Abstract
This special issue of the journal YOUNG is dedicated to youth research in Latin America. It continues the series dedicated to establishing a cross-cultural overview on this field of study, initiated with a special issue on Africa and to be continued soon with another on Asia. With this effort the journal confirms its global ambitions. Founded in the Nordic countries with the aim of disseminating youth research in this region, closely linked to the development of youth policies and youth work, in the past decade both authors and articles published by YOUNG have increasingly become an important international reference.
With this issue, we want to introduce the work of the growing number of Latin American researchers on youth who have not been published in English before. The relevance of youth as an ideological and political question has been a persuasive issue in Latin America from the beginning of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, youth studies as a separate area of research—and youth policies as a separate area of agency—were only institutionalized after 1985 (the International Year of Youth). In the past decade, youth research has been one of the most active and innovative fields in social sciences. The creation and persistence of academic journals focused on youth studies, such as Jóvenes (Mexico), Última Década (Chile), Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales Niñez y Juventud (Colombia), Estudio (Cuba) and Revista de Estudios sobre Juventudes (Argentina), are examples of this emergence.
The intention of this special issue is to disseminate in the international audience, the topics, authors and works of Latin American youth studies by researchers of the most important national traditions of the region, with the aim of investigating similarities and differences with other national and international traditions. The presentation of the historical background of youth policies and the state of the art regarding youth studies will be combined with case studies based on recent investigations.
This issue opens with an introduction by the editors, Patricia Oliart and Carles Feixa, tracing a panorama of youth studies in Latin America, considering the three axes of the ‘magical’ triangle: research, policies and action. Then four articles present case studies on youth from key countries of the region, each one approaching different topics (violence, politics, culture and research) and also presenting their respective theoretical, social and academic contexts. Rossana Reguillo, from Mexico, presents an engaging reflection on ethnographic work done on the maras (the violent youth gangs in Central America). Mariana Chaves and Pedro Nuñez analyze the relationship between youth and politics in the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Argentina. Yanko González, from Chile, evokes the genesis of youth cultures in the 1950s and 1960s and its connections with consumer culture and civil society. Germán Muñoz González and Victoria Eugenia Pinilla analyze the state-of-the-art in youth research in Colombia. The issue is completed by some book and journal reviews showing the rich panorama of today’s youth studies in Latin America.
This special issue has been coordinated by Patricia Oliart—a geographer from Peru, now lecturer at the University of Newcastle (UK), who enthusiastically accepted the role of guest editor of YOUNG—and by Carles Feixa, a Catalan anthropologist who has investigated youth in Mexico and engaged with large networks of youth researchers in Latin America. He has also shared the adventure of being member of the Editorial Team of YOUNG during the past five years. With this contribution he says goodbye with warm thanks to those who invited him to be co-editor, Leena Suurpää and Gestur Gudmundsson, and to the rest of the current members of the team, who have also become friends, with the best wishes for the years to come.