Abstract
This book is the result of more than five years of anthropological fieldwork with young people from the city of La Plata in Argentina. It is a version of the author’s doctoral thesis which has come to bookstores, and through it, to a wider audience, in a context where various and conflicting narratives about youth proliferate in contemporary Argentina. Chaves’ main statement is that understanding youth uses and meanings attributed to certain urban spaces, requires the study of the tense, changing and conflictive relationship with parents, institutions (schools, mass media, market) and other youth groups. Thus, youth in this book is not portrayed as an identifiable discrete actor, but as a territory of shifting boundaries where different actors (youth, teachers, politicians, police, neighbourhood) are linked and built, not without disagreements and disputes, as a shared and changing reality over time. Youth is seen then as a field of reproduction and transformation of culture that the author calls cultural construction processes of youth and youth-building processes of culture.
The investigation of these dynamics is made from diverse and complementary edges: the history of youth, the data provided by socio-demographics studies on ‘young people’, the analysis of discourse and the prevailing social narratives about youth, the representations and uses of the city by young people themselves, the troubled relationship with the school, the territories that young people tread, making them yours, and the sociability generated in such transits and appropriations. In this way, the book approaches the problem from different angles, opening doors to explore various different queries where to think the link between youth and city.
These searches are displayed on a solid architecture that divides the book into four parts. The first, ‘Matrices’, tackles explicit conceptual starting points about the youth category and a detailed description of the methodological strategy employed. The second part is called ‘Local Youths.’ The ‘local’ refers here less to being young in the city of La Plata and more to being young people self-ascribed to the middle classes in a city with a strong presence of public servants (La Plata is the capital of Buenos Aires province) and a long tradition of massive presence of university students from around the country (the city is the host of the National University of La Plata). Thus, if there is a place in Argentina where to study the middle-class youth, La Plata is no doubt one of them. This section analyses current social discourses on youth, the description of the socio-demographic characteristics of young people and the identification—from the analysis of the junior circuits in the city—of trends toward the socialization of the new generations in homogeneous spaces. Indeed, with the field work that took place between 1998 and 2002, during the consolidation (and crisis) of the neoliberal model in Argentina and its social effects (impoverishment of vast sectors of society, instability and job insecurity, targeting system education), research shows how these processes impact the socialization of youth, crumbling a social imaginary marked by equality and expectations of upward social mobility.
The name of the third part of the book is ‘Territories’. This section analyses the images and the imagery that young people have about the city. The three chapters offer the ethnography of three ‘territories’: The school and the uses young people make of it, and its environment. This is followed by the analysis of two specific uses of the urban public space, the ‘murga’ and the ‘street corner.’ Murga is a carnival group that was prohibited during the military dictatorship (1976–1983) and later it resurfaced and expanded as a cultural practice in the city of La Plata in the early 1990s. It counts with a strong youth membership that made an active (and selective) appropriation of the popular tradition and in the last decades won the street. The ‘street corner’ refers to the appropriation by young people of certain public spaces in the city. This practice is interpreted as the visible node of a broader youth cultural circuit connected to a youth cultural style (the ‘alternatives’). Finally, in ‘Complicity’, the author describes and analyzes the life trajectories of youth through its stories, the sociability prevailing in each of the murga and alternative style practices and the search for meaning involved in such links. Thus, against the dominant social discourses, young urban practices show full, active and creative subjects, conditioned and crossed by the same political, economic and social processes that characterize society.
On this structure, writing and analysis are displayed in two complementary ways. On the one hand, the book unfolds as a progression from general to particular issues. But, on the other hand, and simultaneously, it is in the presentation of the particular (in the discussions on a street band, in the aesthetic choices of a young woman, in the dilemmas of young people about school) that the author recovers what initially had worked in a general and abstract way. That’s one of the virtues of work: the specification as a way of getting (and not, as usually happens, move away) to the theoretical and analytical problems.
In other words, it is in the specificity of the lives and practices studied, that the author speaks with the theory. Thus, at the beginning of the book can be read ‘Youth not only opens the doors into adulthood but essentially and mainly opens the doors of the household. It enables many people to transit through the city’(p. 15). It is in passages like this where you can see how relevant analytical issues are for the understanding of youth such as personal autonomy, access to resources, socioeconomic differences, among other topics extracted by the analyst from the flow of everyday life are resolved in space practices and concrete relationships of everyday life. To leave or not leave the parental home? When to leave it? Do women and men hold a different access to public spaces? What about the young people from different social classes? The virtue of Chaves is to replace the materiality of everyday life in her writing. Through questioning and analysis, she shows how major concepts (autonomy, leisure, consumption, class, agency) are inextricably associated with these practices. It is in those same practices where many lives and futures are resolved.
In this way, the work shows how these young people seek—in the different practices that they do with peers—what traditional institutions such as schools do not provide. In their words, they search (and often also find) ‘a place’. This place is both a social place, analytically speaking, and materially an own place to live and imagine.