Youth responses to contexts of discrimination

Abstract

Young people in Mexico live their lives traversed by a complex web of inequalities that manifest themselves in work, the body, territory and, at their most extreme, in de-citizenizing and juvenicidal violence. However, even in scenarios marked by precarization and structural discrimination, young people deploy forms of agency that exceed the narratives that have historically cast them as an “at-risk,” “vulnerable,” “passive,” or “problematic” population. This dossier brings together research that, using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodologies, engages with a perspective that understands youth experience as a social field of meaning-making, in which young people not only react to the structures that traverse them, but also interpret, negotiate, and reconfigure their position in the social world. Youth experience is not limited to a set of individual experiences; rather, it constitutes a situated way of inhabiting inequality, risk, and uncertainty, producing practices, narratives, and forms of sociality that make it possible to sustain everyday life even in adverse contexts.