The badass and the asshole: Violence and the positioned subjectivities of street youth in Mexico City

Summary

This volume is based on the conference Claiming the City: Civil Society Mobilisation by the Urban Poor, held in Uppsala, Sweden, April 16-17, 2013, part of the project Outlook on Civil Society, which is a cooperation between Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and the Dag Hammarskjöld
Foundation.

Chapter found on page 172:

Understanding street youths in Mexico City as emergent practices, in this chapter I set out to understand a) how street youth embody and perform their identities, which subtly diverge from those of similar groups of urban poor, such as gang youth; and b) how violent practices shape who street youth are and what they do. Based upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in streets and institutions in Mexico City throughout the 1990s and regular follow-up visits thereafter (most recently in 2010-2011), the chapter presents impressionist “tales of the field” (Van Maanen 1988). These tales illustrate that, far from merely being destructive, violence constitutes and reinforces street youth’s positioned subjectivities.