Youth, Culture, & Politics
in Latin America

Issue 161, July 2008, Volume 35, Number 4
Issue Editors: Florence E. Babb & Jon Wolseth

Latin American countries have historically been and continue to be “young societies,” with children and young adults comprising a substantial portion of their populations. In the colonial and post-independence eras, the high percentage of children and youth commanded interest from government reformers, military regimes, and social welfare organizations as potential sources of political and social unrest. In recent years, the proportion that is under age 25, which we broadly term “youth,” hovers at just over half of the overall population both regionally and in nearly every nation. Youth movements, including the student protests of the 1960s and 1970s, have played critical roles in the shaping of modern history in the region.

Portions of the Issue Address the Role of Youth within Society, including:

Youth as Agents of Change
"Children and young adults are a critically important sector of society and must be understood as more than passive recipients of others’ actions...Just as women as an underrepresented category began to receive scholarly notice a few decades ago, children and youth are gradually becoming the subject of social analysis. Young women and men are often cultural innovators and are the impetus for societal change. 

Youth and the State
Latin American youth are a marginalized population, whatever their socio-economic class status, insofar as the nation-state defines them as legal non- or partial-citizens and they lack access to avenues of power.  However, this does not mean that youth are powerless.  In fact, youth in Latin American countries can produce anxiety for governments and NGOs because of the ways in which young men and women synthesize and manipulate traditional and innovative cultural styles.  Working-class and working-poor youth, both urban and rural, hold a double position within the popular and state-level imagination.  They are often held up as the cornerstone of the future, while at the same time derided as national embarrassments if discovered to be out of their proper place.  Youth, like children, are a key preoccupation in  national debates on citizenship, cultural rights, and environmental policy. 

This issue of LAP presents timely work that redresses past scholarly neglect of the role of youth in the region’s cultural, political, and social movements—a neglect not only of the impact of such movements on youth, but also of the ways in which youth act as innovators and invigorate movements with new organizational practices and new visions.  Through their active participation in the household, community, and wider structures of public life, youth learn what it means to be full citizens of their nations.  At the broadest level, the future of the democratic transition in Latin America will depend on the engagement of young women and men in calling for, securing, and preserving their citizenship rights.  What we find in the engaged scholarship presented here is abundant evidence that by focusing on young people we gain a distinct and meaningful perspective on urgent contemporary concerns in the Latin American region.  We discover new insights into what is most vexing in neoliberal economies, what is most promising in current political struggles, and how youth cultures are transformed with globalization in both adverse and positive ways.