Street Urchins of Colombia 
Amid the poverty of overpopulated cities, thousands of 
young children learn to survive through their own ingenuity 
by Kirk Felsman 
photographs by Anthony Boccaccio 
The streets of major cities have al- 
ways served as both theater and bat- 
tleground for the children of the poor. 
Nowhere is this more apparent than 
in present-day Colombia, where thou- 
sands of street children, so-called gam- 
ins, struggle to survive with little or 
no support from the traditional insti- 
tutions of family, church, school, or 
state. Young ragamuffins, darting in 
and out of traffic, begging in open- 
air restaurants, singing for change on 
city buses, bathing in public fountains, 
or simply curled up asleep together, 
sometimes along with stray dogs, are 
all too common sights. The street ur- 
chin has become so much a part of 
Colombian society that a recent per- 
formance of the National Ballet Com- 
pany included a piece entitled Gamin, 
while a popular soap opera on the 
same subject is broadcast most even- 
ings in the capital city of Bogota. 
The word gamin comes from the 
French, meaning “urchin.” It is but 
one of the by now pejorative names 
these children have long endured. One 
can also hear chinos de la calle (“chil- 
dren of the street,” from the Quechua 
chino, “child”) and chinches (“bed- 
bugs”), used to refer to the smallest 
waifs, as young as age five. The chil- 
A storefront alcove in Bogota 
shelters a camada, a loose-knit 
group of children who sleep together 
for warmth and protection. Although 
this group includes a girl, most 
street urchins, or gamins, are male. 
All photographs from Ocelot 
dren naturally seek to be recognized 
and known as individuals, preferring 
their own names and nicknames. But 
they also find strength in a shared 
identity. For a collective name, most 
prefer to be known by some variation 
of muchachos (“boys”) de la calle 
or nihos (“children”) de la calle. 
Street children are not unique to 
Colombia. Major cities in Brazil, Mex- 
ico, Turkey, India, and other countries 
face like problems on a similar scale. 
For historical comparison, one recalls 
the scugnizzi (“spinning tops”) of Na- 
ples and the Barnardo Homes of Eng- 
land, as well as the often described 
vagrant children in late-nineteenth- 
and early-twentieth-century Russia 
and France. The portraits offered up 
in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Morris 
West’s Children of the Sun, or Luis 
Bunuel’s film Los Olvidados ( The 
Forgotten Ones) all evoke common 
themes. And one of the most serious 
problems with street children existed 
in the United States. In 1852, police 
records estimated there were 10,000 
vagrant children adrift in New York 
City, and similar problems existed in 
Boston and Chicago. During the pe- 
riod of tremendous immigration and 
industrialization these waifs were pop- 
ularly known as “street Arabs.” At 
the turn of the century, the writer, 
photographer, and reformer Jacob 
Riis graphically portrayed the lives 
of these children in his book How 
the Other Half Lives. 
Gaminismo, as it has been called 
in Colombia, is an urban phenomenon 
linked to the tremendous rural-to-ur- 
ban migration that has changed the 
face of Latin America during the past 
