Youth identities in urban peripheralization scenarios. A biographical approach

Abstract

In this paper we focus on identity processes to analyze a series of narrations produced through a biographical approach. These narrations belong to youngsters who live in popular areas of the city of Córdoba. Our analysis support certain propositions stated by other researches pointing at neighborhoods as identity operators and at the street as a dangerous place. Nevertheless we observe that the definition of the residence as ‘barrio’ or ‘villa’ implies for youngsters an active symbolic dispute, showing that stigmatization processes are not exclusive of experiences taking place out of the neighborhood. Throughout this paper we give account for some discursive, moral and emotional operations through which youngsters get to present themselves as members of “respectful” neighborhoods, stating an identity distance with certain threatening othernesses wondering around ‘the street’: physic and symbolic place that appears to be an obstacle for their projections to institution-based “subworlds” such as school and work.