Globalizing the Streets

Globalizing the Streets makes the compelling case that marginalized young people all over the world are being drawn to the culture of the streets. The volume shows that these youths are searching for identity, meaning, fellowship, security, a measure of excitement and joy, and a way of coping with a global social order that seems no longer to have a place for them. A very important and powerful work. -- Kai Erikson, William R Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University This extremely timely work offers an approach to the youth crisis based on the rich, largely untapped potential of those in the margins wherever they may be found. In doing so, the authors firmly reject the usual pathologizing frames of reference within which our kids are most often located. A great book for students of resistance and activists alike. -- Tom Hayden, former California state senator and author of Street Wars: Gangs and the Future of Violence This is the book on youth we have all been waiting for: international in its orbit and interdisciplinary in its research, it combines feisty theory with grass roots ethnography backed up by creative politics. It places today's youth firmly in a transnational perspective roundly debunking and dismissing stereotypes in a world of continuous moral panics about young people and the demonization of street gangs in particular. If you have any interest or concern about what is going on in the streets of our big cities, in the real world outside of the tabloid press, read this book. -- Jock Young, University of Kent, author of The Vertigo of Late Modernity

From Rio de Janeiro to London, Medellin to Moscow and New York City, organized street youth share the common distinction of being the children of the recently arrived and established poor, the product of a surplus working class, and minorities. This work examines the struggle for identity and interdependence of these youth.Not since the 1960s have the activities of resistance among lower- and working-class youth caused such anxiety in the international community. Yet today the dispossessed are responding to the challenges of globalization and its methods of social control. The contributors to this volume examine the struggle for identity and interdependence of these youth, their clashes with law enforcement and criminal codes, their fight for social, political, and cultural capital, and their efforts to achieve recognition and empowerment. Essays adopt the vantage point of those whose struggle for social solidarity, self-respect, and survival in criminalized or marginalized spaces. In doing so, they contextualize and humanize the seemingly senseless actions of these youths, who make visible the class contradictions, social exclusion, and rituals of psychological humiliation that permeate their everyday lives.