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Theoretical Approaches to Indigenous Youth in Latin America

Abstract:

One of the main difficulties of organizing information about indigenous youth in Latin-America is that neither “youth” nor “indigenous” are categories that represent a factual reality but are constructed based on hegemonic definitions that result from the confluence of different agents. This essay considers the ways in which Latin-American scholarship has contributed to this construction in the last years. Finally, the article offers an alternate approach that uses “age” and “ethnicity” as cleavages to define movement along diverse continuums of subjectivity, identity and agency. Throughout, we argue that these frameworks must be always read as situated in their particular sociopolitical and historical context.