Extra… extra… read all about it! La protesta, La Republica newspapers… called out the little boy with tangled hair, separated rabbit front teeth, and pure childhood-bearing freckles. With his cap to one side and the pile of newspapers under his arm which managed to barely warm up the intense cold in the old cobbled streets from the times of Viceroy Arredondo. These kids were the “seeds of discord”, as Deputy Luis Agote disguised in 1919 when he set out to remove them -- together with their brothers the bootblacks, street vendors, errand boys, or tenement children -- from street life.

“These children start out like paperboys and end up being wicked boys,” argued Dr. Agote and drew, with his words, the most perverse strategy of childhood appropriation. It was necessary to tear them away from the anarchist and socialist immigrant environments, to moralize them, to erase all traces of freedom and rebellion with the institutionalization generated by the Law of Patronage of Minors.
Just like before, in 1902, when the ideological territory had been marked by establishing that “the Executive Power will be able to order the expulsion of all foreigners whose conduct might compromise national security or disturb public order.”
It was necessary to sweep, from all streets and corners, that annoying presence that was transforming, at the very gates of power, into a denunciation standard: “I have no home, but I do not need one either. What do I want it for! I do not have parents anyway… At noon, after I sell the morning papers, I go to any of the afternoon papers’ basements and eat some bread or crackers with chorizo, salami, or sausage. When I am done eating, I continue selling until night comes. But… Dang! The bellhops do not leave me alone and push me out yelling: Lazybones! Good-for-nothing! I have to go somewhere else,” wrote Caras y Caretas magazine in May 1908.
Order, progress, tradition, motherland, home: homogenizing flags of a vertiginously changing Argentina. More and more laws imposed -- within a conservative and hygienist political context -- a concept of nationality which sought to massively execute political conscience and protest. The Social Defense Law, in 1910, promoted the preventive detention of anyone who might be tinged with anarchist thinking.
Childhood was, and will always be, the tender and naive seed of growing danger. Because the future is theirs and it’s eternal, because there is no death that might touch them and change the stubborn habit of walking on the edge. Innocent sponges capable of believing that a utopia is not a distant tramway station and capable of knowing, firsthand, that injustice is not lord and master but an eternal enemy.
They had to be tutored. They had to be locked up. Their thinking had to be molded. In their own image. They had to be removed from their slums and tenements. They had to be swept away from the streets.
Agote designed, to perfection, the large shadow that would cast over their disheveled heads, full of hopping lice and tangled hair, for much longer than a century. Control and moralization. Non-deferrable slogans that led to and are still leading to confinement institutions. The seeds of discord the paperboys of Florencio Sanchez once were are, today, the millions of kids of the outskirts, who must be specifically watched over for their necessary regeneration.
Michel Foucault defines that the states assure social consensus by promising order and security, colonizing and institutionalizing collective life. And the standardization of Patronage Law 10,903 precisely outlined state intervention to blur the “deviated” child, the uncontrollable boy, the evil seed child, from national life.
“I have got, in my seat, several sentences from judges condemning children of 10, 11, and 12 years of age for reoffending. If one delves into the records of these little criminals, one finds they are bootblacks, paperboys, or messengers,” the conservative doctor pronounced from his bench on August 27, 1919.
These little criminals from back then now also have freckles and big front teeth and live, same as the paperboys from a century ago, without a roof over their heads or a table with nutrients to warm them up on cold days. They tend to look for this warmth in the corners, away from the containing arm of the State. Unheard in their stories of neglect and sorrow. Pushed into the frontiers of life by the lack of hugs and shelter. Expelled from schools they do not recognize as their territory.
Paperboys who do not sell newspapers anymore but who clean car windshields or juggle in front of traffic lights that systematically give their lives the red light. Without being able to imagine that one of these mornings they will have to go out in the streets and cry out: “Extra… extra… the new law of misdemeanors has been passed in the province… read all about it!” A code that has been sketched out to fall on their heads immediately, to penalize the social protest, charge against them and all those who are vulnerable in these lands, and to open more and more margins to the discretion of the police power and control.
The Spanish language original version of this article can be viewed at the website www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar.
Photo: Florida St. in Buenos Aires (Photo by Susana Moreno, Pelota de Trapo)