"Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated. Krista Van Vleet takes us backstage in a home for teenage mothers and their young children in Cusco, Peru. Faithfully witnessing the ordinary interactions of the young women, Van Vleet shows us how their moral experience is saturated by intertwined hierarchies of race, gender, and class. The mothers learn to care for their infants at the same time as they are taught to fit normatively into urban Peruvian modernity. Van Vleet's attention to the nuances of everyday life in the institution shakes up our preconceptions about relatedness and gender in the Andes, and our certainties about the moral dimensions of mother-child bonds."—Bruce Mannheim, coeditor of Indigenous Languages, Politics, and Authority in Latin America
"Taking as her fieldsite a Peruvian orphanage where adolescent wards of the state live with their own small children, Krista Van Vleet centers the stories and experiences of very young mothers who navigate violences and injustices large and small. Here, an international humanitarian NGO cares for young mothers and their children by teaching the mothers how to care. It's a tremendously layered lesson: an education in care smuggles with it understandings of racial and social hierarchy in Peru, hinting at the inadequacy of indigenous domesticity. Empathetically researched and clearly written, deeply respectful of and curious about the young women at Palomitay, this book runs a far wider gamut than most ethnographies, engaging visual arts and performance, humanitarianism, gender, and kinship in a context of unrelenting neoliberalism. Van Vleet also works with more experimental—analyzing the photos taken by and the theater performed by the young women, mediated by NGO workers, in chapters that sing with rich descriptions and colorful, skillful images that generously invoke the contexts and the actions of the girls as they learn to consider themselves, and perhaps so to become, mothers."—Jessaca Leinaweaver, author of Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain
