Abstract

URTEAGA CASTRO POZO, Maritza. Youths and Indians in contemporary Mexico. Rev.latinoam.cienc.soc.niñez juv [online]. 2008, vol.6, n.2, pp.667-708. ISSN 1692-715X.

A review of the ethnographic literature about indigenous peoples in Mexico between the fifties and nineties of the 20th Century allows the observation that the topic of indigenous youths has not been central in anthropological research. The last few years indicate significant changes in the quantity and quality of those studies, whose results reveal the emergency of something that could be called "a youth period" among the ethnic populations that inhabit the villages and cities of today. The state of the art looks for specifics of those youths that are being formed in rural ethnic groups and in the so-called "displacement ethnic groups" -in their social conditions of emergency and in the social perception of Indians in this age segment- from the paradigm of youth agency, that is, rendering accounts of lives of youths as experiencing their participation in the life-cycle transitions, rather than as exclusion zones. The two initial parts critically present the usual conceptual approaches used (1) by the classical literature, to make the young subject invisible among those ethnic groups that are conceptualized as homogeneous, and (2) by the recent literature that attempts to make them visible in the processes of change and internal inconsistency, in the conflicts and contradictions, and in its contemporary mobility. The last two parts attempt to look in depth at the particularities of being a rural indigenous youth, and a migrant indigenous youth, signaling the advances and the theoretical trends that are now developing.

Keywords : Youth, migration; cultural change; rural indigenous youth; migrant indigenous youth; city; displacement ethnic groups; frontier.

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