In Mexico, like it or not, American tourists are seigneurs, and in relative terms always ultra-wealthy. The vassals and serfs who pay them homage are the poor Mexican street hawkers and golfillos, or street urchins. I'd been fooling myself as Herr Photographer until a magazine editor brought this to my attention.

In the poorer cities of Mexico, not Monterey or Pachuco, but rather Acapulco and Oaxaca, for example, the children are especially present in the streets. In the zocalo(town square) in Oaxaca, they are omnipresent. As a photographer, something captivates me, something in their faces quite absent in their American counterparts. Where I live in Massachusetts, the children are conspicuously absent from neighborhood streets, corralled instead behind the steel-linked fences of school playgrounds. Peer through those fences and people will take you for a pedophile. Try taking photos and you'll be arrested.

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Out of poverty and need, the children of the zocalo will gladly pose for a peso or two. They'll either be honored or bored. You can talk with them, haggle price, and nobody will think you're a pedophile in the negative sense. Pull out a peso and they'll swarm all over you, not nastily, but wildly. "Un peso, un peso para mi!" "Dame un peso."

Somehow I think they knew I'd have to give them all pesos for fear of embarrassment.

In Oaxaca, the zocalo is billed as one of the most charming, a large city block whose center is a gazebo surrounded by a park, replete with trees, shoeshiners and benches, and surrounded by four cobble-stoned streets closed to traffic. Vending stands and vendors without stands are set up along the streets selling everything from pastries and ice-cream to children's toys, helium-filled balloons, jewelry and clothing.

Oaxaca is famous for its artesanias, or handicrafts, especially its black-clay pottery and alebrijes, or wildly painted, wooden animals carved from the copal tree. On any given day, the zocalo is crowded with people, tourists, as well as locals.

Two-thirds of the population of the state of Oaxaca are Indians, many of whom speak one or more of the state's 200 indigenous dialects, as well as Spanish. Oaxaca is on the border of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. Chiapas has been in the headlines, especially the massacre of 45 women and children that took place in Acteal a year ago. Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the autochthonous rebel forces in Chiapas, has become a Che Guevara-like icon.

Some of the children hanging around the zocalo have accompanied their mothers from Chiapas. The mothers came to protest on behalf of political prisoners and against the massacres. These children live in the zocalo, spend all day and night in the zocalo, even sleeping there. Other children, hanging around the zocalo, arrived from adjacent villages with their parents to sell handicrafts. They too spend very long hours in the street.

Many of the children are ambulating salespeople, each specializing in one or several items, including ambar de Chiapas(amber jewelry), botaneros "para picar la fruta"(little wooden picks for fruit), palitos "para la mayonesa"(little wooden pallet knives), sobres de papel amate(painted bark envelopes), peines de madera(wooden combs), peinecitos para las pesta–as(tiny wooden combs for eyelashes), globos "caras en caucho"(little rubber faces), separadores de libros(wooden bookmarks), chicles(chewing gum), munecas(dolls), pinturas en corteza(bark paintings), dulcerias(candy), pulseras en algodon(cloth bracelets) and various other jewelry made of different semi-precious stones, pastillas para la toz(cough drops) and semillas de calabaza(pumpkin seeds).

The children's mothers usually take care of the jewelry, as well as the chapulines, or fried grasshoppers. Some of the kids work as limpiabotas, or shoeshine boys.

Most of the children smile quite easily, which, of course, underscores that money is not the only road to happiness. Indeed, their impoverished parents, no doubt, treat many of them with love. Clearly, the kids do not fear the gringo or guero for the latter have not hurt them... at least not in a visible or tangible way.

Not all the children are happy. One boy I observed, selling rubber ball faces, was quite sullen. He molded, over and over, the same smiling rubber face from a blank one. The boy's lifeless regard came from fatigue no doubt and perhaps an unhappy family situation. Other children wore that blank look, too, but most seemed quite content.

I witnessed a street baby drinking from a puddle and a wealthy Mexican woman shaking her head in disgust, thinking: where's the baby's mother?

Well, the baby's mother was no doubt very poor, a vendor and trying her best to earn a peso or two to help feed the infant.

Again, some of these kids are virtually living in the square. They pee openly on the sidewalks, eat outside on the road and nap in the sun. When they aren't selling, they play joyously with the simplest of toys. I surprised a couple of them playing with coat-hangers. Some of the more considerate tourists, like my friend Jeanne, bought toys for them. One little kid went crazy with his new play telephone, while another with his little car, pushing it in between and around the legs of waves of ambulating tourists as if they weren't even present. I even observed a row of ten kids with little homemade rubber-band slingshots shooting at a line of toy men. They were having the time of their lives.

One little girl came up to me with a box of chicles and said: "50 centavos, cada uno(a dime for each one)."

So I took four little boxes out of the bigger box and gave her two pesos. But she protested: "50 centavos, cada uno!"

I put two back and gave her the two pesos. But she protested again: "50 centavos, cada uno!"

I gave her one peso, and she smiled.

Some of the older children sat glassy eyed, manning booths. As we walked round and round the square, they came up to us here and there: "Quiere retratarme, senor?(You want to take my photo?)"

Like piranhas they surround me again and again for coins, tugging at my shirt, wrapping their arms around my neck. "Dame un peso!" "Dame un peso!"

I'd read that Acapulco was trying to get rid of golfillos(street children) because town officials felt they were discouraging tourism. How bizarre that many tourists didn't even seem to notice them. Some could even be surprisingly nasty. I witnessed one tourist sipping a beer at a cafe table. A couple of kids walked up to him and asked if he wanted to buy some of their things. But he dismissed them with a categorical "RAUS!(Beat it!)" Then a couple of other kids came up to him, and he hollered: "NEIN!"

In La Magia de Oaxaca, the autochthonous people are described as a raza cosmica, or cosmic race, but I observed hatred in the eyes of many indigenous adults. No doubt it must be unfathomably difficult for some of them with the peso at an all time low, ruthless government corruption, persecution and, at times, brutal massacres such as the one that took place in Acteal. Unfortunately, that scar of odium ends up sooner or later tainting many of the children as they grow older.

Perhaps the Conquest has indelibly shattered a part of the Indian soul and irreversibly destroyed any possibility of favorable rapports with foreigners. Fortunately, the young children probably prove that assumption wrong, for they continue to shine even in the face of abject poverty. Nevertheless, we must not forget the beginning paragraph of Oscar Lewis' The Children of Sanchez:

"I can say I had no childhood. I was born in a poor little village in the state of Veracruz. Very lonely and sad is what it was. In the provinces a child does not have the same opportunities children have in the capital. My father didn't allow us to play with anybody, he never bought us toys, we were always alone. I went to school for only one year when I was about eight or nine years old."

Finally, as a photographer and humanist, I must constantly be on guard not to be exploitative of third-world children. Even paying children for a photo shoot can be that way. The only money that I have ever made from my photos is from this essay. Hopefully, this is not an exploitative essay, but rather an informative one.