Wasteland: Indigenous and Rural Youth Identities in Latin America

Abstract

The theories about the historical invention of childhood and youth have been almost exclusively based upon western sources (to be more precise, central European and Anglo-Saxon sources). One of the conclusions of the conference «The child and the young in Latin America» («A criança e o jovem na America Latina»), held in Marilia (Brasil) in November 2001, organised by ISA, was the need to reconceptualise childhood and youth from a Latin American perspective (geographically, academically and culturally). We will focus on a reconceptualisation of youth in a diachronic and transcultural view. We are offering two ethnographic studies from Mexico (Feixa, 1998b) and Chile (González, 2004a, 2004b) as examples of the reconceptualisation that needs to take place.