Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social World of Homeless Youth in Mexico City.

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The homeless youth of Mexico City are sometimes called street children or chav@s de la calle. They live in the sewers, wash windshields at busy intersections, or solicit money from metro riders. Their numbers are difficult to enumerate, but scholars have estimated that there are between 14,000 and 20,000 youth living and working on the streets of Mexico City. A serious problem in Mexico City, homeless youth are part of a larger, global phenomenon. UNICEF has estimated there are as many as 150 million children and adolescents living on the streets worldwide?the majority in megacities of the developing world. This project is one of the first in-depth studies of the social lives of homeless youth. The findings have the potential to inform policy and aid provision for homeless and at risk youth that live in cities across the developing world. Street youth are a ubiquitous feature of cities in the developing world. These cities are characterized by widespread informality as the majority of households have at least one member working in unregulated income-generating activities and many live in informal or self-help housing. Scholars have examined various aspects of informality in these cities but have largely overlooked the millions of street youth who are a unique component of informality in these cities. An understanding of these settings is incomplete without an investigation of the social worlds of such youth. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, life-history interviews, and archival research this project will offer a holistic understanding of the lives of these youth, how they interpret their situation, the complex culture that the youth create on the street, and how they contribute to life in the larger city. By filling a gap in the literature, this project adds to the sociological understanding of social dynamics that occur in cities of the developing world and offers the information necessary to create more effective interventions and programming to better serve the population.