Martín Hopenhayn "Jóvenes en América Latina: entre protagonistas y postergados" October 14, 2004

Martín Hopenhayn speaking in the CLAS Conference Room on October 14.

Youth in Latin America
By Alejandro Reyes

In recent years, society’s perception of youth in Latin America has changed. Instead of being seen as bold-spirited protagonists of social change, they have often been associated with a threat to social order and public safety. According to Martín Hopenhayn, Officer in Charge of the Social Development Division of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), this is due in part to a series of tensions lived by the young which have helped to mold their identity in the form of conflict.

The notion of “youth,” explained Hopenhayn, is a relatively recent category. In premodern societies, there was a direct passage from childhood into adulthood, with a coincidence between sexual maturity and the onset of the productive/reproductive stage. Today a disassociation, often referred to as a “moratorium of responsibilities,” takes place between those two stages creating a period during which the individual is neither child nor adult.

Youth becomes an object of analysis and debate, says Hopenhayn, when the transit from childhood to adulthood — from education to employment, from dependence to independence, from the acquisition of values to their reproduction — is no longer clear.

This phenomenon, an aspect of modernization, exhibits certain characteristics in Latin America that make it particularly dramatic. From 1940 to 1990, the speed and intensity of urbanization — and therefore of change — in Latin America was the highest in the world. The most visible form of this has been the demographic explosion and rural migration to the cities, resulting in a very large young urban population subjected to rapid changes.

The young are not a homogeneous group, and in Latin America there are a number of important differentiating factors. One of them is that modernization in Latin America exhibits patterns of highly unequal economic integration and profound social differences. Members of the younger generations make up a very heterogeneous group, divided along the lines of very significant educational and economic distinctions, rural versus urban backgrounds and gender.

In “postmodern” society, images of youth resonate with contradictory themes. On one hand, the esthetic obsession with freshness and beauty, the emphasis on adaptability and the worship of virility have turned youth into what Hopenhayn calls a “diffuse promise of happiness.” On the other hand, the young are perceived as a source of disruption in the social order: undisciplined, unpredictable and engaged in risky behavior.

Among the negative images that stigmatize youth, the most pervasive in recent decades has been related to the discourse of public safety, which places the issue of violence as society’s main problem. Youths — especially those who are male, urban and lower class — are thought to be the protagonists of violence. As a result, they are no longer viewed, as in previous decades, as a political threat to national security, but as a physical danger to public safety. This image of youth has to do with the fact that this group bears the burden of a conflicting combination of factors: difficult access to the job market, greater exposure to goods that symbolize social mobility but to which they have no access and a cynical distrust of the means by which others obtain them. The young thus incarnate society’s phantoms and are stigmatized as violent and morally weak. And while the issues of violence and drugs are indeed relevant in today’s societies, the stigma placed on the young is a generalization that turns the innocent majority into victims of unwarranted discrimination. By doing so, this “phobic view” of youth often works as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The younger generations are further affected by what Hopenhayn calls “precocious weaning,” i.e., a greater consciousness of moral autonomy, and, at the same time, a longer material dependence. Whereas traditionally moral autonomy accompanied material independence, today the young must spend a longer period preparing for an increasingly competitive job market, thus lengthening their dependence and increasing their expectations of autonomy.

Another element affecting the young is the fact that they no longer see themselves as the protagonists of social change. Instead, they have become the objects of social policies, which characterize them as vulnerable, as needing protection and empowerment, and, in neoliberal discourse, as “human capital.” The young are thus characterized as either fragile or ferocious, but in neither case as protagonists of change.

From the point of view of the young themselves, subjectivity is imbued by two conflicting themes. On the one hand, there is the necessity to integrate in the productive world. On the other, they must confront the limited access to the channels for such integration and their own desires for individuation and the ability to chart their own course.

Hopenhayn further identifies a number of other tensions faced by the young that create a disjuncture between expectations and possibilities. One is the conflict between living for the present — encouraged both by the natural proclivities of the young and by the imperatives of consumer society — and the need to capitalize for the future due to the increasingly competitive nature of the job market.

Another conflict occurs because the young have higher levels of unemployment than their parents in spite of being better educated. While they are told that a better education results in greater job opportunities, they are faced with a different reality, causing a breach of expectations. The young also have a greater access to information — through computer networks, schooling, and the media — but a more limited access to power. They feel excluded from the political system and stigmatized by adults and authorities. Yet another paradox is that while the young have a greater inner cohesion, particularly in the context of the so-called “urban tribes,” they are highly segmented in separate groups and are more externally impermeable. This results in greater difficulties for political action and makes them less understood by other social groups. One of the clearest symptoms of this dissociation is the clash between the culture of formal education and self-defined youth culture.

Given all of these contradictions, Hopenhayn provides some ideas that may guide public policies for the young. The first is to provide greater access to the job market by rewarding education at the entry levels. Affirmative action mechanisms, says Hopenhayn, may help ensure a greater continuity between education and employment. A second element has to do with rebuilding the concept of youth participation. The problem here is inducing participation from the top-down, when participation is by definition bottom-up. The answer, according to Hopenhayn, may lie in policies that promote citizenship.

In any case, effective policies can only result from an understanding of the conflicts and paradoxes faced by Latin American youth, in an effort to diminish the disjuncture between expectations and possibilities.

Martín Hopenhayn is Officer in Charge of the Social Development Division of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). He spoke at CLAS on October 14, 2004.

Alejandro Reyes is a graduate student in the Latin American Studies program.

Martín Hopenhayn ha sido profesor de filosofía en la Universidad de Chile (1980-1985, 1993 y 1998), Universidad Diego Portales (1983-1988) y Academia de Humanismo Cristiano (1982-1983). Desde 1989 es investigador a tiempo completo de la División de Desarrollo Social de la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) y durante 2004 ejerce como Oficial a Cargo de dicha División. Es autor de más de cincuenta artículos en temas como integración social, situación y políticas educativas, y dimensiones culturales y sociales de la juventud en Iberoamérica. Es autor del libro “Ni apocalipticos ni integrados: aventuras de la modernidad en America Latina” que obtuvo el Premio Iberoamericano de Ensayo de LASA en 1997, y fue traducido al ingles por Duke University Press.