ABSTRACT
Families in the shantytown communities of Guayaquil, Ecuador, represent a kinship model that is in constant motion, bolstered by cycles of bloodshed and fractured blood ties. To demonstrate the strategic ways in which families and childhoods are both created and dissolved, this chapter begins with stories from the girls and women the author worked with during more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork. It describes the physical and emotional movement of daughters and mothers, that is the reasons and the ways in which they cycle from one home to another, from one family to another and from one experience to another. These cycles are certainly complex and contradictory, and they are often triggered by the decisions of girls and women as they measure the stakes of enduring versus escaping violence and abuse.
