At home in the street

by Tobias Hecht

Based on innovative fieldwork among street children and activist organizations in Brazil's Northeast, this book changes the terms of the debate, asking not why there are so many homeless children in Brazil, but why - given the oppressive alternative of home life in cramped favela shacks - there are in fact so few. At the center of this book are children who play, steal, sleep, dance, and die in the streets of a Brazilian city. But all around them figure activists, politicians, researchers, "home" children, and a global crisis of childhood.