MATRACA (Movement to support working and street children)
In the early 1990s, a group of students from universities in Xalapa began to meet to discuss social problems. Helped by a Jesuit priest, Davíd Fernández, these students divided into small groups to think about specific issues and to propose concrete solutions. Matraca emerged in 1991 as the work of the students that had been thinking about the issue of youth homelessness.
For several years, the Jesuits continued to support the program, which helped the youth leaders with fundraising and with keeping up their hopes in the midst of a difficult situation. However, after several years the Jesuits were assigned to new jobs in new cities, and the movement’s founders (now young professionals) had to take change. Since then, they have created the most important and successful program for street and working children in the state of Veracruz.
Matraca takes its name from its support of working and street children, but also from a small Mexican toy. A matraca is a small box mounted on a thin stick; it is spun to make a loud noise. Like the matraca, Matraca strives to make a huge amount of noise on behalf of children.
Today in Xalapa, informal studies suggest that some 120 children live on the streets, while another 3000 work there.
Matraca works in four areas:
- Working children: Matraca defies this population as “children that work on the street, but that return home every night. They have not broken connections with family or school.” With these children, Matraca does organizational work, consciousness raising, and tutoring.
- Street children. These children have broken ties with their families and their schools, and the street is their main living space. In Xalapa, these children are at high risk of prostitution and drug abuse. Matraca serves them in two spaces:
- The “Club Matraca” is a building in the city center where children can learn, do workshops, watch films, or to eat, wash, and play in a safe space. It is called a “club” so that children do not feel as if they are being stigmatized.
- The “Casa Matraca” began as an option to the inadequate state shelter system. Today it is a home for street girls, a population that would otherwise go unserved.
- Families and community. Matraca teaches the Xalapan public about life on the street and works with families to enable them to reunite with their families. Matraca is proud to have won “the authority to speak with a moral voice to Xalapan society.”
- Media. Matraca collects and studies news stories from all of the newspapers in Veracruz, working to establish an “X-ray on the situation of children in the province.”
Matraca’s position on child labor is nuanced. Like UNICEF and the ILO, the program believes that it would be better if children did not work. Never the less, it recognizes that in the current Mexican economy this dream is impossible, so it strives to improve the conditions under which children work, keep them in school, and help families to achieve prosperity, so that their children need not work. “Child labor is the result of an unjust economy... It should not exist, but as long as it does, Matraca will defend and support the child worker.”
Matraca developed its methodology with the help of Ednica (Mexico City) and MAMA (Guadalajara). It is based on popular education, participatory research, and liberation theology. It begins from the idea that a child is a “subject in development” with an open future. It attempts to inculcate values of helping each other, respect, solidarity, and democracy.
Matraca has provided its mission paper in English. You can read it by clicking here.
MATRACA
Insurgentes 58
Colonia Centro
Xalapa, Ver
México
Tel-Fax 228 817 0044
www.matracaac.org.mx
Contacto: Octavio Hernandez matraca@matracaac.org.mx y matracaac@gmail.com.
