Introduction

I met the displaced ‘children of Loxicha’ while carrying out my doctoral fieldwork in Oaxaca City, Mexico, between 2001 and 2002. In Oaxaca City they were simply referred to (by journalists, residents and local non-governmental organisations [NGOs]) as ‘los Loxicha’. Their real home is San Agustín Loxicha, located in the southern region of the state of Oaxaca, as detailed below, but this chapter is based on their time living in a protest camp and a shelter in the city of Oaxaca.

At the time of this research the group was made up of approximately 15 children ranging from age three to fifteen who had been living in the protest camp in the city's central square for four and a half years, where their day-to-day lives included a participatory role in their community's political protest.

Via an exploration of the elements surrounding their day-to-day lives, and the ways in which they are portrayed and viewed by the local media and residents, this chapter seeks to generate debate about how we have come to ‘box’ participation into very clear spaces – spaces that have largely been devised by adults. In particular, the discussion here explores the idea of child participation in relation to its political possibilities, raising such questions as: Who sets the child participation agenda? Which ‘types’ or degrees of child participation are pleasing to adults (and therefore applauded and promoted) and which are disregarded either for their ambiguity or because they represent a threat to the status quo?

The sociopolitical context in Oaxaca from the late 1990s to 2002 provides a volatile backdrop to the lives of the Loxicha children, and is described in the next section.

Oaxaca: political violence and displacement

The region of Oaxaca that is subject to the militarisation described by Stephen above is in the mountainous region between the Sierra Madre del Sur and the Pacific Coast (see Figure 3.1), and includes the Loxicha children's rural home, the community of San Agustín Loxicha.