Abstract
On the basis of the results of research informed by an ethnographic approach, we examine the narratives of young people who were born and/or live in contexts of extreme urban poverty in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area in order to describe the process of becoming youth in one of the impoverished neighborhoods of the global south. Through the statement “Carcova is love”—that was enunciated by a young woman to refer to the slum where she was born and lives,—we delve into the multiple connections that evidence the complexity of what it means to live in spaces marked in their very constitution by the displacement, circulation, and movement of subjects in the metropolitan city. “Carcova is love” condenses, among other things, the struggles for seeking and having a place in contemporary societies. Far from stigmatizing images of those neighborhoods but also from any romantization, we propose on the basis of these young people’s narratives, elements to grasp the overlapping, multiple, and layered workings of that process of becoming young in these urban contexts. In this framework we suggest that those spaces are signs of the contemporary politics of urban life that draws the borders of the contemporary metropolis in the global south.
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Notes
- 1.
An experience that takes the shape of “a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 22).
- 2.
Though we will not address the question of well-being and mental health (Wyn et al. 2015) here, it is important to point out the very strong relationship between them and the politics of urban life in the slums.
- 3.
“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and… and…’ This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 25).
- 4.
“A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 21).
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Grinberg, S., Machado, M., Mantiñan, L.M. (2019). Carcova is Love: Becoming Youth in the Slums of the Global South. In: Cuervo, H., Miranda, A. (eds) Youth, Inequality and Social Change in the Global South. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3750-5_10
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