Youth resistance practices: Surviving the street, public space and spaces of confinement

Abstract

The appropriation of public spaces can be considered a form of resistance against a social environment that, in many ways, has been managed in an adult-centric logic, limiting horizontal dialogue. Thus, this text presents three approaches to complex realities of youth in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico. In it, the descriptive method is privileged, as the scaffolding that allows interpretations to be generated through the observation of social life, always with a critical approach. The cases presented have as their articulating axis the youth, the dispute over public spaces and the agency that generates strategies of social resistance in its different scenarios. The result of these observations was to glimpse the main factors of appropriation of public space by these populations. The limitation of immersion in the most precarious territories was addressed with the descriptive method; however, it continues to represent a debt in the social sciences.