In order to get more out of this, you may need to reframe your thinking of these children. These aren't the dregs of society, wherein one may be astonished to find the Gnostic diamonds. They are mostly Latino/Latina children, many of them also of African, Caribbean, and/or indigenous American descent. They are intelligent, they absorb knowledge, they may be magically gifted, they respond to other people's conscious and unconscious behavior towards them. They are building a street culture which reflects that.
Looked at through Gnostic lenses, everything looks like Gnosticism— which is all well and good. But it also ignores the richness and subtlety of people's native cultures, turning these things into pale reflections of Western thought. For instance, here, what is astonishing to me is how these kids are creating an age-specific subculture with a mythology, a ritual technology, and a body of esoteric knowledge which is not divulged to outsiders except with great difficulty. To suborn it as a reflection of gnosticism, I feel, is to obscure the really interesting process of creating a new, albeit syncretic, system to respond to a completely novel environment, the particular challenges of which no other culture has had to meet— those of being a street child in Miami. |
