Sociological Perspective and Cultural Dimension in the Research about the Youth in a Marginal Urban Context

Abstract

How can we approach the process of construction of young men and women as subjects in the case of a group of high school students, who, in some cases, come from the families of maya origin and are inhabitants of a marginalized urban area in the southeast of Mexico? In this paper I argue that their way of being, relationship with structures, future projects, and notions of “good life” become intelligible through an approach that puts into dialogue the concepts of social experience (Dubet, 2011) and otherness. The first one is a valuable tool that allows to discover a particular dialectic of integrationsubjectivation, which characterizes the relationship of these young people with social institutions and actors. The second one locates the students as constructors of a symbolic universe, where different cultural elements, among them those originated in the family and in school, interact. The representation of a young subject that I construct differs from the stereotypes – usually negative and homogeneous– that are used to describe the urban area in question; it also allows to understand the necessities and aspirations of these individuals according to their own notions of good life, in which the individual and the communal aspects are merged.