Refracting articulations of citizenship, delicuencia and vigilantism in boys’ sociodramatic play in postwar Guatemala

•A neo-Marxist, semiotic framework frames the analysis of boys’ sociodramatic play.•Children’s cultural citizenship is examined within a weak and fractured state.•Boys “refract” figures of neoliberal, racialized citizenship exploiting ambiguity.•Boys demonstrate moral consciousness to each other during talk-in-interaction.

In this paper I examine the intersection of cultural citizenship and Guatemalan childhoods in boys’ sociodramatic play within a single peer network. Specifically, I focus on their enactment of expressions of delincuencia (social delinquency) and linchamientos (lynchings) associated with Guatemalan forms of “new violence” characterizing the postwar era. I argue that through their engagement with these overdetermined images, new meanings and identifications inhered not only in the ways children tacitly expressed their understandings of duplicitous relations and malign acts, but also in the forms of social organization that were actualized in play. In particular, in these playfully keyed exchanges boys refracted circulating discourses characterizing neoliberal citizenship and racialized and gendered representations of postwar violence.