Child care and participation in the Global South: an anthropological study from squatter houses in Buenos Aires

ABSTRACT Children and teenagers are often considered as objects of care or as subjects who have the right to be cared for. However, in squatter houses in Buenos Aires, they often take on responsibilities that challenge the ways we understand childcare and participation. This article sets out to analyse the experiences of girls and young women. To do so, we carried out ethnographic work with girls aged 8–19 years within two occupied buildings in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, studying its consequent measures of isolation and social distancing. Firstly, we describe how health measures applied to contain the pandemic reinforced certain stereotypes about children and their care. Secondly, we analyse the participation of these children in production and reproduction activities inside and outside their homes. In this analysis, we include the ways in which they deployed strategies for their own care, based on their activism in a political organisation. The analysed material allows us to explore tensions between care and participation that occur in the daily practices of young women who inhabit these spaces, which are crossed by moral and legal duties as well as by material needs and violence.