[X]PRESSPHOTO

Photo by Jason Fritz

Everyday, Alejandro rose well before the sun did. Just twelve years old, he had already been working in the Mercado in the hardscrabble El Tepe neighborhood, in Querétaro, México, stacking crates of fruits and stocking the vegetable stalls for some years.

While attending school is obligatory in México, the reality for many children like Alejandro in the neighborhood is one of working - from a very young age - to provide for their families.

The kids of El Tepe can been seen in the city's markets and major intersections, where they weave in-and-out of traffic, squeegeeing the windshields of sympathetic bus drivers and passing motorists, who hand over a pocket full of change for their efforts.

Yet, even after a long day of work, the hunger for learning lead some of the children of this poor district to come of their own accord to a neighborhood after-work program designed educate children who, because of economic realities, were unable to attend formal school.

I spent many days with this amazing group of kids. My limited Spanish vocabulary wasn't a problem, as the kids would come to me to see if their long division problems were correct. They seemed to get a kick out of it when I said that I needed a calculator first. I was only half kidding. Towards the end of each session, I received lessons from the children on the latest in Spanish slang, or words in Otomi, an indigenous language that many of the children spoke. In turn, I would teach them the words in English, or the best of English slang, whichever they preferred.

After a few hours of studying, and the day's light waning, it was time to play. Chaotic soccer games in the streets just outside the market were the norm. Sometimes, play took the form of epic food-fights with the mercado's unsellable fruits and vegetables being hurled about. And on one particular day, the kids raided the lumberyard across the way for scraps of wood to play with.

Most of the kids never left the neighborhood, only experiencing the world inside El Tepe's boundaries.

Sometimes, however, with the right scrap of wood as a prop, and a little imagination, it seemed as if they just might fly away.