This article presents and describes the way that child and teenage street artists and performers in Recife, as well as their families, understand and give meaning to childhood as a phase of life. To be a child is associated with a series of arguments about the body, age, experience, performance, and responsibilities take on by people over the course of their lives. "To be a child" is quickly confused with "the childhood in being". These cultural discourses and practices reveal the word "child" to be a semantic network that brings together and negotiates meanings and ideas from different semiotic universes and different social actors, showing the intertextual way that the concept of "childhood" is created.
anthropology of child; childhood; intertextuality; performance