Estefany explained her commitment to abstaining from sex as evidence of her ambition and strength of purpose,

Like, I think that the girls that … are in favor of having sex, it’s because, like,

they don’t [have goals in life], or they have goals in name only. … In contrast, if I

commit to do something then I do it.99

For Estefany, the age-based responsibility to abstain from sex (or the absence of a right to sex) is not a form of exclusion from citizenship, but a way that she holds herself accountable for national belonging. Sexual abstinence is a path to social mobility, a way that she is able to correct her own unequal position in society, and thus, simultaneously, participate in Ecuador’s national advancement.

My informants’ accounts lead me to see Cruikshank’s depiction of citizen empowerment as a fundamentally temporal argument: to understand how citizenship works, we must move away from the idea of rights and responsibilities as timeless reflections of national belonging, and instead perceive them as mechanisms for citizens’

“becoming.” That is, the subjecthood of the “welfare queen” is not meant to be a permanent state based on race, class, gender, or kinship, but a temporary measure in order to empower her to become an accountable citizen. In this chapter I highlight the impermanence (rather than the directionality or discontinuity) of youth becoming. For

99 Osea creo que las chicas que, ósea, que tal vez, tal vez están a favor de tener relaciones, es porque, ósea ellas no, ósea tal vez tengan metas no, pero, ósea solo son como un decir. Tal vez es, ósea digan “si es que no puedo cumplirlo, bueno, ya no puedo.” En cambio yo pienso en que debo cumplirlo y lo debo eso porque ya lo dije y entonces lo debo hacer. - Estefany #1 (54:15) 211 example, the "welfare queen" may not be on a unidirectional trajectory at all - the language of "recidivism" permeates these discourses - but insofar as she ages and her mythological children age, that identity is inherently temporary. That is, it is not that youth identity has a unique temporal relationship to "becoming," so much as it is that technologies of citizen empowerment are inherently temporal.

Temporary Risks, Impermanent Youth

Attending to the ways that youth citizenship is different from adult citizenship ultimately reveals important information about how technologies of governance work for all citizens. My informants’ desire to be protected from alcohol, drugs, sex, and the bad kids who "carry" these behaviors is part of seeing high school as a temporary, and critical, social program designed to improve their social position. Insofar as participating in high school is a critical stage in the citizen life course, these risks take on increased significance for youth membership in the nation. The ideas that drinking and sex put youth at risk and that adult authorities have a responsibility to protect youth are so ubiquitous in places with mass education that they may appear self evident. But they reveal that social mobility is contingent on students’ alignment with particular temporal frameworks of aging, and they help show how inequalities of race, class, and gender are normalized, and even excused, as “temporary.”

My informants’ discussion of those risks show that they hold themselves individually accountable for a whole-hearted investment in formal schooling, including maintaining a single-minded focus on studying, being careful to avoid dangerous social situations and behaviors that might distract their focus, and embracing attitudes of obedience and 212 dependence on adult authorities despite being physically and intellectually capable of more autonomy. These forms of subjecthood are temporary measures inherent to the particular context of high school, and embodying them promises a future of far wider civil and political rights than would be available if they were not able to move beyond the barriers experienced by the working class. The acceptance of these restrictions is central to what makes them legible as “youth” and their naturalization justifies their use in schools. Recognizing the ways that alcohol and sex define youth as a period of vulnerability does not simply allow us to remove the veil of age, but to see age itself as a technology of citizenship. The impermanence of youth, like youth’s unidirectionality and its discontinuous relationship with adulthood, reveals how youth becoming governs

Ecuadorian belonging. 213 Part 4: Conclusion

Image 4. A mural on an elementary school wall in downtown Quito (made by one of the 4th grade classes) reading, “Freedom is as free as your responsibility allows it to be!!”

The novel solutions hinted at in the body of the dissertation are introduced and briefly considered in the final chapter. I suggest that the wider value of the theory of age horizons translates identity into an object whose planes expand and shrink in time, and explore how that might reshape understandings of race, gender, and class identities. I also revisit each of the mechanisms of age-based citizenship discussed in the chapters on the citizen life cycle, and reflect on how some of these might be operationalized in the development of interventions designed to ameliorate race, gender, and class inequality.

214 8. Making Age More Equitable in School and Beyond

In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz reflects that, “the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them. ... Theory is used

… to ferret out the unapparent import of things” (2000[1973]:26). This dissertation theorizes age the same way - not to argue for a universal frame of human experience, but to "ferret out" the ways that age shapes the particular experiences, pressures, and desires we see in our informants' lives as well as in our own. Like most anthropologists, I use categorical frames of identity less out of an investment in finding a universally generalizable theory, and more to highlight variation and particularity in ways that challenge the "naturalness" of our own experiences. Age is already tacitly present in the analyses of most sociocultural anthropologists interested in identity as it intersects with categories like gender, race, class, and nationality. But the same anthropologists who analyze the meaning of race, class, and gender as the products of power often refer to age as if it were naturally objective.

Anthropological studies of citizenship, particularly the analysis of cultural citizenship under neoliberalism, help us understand the ways that gender, race, and class identities are produced through state-structured hierarchies of belonging (Berlant 2002, Ong 1996,

Ong 2006, Briggs and Mantini Briggs 2003). That age is relevant to the distribution of rights and responsibilities is evident in virtually all discourses of citizenship (e.g., voting age, age of sexual consent), but its relevance is generally framed as "natural." In other words, both in anthropology broadly and in citizenship studies in particular, cross-cultural 215 variation in aging has been analyzed without reference to a larger theory of age (cf.

LeVine 2007). My dissertation, by contrast, examines how formal schooling in Ecuador shapes life course trajectories through normalizing “youth becoming” in student identities and thereby demonstrates the role of aging in producing hierarchies of belonging.

Analyzing the citizen life cycle within a broader age horizon is, thus, an anthropological approach to examining how identities are governed through time.

Within the anthropology of education, Bradley Levinson calls for the examination of the practices and mechanisms through which students negotiate belonging through formal schooling (1996, 2005, 2016). For anthropologists of education who seek to further unpack the construction of citizen identities, this dissertation problematizes the analysis of inclusive citizenship projects as "progress.” By showing how "objective" measures of age and time are productive practices grounded in school-based mechanisms, "becoming" is shown as only one within a variety of possible chronotopes. This approach opens up new possibilities for interventions and applications. For example, rather than focusing on decreasing youth risk, interventions might instead work towards making schools more accessible for parents and working students. For critical educational anthropologists, understanding how normative age identities and life course trajectories mask inequality strengthens diagnoses of (and interventions on) the marginalization of students by race, class, gender, and nationality. My research highlights the ways that modern schooling structures are a globalizing force not only of citizen identities, but of normative youth identities in particular. Studies that fail to recognize the ways that age identity is being governed in intersection with other hierarchies of power ultimately reproduce that normative frame of age and time. Where there is no alternative framework for age, 216 variation in age identities and life course trajectories is, either implicitly or explicitly, framed as "deviant," "growing up too fast," or a "risk" that ultimately stigmatizes the very groups anthropologists are invested in helping.

In contrast to the anthropology of education, which generally takes age as an unproblematic category, the anthropology of youth makes age an object of inquiry. The anthropology of youth downplays connections to other parts of the life course in order to avoid reifying ethnocentric temporal frames of youth as teleological (Bucholtz 2002). In doing so, the anthropology of youth makes its contributions largely inaccessible to education research. This dissertation seeks to connect the two fields by analyzing the production of youth identities in tandem with the production of aging across the life course.

My effort to highlight the role of schooling in defining youth identities also re- establishes the connections between youth and other age identities. This connection once existed in the obligatory "life cycle" chapter of classic anthropology, but that fell into disuse long ago. In the 1980s, anthropologists of (old) age began embracing a "whole life" context to address the enormous biological variation of old age. But this was not a problem that needed solving in the anthropology of youth, where the relative biological homogeneity of youth aging (reflected in developmental approaches to age) did not provide the same challenge to linking biology and chronology. As a result, the findings coming out of the anthropology of youth are only rarely in dialogue with other anthropologies of age. My work re-establishes those connections by highlighting the ways that normative youth identities are defined in a particular temporal and biocultural relationship to a whole life. In other words, by analyzing "youth becoming" as a 217 unidirectional, discontinuous, and impermanent age identity within a "citizen life cycle," my work shows how a life course approach is needed to understand "youth" age identity as a disciplinary mechanism. Not only does this reconnect the anthropology of youth to other anthropologies of age, it adds another element to a broader anthropology of the life course that may also be of great use to anthropologists of (old) age.

By beginning to theorize age as a temporal identification that "penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power" (as Foucault put it), this dissertation highlights age's role in constraining and incentivizing familial strategies of citizen belonging. Examining how students migrating between Ecuador and the U.S. take advantage of the shifting intersections of age, race, and gender, and national identity would be a particularly valuable way to explore how global, local, and hybrid education practices work through identities through time. A transnational and multigenerational study might ask how interactions between new and old guideposts of age and citizenship reshape transnational families’ experiences of gender, race, and class. Certainly, as global forces like the United Nations continue to link national progress to normative definitions of youth as a period of becoming, school is increasingly important as a site for differentiating the citizenship of students and their families through salient local identities

(e.g., being indigenous in Ecuador, or being an Ecuadorian in Spain). A transnational comparison of citizen life cycles represents the next step in analyzing how becoming shapes belonging in students' age horizons.

218 Appendix A. Student Informant Descriptions

Presented in the same order as the first one-on-one interviews where I really started getting to know them, here are the 14 students who formed the backbone of this project, presented in order from first to last interviews.

Colegio Conquistador:

Angel: His stories stand out strongest of all in my memory, and not just because his semi-scandalous selfies show up regularly in my Facebook feed. Angel had a quick temper and he held grudges, and struggled with wanting to be perceived as a rule- following good kid even as he was consistently framed as strange and vaguely troublesome for being gay. He and Benjamin regularly occupied the basketball hoop closest to the bleachers every day during every free period, and where one went the other could almost always be found. Both were on the basketball team, but Angel was taller and darker featured, with a pouty mouth, expressive hands, markedly effeminate speech patterns and posture, and an uncanny ability to hit three-pointers. In the classroom, he was often surrounded by girls, but I got to know him pretty well at home, too, since his was the family I attempted to live with. Their neighborhood was safe enough, but in

Quito that still meant that they didn’t think I ought to walk around there without Angel to chaperone me. Although his first mention of his sexuality was an angry condemnation of someone who called him gay as a slur, while we walked to school together, he told me all about his semi-closeted love life, including his budding relationship with Pablo (below), who he complained was too short for him. When I moved in to do home-based participant observation, I took the room he had to himself, and he moved to share a queen-sized bed 219 with his 19 year old brother in the bedroom with his mother and father next to the kitchen. Angel was the first to leave in the morning, walking to the public bus a couple of blocks away as the sun rose, and when he didn’t stay for basketball, he was the first home, his father and brother coming home from their mechanic jobs and his mother from her odd jobs cleaning and selling makeup in time for later dinners.

Luz: Luz was an only child, and had the ease with adults that sometimes accompanies such identities. Her family were pharmacists, but deeply in debt despite their comfortably middle class jobs, thanks to crippling hospital bills and months of lost work they were still paying back years after a horrific car accident. Her parents met through a shared love of basketball (they still coached), and I found it unintuitive that her mother could play such a physically intense sport and still hound the slim and small-statured Luz for getting fat from eating too much. In school, she was quietly composed and easy to pick out of a crowd for her braces and black mustache earrings (a popular theme those days). She was sometimes found hanging out with another smiling and quiet girl in her class, but never seemed to be caught up in the intense shifting of loyalties and girl-cliques that was particularly evident at Colegio Conquistador.

Estefany: Unlike Luz, it is impossible for me to think about Estefany without thinking of her concerns about her position in the social hierarchy. Not only was she always visibly hanging out with friends during free time at school, her friendships were always something she was interested in talking about. Her assessment of her friends and dating possibilities dominated our conversation for the two hours that we spent together 220 on the various buses that took her to her neighborhood in the outskirts of north Quito, she spent a good chunk of our second interview gossiping with a friend on the phone, she expressed distress about the fickleness of friendship in our one-on-one talks, I watched her break the code of silence to inform on her conspicuously missing friends (without her!) to a teacher, and listened to her irritation after her friends cut her out. She struck me as one of the most privileged of my informants, something that I connected to her extreme indignation when her grandmother called her selfish for wanting an expensive quinceañera, her displeasure at various aspects of the Conquistador education

(particularly since she had cashed in being valedictorian of her elementary school to attend Conquistador), and the relative wealth implied by her family’s ownership of a small farm/home (quinta) in the countryside. With the price of land in the countryside so low, spending their weekends and vacations at a quinta and letting locals split the profits from their work on the land was far from the signifier of wealth that a vacation home in the U.S. would be, but it still indicated a level of economic comfort not shared by most of my informants.

Valentina: Valentina, who was constantly in Estefany’s company at the beginning of the spring semester and never by the end, was not yet 13 and a half when I joined her class, making her the youngest in the room by a significant amount. I know this even though I don’t know the birthday of every kid in the class because one of the first days I was there, one of the many times when there was no teacher, she jumped up and tried to organize the room by age. When various kids hanging out and doing their own thing in groups didn’t fall in line, she bounced around the room, interrogating people and 221 delighted exclaiming that no one was even close to her. Estefany reflected that

Valentina’s comparative youth made her unconcerned with things her peers took more seriously, and that is consistent with how the 10th graders discussed the lower grades as well. While Valentina did seem especially exuberant compared to most of the girls

(although not compared to the majority of boys, pulling seats out from under each other and other similarly active and semi-aggressive play), she was no less capable of sitting and engaging in serious conversation or topics. Indeed, while Estefany’s conversations were occupied with concerns of her peer group, Valentina saw school-friendships as temporary, and was more interested in talking about her aspiration to model (something her ivory skin, black hair, and red lips made a reasonable aspiration, if not her short stature), soccer (it was a World Cup year), and family relationships (particularly her interest in converting to being a Jehovah’s Witness like her uncle). She was the only of my informants living walking distance from the school, in an enviable spot right in the heart of a tourist district, where she lived with her mother and grandmother. The three of them all name-dropped and flattered so unceasingly that it was difficult to sustain small talk, but their unapologetic social climbing was unmatched by financial ease. Valentina’s mother explained that Valentina was able to go to the school because her famous musician father (“a good friend of President Correa”) came up from southern Ecuador to shake hands with Conquistador’s principal (rector) and get her a scholarship, but that fame did not keep either Valentina’s mother or grandmother from needing to work multiple jobs to stay afloat.

222 Benjamin: Benjamin lived in south Quito, where his parents both worked as taxi drivers, among other things. At my first visit, I found their house because it was connected to a little general store, whereupon his squinting and wild-haired mother invited in to their cavernous cement walled, ceilinged, and floored living room, laughing and apologizing for everyone’s vague and hungover affect. Over the next few hours, any number of family members wandered in and out, checking in for the day and making plans. Adult siblings and aunts joined the consenting process to help read for an illiterate grandmother (the first but not last time that would happen on my consent visits), to offer their insights for my project, and to chat about cultural differences between Ecuador and the U.S., and eventually we all sat down to eat a filling lunch of boiled chicken and rice together. Benjamin’s big and strongly connected family was not only geographically but figuratively distant from his daily life at school, where Benjamin was always, only, with his best friend, Angel. By contrast, at home, he fit seamlessly into the larger swirling action of moving, interacting, people, and somehow seemed younger, more comfortable, and even tranquil than his already calm demeanor at school. Of the three male informants

I worked closely with at Colegio Conquistador, he looked, demographically, most like the other boys in the classroom - heterosexual, for starters, but also an average student, slim and unremarkably brown-skinned, and solidly in the middle range of socioeconomic status. However, whether due to his loyalty to Angel or, more probably in my opinion, some larger predisposition, he never got caught up in the aggressive teasing games the other boys so often played.

223 Jeaneth: Jeaneth was the last participant to join the study (after another girl’s mother decided the family was too private to join in the larger study after all), and she looks and sounds a great deal like Luz - they are both short and slim with soft, high voices. But

Jeaneth’s voice is a bit less squeaky, her long black hair is tightly wavy, her skin is a touch more brown, her expression is more serious, and she has no braces or distinctive jewelry. After our one-on-one interview, I recategorize her solemnity in the explanatory context that she offers: that she has more (emotional and caretaking) responsibilities that most kids her age. She is the oldest of three daughters, and provides much of the care for her baby sister. The three girls live only with their mother, and Jeaneth hopes that it will stay that way and that her mother will not allow her father to live with them again. Her parents are in therapy, trying to make things work, but after the traumatic and abusive stories she told (and her mother confirmed) about her alcoholic father, I can’t say I blame her for her reservations.

Pablo: Pablo remained disappointingly enigmatic to me, despite my careful efforts to build rapport with him. Much smaller than Angel and Benjamin, at 15 he seemed simply not to have hit the growth spurt some of his peers had already begun. Because he was so quiet in school, I had little sense of him until I sat down with him and his mother for the consent conversation over coffee and pastries at the fancy shop across the street from the school. She was eager to participate and he was eager to do the next interviews with her, an arrangement that made perfect sense when she told me that they were hiding the fact that he had not passed the year last year from his father because he might beat Pablo.

However, because she did not feel she had the authority to grant permission for Pablo's 224 participation without her husband's okay (she was the only parent who had that reaction), once his father understood the study, he expected to be interviewed, and everyone fell in line. Pablo never gave me any indication he was dating Angel, and our one on one conversations - walking outside where we were safe from listening family, but still not exactly private - led me to believe that since I started getting to know his father, he would not share any opinion that might be dangerous for his father to learn about. Despite my disappointment at what I saw as failing a crucial test in rapport-building, the vociferous opinions of his older brothers and father led me to see Pablo as a kid trapped far more by his family's hopes for him as by any violent threat from his father.

ITSE Maestro:

Aurora: When I took the little school van home with Aurora, we got out in front of a hair stylist’s shop and went in to greet her mother, who was cutting a middle aged woman’s hair with two more clients waiting in chairs. After a quick cuddle to her 1 year old brother in the pen on the other side of the shop, Aurora led me through and down the stairs to the basement below, waving her hand to show me the layout of the kitchen, glass dining room table, and queen-sized bed, separated into separate living spaces by strategically placed chairs and chests of drawers. The air was heavy with the strong chemical smells of hair treatments that settled from the open shop above. Sitting on leather stuffed benches at the table, Aurora told me about her involvement in a youth activist group (Heroes Without Capes) doing work on animal rights and social inequality.

That, far more than her lisped “s” or intellectualism, set her apart from virtually all the other 10th graders I met. And she intended it to, as became clear when she complained 225 about her age-mates in the school and neighborhood, saying she had “taken an informal poll” and found that they all just wanted to hang out instead of making a difference in society.

Michael: Like Pablo at Conquistador, Michael was smaller and quieter than most of the other kids in his grade. His father, like Pablo’s father, was proudly authoritarian, but

Michael’s dad was successful in his long-houred bureaucratic job and strongly tied with the community he had found in his evangelical church when he converted a few years previous. Michael, who lived full time with his dad and university-aged brother and sister and visited his mother a few blocks away on weekends, seemed comfortably obedient at home and artlessly playful at school. He felt more comfortable with the younger group of kids at his church, which he also attended multiple times a week with his family, although without the same level of devotion as either parent or siblings.

Lucas: Lucas liked to take selfies and post them on Facebook, usually in his school uniform from the main patio of the school. Letting his face slacken into a soft smile and looking up at his phone through soft eyes, his profile photos seemed to aim for the genre of “cool romance,” and they regularly got hundreds of likes from his thousands of followers and friends. He was conscientious and caring with his four-year-old sister, 12- year-old brother, and beloved white shih tzu. In the classroom, when he regularly came up to say hi and look over my shoulder to see what I was writing on my iPad, his eyes looked more glassy than pillowy, and he seemed less concerned about portraying a popular cool kid than simply being amicable. Later, I would begin to suspect that he 226 started many of his days secretly drunk. He got along well with the girls in the class, although he was known to be devoted to his 8th grade girlfriend, but was rarely involved in the often aggressive games of pushing, backpack stealing, and teasing that were the daily norm among the boys (and a couple of girls). He lived north of the school in a comfortably middle class home undergoing construction to create an orthodontist office for his mother, who was finishing her final years of practicum. But despite the higher socioeconomic status of the area, Lucas was more concerned than most about the danger of being out and about in the street, and recounted an example when he had almost been kidnapped while he was right outside the metal gates that enclosed the house. I read that concern as a class marker, and added it to his grandparents ability to support his mother’s adult education, and his parents ability to get educational loans, as evidence that he was starting off with more privilege and less precarity than many of his peers.

Liliana: Before the process of consents and interviews and home visits began, my field notes about Liliana only identified her as “the quiet girl in the front row with the big red bow and darker skin.” With uniforms and haircut restrictions limiting stylistic expression, choosing a single regular element was pretty common, and the bow was hers.

When I did eventually go up the mountain to her neighborhood, my driver’s concern with the safety of staying parked outside to wait for me was my first indicator of Liliana’s family’s socioeconomic status. The beauty of the view from their concrete patio looking over the city, the fact that they owned the house and land (even if it was shared between

Liliana’s cousins and aunts and uncles), and the desktop computer ensconced among piles of storage, would have led me to guess “middle class,” rather than, in fact, struggling to 227 make sure there was food on the table every day. Liliana’s mother’s work as a housemaid offered only the minimum wage, and she remained vulnerable to the exploitation of

“patrons” who did not feel like following the new laws meant to ensure she would have her insurance covered. Liliana’s family was, in short, very much the profile of the kind of citizen that the Correa administration aimed to empower with their expanded protections and opportunities, and Liliana and her mother were among the most enthusiastic of my informants in their discussions of the Correa administration’s class abatement efforts.

Tomas: The first thing you noticed when you saw Tomas was how tall he was. At almost 16, even I, a full 5 feet 10 inches, had to look up at him when we talked, which certainly set him apart from most of the other Ecuadorians I met. He wore his hair in the more extreme end of the “cool masculine” style - short on the sides and long and high on the top - and was sent to the the head inspector’s office more than once for the small gauge earrings that he insisted on wearing, slightly bloodily, and against the school dress code. He was, proudly, a tough kid, and was the only informant to tell me that he thought he was a bad citizen (because he didn’t follow the rules). He was going through 10th grade for the second time after being even more rebellious the year before, but in our first focus group he surprised the rest of the group when he volunteered that he had been admitted to ITSE Maestro, rather than his neighborhood high school on the south side, because of his remarkably high GPA on graduating from elementary school. His house, according to his mother (and I believed her), was often chaotic with lots of angry shouting, whether from his parents between themselves or at him, or from him towards his 12 year old sister. He felt his baby sister - just turned two years old - had brought the 228 family together, but the emotional dynamics of the family interview were among the most tense of any I interviewed. Around them, the proud and aloof demeanor Tomas wore at school leaned more into resentment punctuated by protests of dutiful tractability.

Alicia: The oldest daughter of a single mom, Alicia was born in Spain and spent many formative years there, moving back only when Spanish authorities threatened to remove her because she was being left at home without adult supervision while her mom worked.

After she arriving in Ecuador halfway through elementary school, she and her mother and

(now 10 year old) brother moved a few times until a therapist told her mother that she was stealing Alicia’s childhood with so much disruption. For the last few years now, they’ve lived in a picturesque part of Quito’s outskirts, commuting in an hour and a half for school and her mother’s mid-level bureaucratic position. A year and a half ago,

Alicia’s mom became unexpectedly pregnant with Alicia’s now one year old sister, and, in reaction, she and Alicia both converted whole-heartedly to evangelical Christianity, a faith Alicia’s maternal uncle and his family (with whom they were quite close) were already committed to. Alicia was both the only one of my female informants who was open about having once had a “partier” identity (in 8th grade) and was also the most committed to conservative morality, particularly evidenced in the future she imagined for herself, finding a nice Christian husband in her early 20s and starting to have kids. Her conservative values were far from out of place in Quito, but was strangely out of sync with her annoyance with a number of the pedagogical strategies found at ITSE Maestro

(something she attributed to her years in a more student-centered environment in Spain).

229 Patricio: Patricio’s mother teased him for his vanity, and apparently he spent an inordinate amount of time styling his mousey brown hair in their beautiful apartment’s nicely decorated bathroom. Despite his efforts and his light (if blemished) skin tone, he had little of the suave confidence of the much taller Tomas, who he seemed to always be following behind in school. He and Tomas took the bus home together, and Patricio certainly considered him a friend, although Tomas took little notice of him. Patricio’s mother was not pleased with what she perceived as Tomas’s negative influence, but

Patricio’s face got stormy when she brought it up, and we did not dwell on it long. When the group interview brought him together with his grandmother, aunt, mother, and older brother (16), he alternated between sitting up comically straight when I asked him direct questions (presumably to be respectful) and snuggling in with his mother, ostentatiously ignoring my questions to the group (asking for repetition) and stroking her hand and arm in a display of intimacy. In fact, I found it so difficult to establish rapport or get him engaged in the themes that I wondered if the only reason he asked to participate was because Tomas had. Still, I was glad to have even his rather spare assessments of ITSE

Maestro and familial responsibilities to corroborate the rest, as well as his account of being targeted by the school for drug and alcohol addiction classes when the authorities believed he had been selling or taking drugs - an accusation he indignantly denied.

230 Appendix B. Recruitment Script Hello, my name is Samantha Grace and I am a doctoral student of anthropology and I am conducting my dissertation research here and at two other schools. I am studying how people’s rights and responsibilities relate to their ages. If you volunteer as a participant in this study, you will be asked to come to a small focus group of seven students to discuss the expectations and obligations that students in this school have. The focus group should take approximately 2 hours of your time and there will be snacks provided. In a later phase of this research, I will be seeking students interested in participating in one-on-one interviews and who would be open to introducing me to their families. However, this is not required to participate in a focus group. Although I would love to hear your opinions, my gratitude (and the snacks) are the only benefits to participating in my study. Your teachers aren’t going to give you any extra credit or anything like that. Also, just so you know, and because my University thinks its important for me to tell you, this project has been reviewed and approved by something called an Institutional Review Board at the University of Arizona. Basically, they are responsible for making sure that researchers working with human subjects are following all the laws and rules and policies that are supposed to protect the people participating in research. If you are interested in participating, please fill out one of the individual confidential recruitment cards* and I will be in touch with you and give you more specifics about the project. Alternatively, you can find me in the hall one day and let me know you are interested. You can also contact me by phone at 096 887 3927 or by email at [email protected]. Thank you. ------CONFIDENTIAL RECRUITMENT CARDS

Name: ______DOB: ______Mobile Phone: ______Email: ______When are you available to meet? Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Morning Morning Morning Morning Morning Morning Afternoon Afternoon Afternoon Afternoon Afternoon Afternoon Evening Evening Evening Evening Evening Evening Other: ______Snack Preference: ______Questions/ Comments? ______231 Buenos días, me llamo Samantha Grace y soy una estudiante doctoral de antropología realizando la investigación para mi tesis aquí y en dos colegios más. El tema de mi investigación se trata del concepto de edad y como se está relacionado con los derechos y obligaciones de uno.

Si le interesaría ofrecerse como participante en esta investigación, se le invitará a un grupo focal de siete estudiantes para charlar sobre las expectativas y obligaciones que experimentan los estudiantes de este colegio. El grupo focal debe durar dos horas y picadas estarán provistos. Más adelante en la investigación, estaré buscando chicos interesados en participar en entrevistas individuales y quienes serían interesados en presentarme a sus familias. Pero se puede participar en el grupo focal y nada más.

Aunque me encantaría aprender de sus opiniones, mi aprecio (y las picadas) son las únicas ventajas de participar en la investigación. Sus maestros no les van a dar puntos extra ni nada así. Y, para que sepas y porque mi Universidad piensa que está importante que le diga, este proyecto ha sido revisado y aprobado por un grupo que se llama Un Comité Examinador Institucional de la Universidad de Arizona. Basicamente, ellos están encargados de asegurar que los investigadores trabajando con sujetos humanos, como yo, están en línea con todo las leyes y reglas y políticas que existen para proteger a los participantes en investigaciones.

Si le interesa participar, favor de llenar una de las tarjetas de reclutamiento y estaré en contacto consigo y le explicaré más del proyecto. Alternativamente, me puede encontrar en el pasillo un día para decirme que estás interesado. Además me puede llamar por teléfono en el 096 877 3927 o mandar un correo electrónico al [email protected]. Gracias. ------TARJETA DE RECLUTAMIENTO Nombre completo: ______Fecha de nacimiento: ______N. de móvil: ______Correo electrónico: ______Disponibilidad (marque con un círculo): Lunes Martes Miercoles Jueves Viernes Sábado Mañana Mañana Mañana Mañana Mañana Mañana Mediodía Mediodía Mediodía Mediodía Mediodía Mediodía Tarde Tarde Tarde Tarde Tarde Tarde Otro tiempo disponible: ______Picada preferida: ______Preguntas/comentarios: ______232 Bibliography

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