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Based on an ethnographic fieldwork (2008-2010) in Mexico among social workers whose mission consists in taking care of and providing support to street children, this article focuses on how these agents seize upon questions raised by adoption procedures and legal norms in this particular context. In order to successfully complete their mission, social workers we interviewed tend to progressively grasp, interpret and use both new discursive and legal resources related to Children’s and Human rights. We try to question the role of these resources and their interpretation in the care given to street youth by those agents, within a specific sociopolitical context in Mexico, i.e. the “democratic openness”. We demonstrate that those new resources are mobilized by agents in a unique perspective and within a wider framework than the one originally assigned to them: l’enfoque de derecho y de genero (human rights and gender perspectives on issues raised by street youth). A gender analysis of the data gathered in the fieldwork reveals the manners in which these resources and their interpretation within agents’ mission lead to contradictions and paradoxes, replacing street girls under naturalized social roles related to their own gender. Two logics are pitching against each other here: on one side, the social world of the care given to street youth is confronted to a political reference to human rights within a gender perspective; on the other side, depending on one child’s gender, the result of the first logic revolves around a contradictory appropriation of these resources, not always following the principle of equality of treatment among these street children.