Mexican youth in my study

The term youth is complex and slippery. It can be seen as a concept that answers to biological, social, and historical conditions. And its definition depends on the focus of our study.

As a defining age category, in Mexico youth is considered as the range between 12 and 29 years old. (Davila 2004) For my study these could be very useful since I can find in my networks of Hi5, MySpace and Facebook a lot of people from this range of ages. Nevertheless, an age criteria to define youth cannot be valid for any social, economic and cultural sectors or for any time in history. For cultural and social studies, defining youth according to age is narrowing the concept to a primary basis that is useful only for demographic objectives.

Youth is normally considered as a transition phase in people's lives. According to Mallan and Pearce (2003) “youth is often regarded as a state of becoming, as necessary (and often tortuous) pathway to adulthood. The reward of adulthood status carries with it the mythical virtues of maturity, independence, stability and above all a secure identity”.

Yes, my research is about youth, but not about teenagers. It is about young adults who are still young people and are living a transitional phase in their lives. These young adults are not teenagers anymore; they have faced already the major changes of adolescence. However, they face problems related to the transition to adult life, which implies many different roles and responsibilities, such as independency, a job, raising children, etc.

According to Brito (1996) youth is a social condition with specific qualities that are expressed in different ways according to personal social and historical conditions. This means that we cannot compare a young person from a rural or marginalized area, with a young person from the city who works and gets a high income or good education. In addition, it is not the same the post-war youth, and the contemporary one. We face the need of creating our own categories when referring to youth. How can we apply the term youth to the Mexican case in the same terms, as it was created in England in the post-war era? We have not been through the same or a similar historical process.

Youth can be explained as a “socio-historic, cultural and relational construction in contemporary societies, where the efforts in social research in general, and the studies on youth in particular, have been centered in letting know the stage between the childhood and the adulthood, that —at their own time— are also categories originated by social significations and constructions in historic contexts and defined societies, within a process of constant changes and new significations.” (Davila 2004) Youth, as a stage in life cannot be defined as a homogenous concept. A person of 13 years old is completely different from one of 19, but both are youth. It is necessary to define different categories of youth and use them according to the objectives of our work.

Other issues to solve, that are even more complicated are related to the construction and representation of youth identity. I have mentioned before, the process of identity construction is one of the main characteristics of youth. How do youths construct their identities online?

According to Bourdieu youth is created according to a set of capitals. If I can find the representation of this set of capitals online, could I be finding young people of 35 years old???

These and more issues will be discussed later….

References
DAVILA LEON, Oscar. ADOLESCENCIA Y JUVENTUD: DE LAS NOCIONES A LOS ABORDAJES. Ultima décad. [online]. dic. 2004, vol.12, no.21 [citado 10 Noviembre 2007], p.83-104. Disponible en la World Wide Web: . ISSN 0718-2236.
Mallan K. and Pearce S. (2003) Introduction: Tales of youth in Postmodern Culture in Youth Cultures: Texts, Images and Identities USA: Praeger