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Citizens in the Present

Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

CHAPTER 1

Civically Engaged Youth

Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Río

In the Americas in the beginning of the twentieth century, some observers expected the emergence of independent nations in which citizens would participate in decisions that affected their lives. For many of these observers, one of the foundations of these democratic societies was the children, who would be trained to be active citizens and, eventually, would take leadership positions at various levels in their societies (Dewey 1916; Martí 1979; Rodo 1961; Mariátegui 1988). The idea of training children and young people to be future leaders had been a concern of philosophers for centuries (Plato 1941; Rousseau 1956; Locke 1979); however, this new, modern, rational project promised a historical transformation in which large numbers of citizens would be included in the deliberation and administration of public policies. Even so, the children's citizenship and leadership roles were to be in their futures, not in their present, while they were still children. Democratic theory did not contemplate a role for children in the public arena, since it was deemed that they were not yet capable of making rational, informed decisions (Kulynych 2001; Bennett 2003). Indeed, some observers vehemently opposed their participation on the grounds that children were to be nurtured and protected in the private sphere, not thrown into the chaos of the public (Bethke Elshtain 1995). Exceptions were made in times of war, when extraordinary circumstances placed extraordinary demands on both women and children (Tuttle 1993).

Despite this philosophical and institutional exclusion, young people have sought ways to have a meaningful voice in the public arena and have challenged the precepts that effectively excluded them from the public. Many societies have responded by lowering the voting age. In the United States and in Mexico, it was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen following the widespread student mobilizations that took place in 1968. Perhaps the most emblematic action has been the United Nations' passage, in 1989, of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which includes their right to have a voice in decisions that affect their lives. Subsequently there has been a flurry of governmental and nongovernmental organization (NGO) attention to creating institutions and practices that give children and young people a voice. Additionally, countless projects have debated and prescribed the best ways to instill a sense of civic responsibility in children and young people (Flanagan and Sherrod 1998; Haste and Torney-Purta 1992).

Still, as we started this research project, young people were predominantly viewed as apathetic and uninterested in politics. In the United States, for example, one particularly gloomy forecast cautioned that the future of democracy was in peril given the overall decline in participation (Putnam 2001). This was alarming. But a decline in traditional modes of political participation may not mean an overall decline, since engagement and, indeed, values attached to why and how citizens engage may vary from culture to culture, even within nations, and from generation to generation (Vinken 2005). This has certainly been the case in Latin America, which has witnessed a tidal wave of democratizing activities and the rise of countless grassroots and community-based organizations active in a variety of fields (Escobar and Álvarez 1992). There have also been visible signs of increased youth involvement throughout the world (Welton and Wolf 2001). And after 2006, when young people took to the streets in the largest marches in its history demanding immigration reform, scholars saw the beginning of a generational change (Pallares and Flores-Gonzalez 2010). They also noted increases in traditional forms of participation as young people turned out in record numbers for presidential elections in many countries in the Americas (Youniss and Levine 2009).

In our three cities—Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City—we knew of young people who cared deeply about their communities and were actively engaged in a variety of public issues. Still, we knew very little about these activists, their concerns or inquietudes, their trajectories, their political and social practices, and their ideas. Who were these young people? How did they become involved? How do they engage? What are their political ideas?

Were there lessons to be learned from their engagement that could inform policies aimed at increasing the civic engagement of other young people? What could their actions tell us about democratic practices in cities in the Americas today? These are the central questions we posed to the young activists in our three cities.

Broader Context

The Changing Place of Youth in Public Discourses

We started our research by trying to understand the broad political context in which youth engagement was unfolding, including the place of youth in contemporary public discourses. We noted that young people did not hold the magical place in political discourses they had in the past. In all three countries studied, youth had been central to nation building in the past century. Compulsory public education, which included lessons on how to become a good citizen, had been expanded to all children and young people. Special projects, albeit with mixed results, were put in place to bring children and young people from the margins—among them orphans, Native Americans, and refugees from communism—into the national project (Rizzini 2002; Holt 1992; Adams 1995; Torres 2004).

By the mid-twentieth century, young people in the Americas were entering the political stage not as passive model citizens but rather as activists. The postwar boom had not resulted in egalitarianism. The Cold War had engendered military and authoritarian regimes throughout the Americas, supported by the United States, which had itself been involved in an unpopular war in Vietnam and was undergoing internal social upheavals. New social movements emerged in which young people were critical of governments. They were fueled by what the Brazilian anthropologist Alzira de Abreu in 2000 described as engagement born of feelings of constant impatience with injustice, with the anger that comes from arbitrary power, and with the association of intolerance with complicity and culpability.

Youth became the target of repressive forces seeking to reestablish order. In 1964, a United States–backed military regime came to power in Brazil, instituting a series of repressive measures, many aimed at young people in university settings. In 1968, young people took to the streets in Mexico City, only to be met by repressive government forces. On October 2, days before the opening of the Olympic Games, more than five hundred young people were killed by government forces as they protested repression and demanded a more egalitarian society. Also in 1968, Chicago's mayor ordered the police to shoot to kill if necessary to subdue the young protesters who had gathered during the Democratic National Convention.

Youth as agents of change, then, came to hold a special place in the 1960s. They were especially influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of engagement as a personal commitment to a project, or proyecto de vida (Sartre 1960), and by socialist promises of world equality and peace. Youth activists were both acting on and forging a social narrative that viewed young people as motors of change (Luzzatto 1997) and assumed that engagement was part of becoming a social being. Youth had disrupted the prescriptive developmental model that saw children as the citizens of the future. They had become rebels with an anti-establishment cause.

As youth became a political social category symbolizing change, this created anxieties. In the past twenty-five years, the place of young people in society and our concerns about them have continued to undergo drastic changes (Tyyska 2005). Children and youth—particularly those who are members of socially marginalized communities—have become objects of social derision (Grossberg 2001). Indeed, many have become objects of fear (Giroux 2003)—specifically, Latinos and African Americans in the United States, indigenous groups and the poor in Mexico, and Afro-Brazilians in Brazil, especially the "street children."

Social fears have resulted in changes to the social and legal mechanisms that had been put in place to educate and protect young people. In many countries, public education is no longer seen as central to the future of the nation. Young people are unevenly protected in the criminal justice system. In the United States, a minor convicted of the same crime as an adult serves a longer jail sentence. And increasingly, Congress has eroded juvenile rights (Arteaga 2002). In all three countries studied, both violence against young people and violence carried out by them are increasing at alarming rates (Reguillo Cruz 2004). Young people of color are more vulnerable in Brazil and the United States, as are the poor in all three cities.

Paradoxically, as youth are feared, they are nonetheless given currency in a consumer market that both appeals to them and uses them to appeal to others (Maira and Soep 2005). Some scholars have argued that the concept of "youth" has been repackaged as a consumer category to serve the needs of global markets. Yet this artificial notion of a homogeneous "youth" can hide the deep differences in which young people of various backgrounds experience being young.

Young people, then, are commonly seen as consumers and in some cases as criminals, but their role as social activists is generally not recognized. This presents a special disjuncture, particularly given the current, dramatic demographic shift, in which young people make up an increasing percentage of the population in urban areas throughout the world.

Changing Public Spaces

The nature of the public spaces in which young people engage has also changed (Held 1999). Theoretically, democracies were conceived as political systems that relied on citizen input in the forms of electing representatives and participating in some fashion in the deliberations of public policy. The vote was a right given to "capable adults," a definition that often excluded women, individuals who did not own property or were not literate, and children and young people. In the last century, more countries—including those subjected to military regimes like Brazil or single party authoritarian governments like Mexico—opted for systems that had some form of citizen participation. Slowly, the definition of who was entitled to participate expanded, and younger members were included. In Brazil, the vote is compulsory for everyone over eighteen and voluntary for those aged sixteen to eighteen. As mentioned above, in Mexico and the United States, voting begins at eighteen.

As children's rights, including political rights, have become an intense focus of worldwide attention, many countries have responded by creating special councils that give young people a political platform in which to deliberate policies that affect them. Brazil codified into national law the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and has a series of regional and municipal children's and youth's rights councils that monitor compliance with the law; these councils have various degrees of effectiveness but still recognize the importance of young people's voices. In addition, councils at the municipal, state, and federal level make an effort to include young people in the process of deliberation of policies that affect them. Mexico issued the Law for the Protection of the Rights of Children and Adolescents in 2000.

But even as young people were gaining acceptance in political systems, the last decades of the twentieth century brought forth new challenges that compromised the promise of more egalitarian and participatory societies, particularly for individuals without formal ties, or with weak ties, to the institutions of decision making. Globalization and neoliberal policies aimed at expanding its markets accelerated the bifurcation of economies, which created wider schisms between those who have access to the people and institutions that make public decisions and those who do not. Even political scientists who have followed democratization trends in the Americas by focusing on formal arrangements for public participation admit that democracies perhaps can be sustained only in settings where a rich social and economic fabric provides some level of egalitarianism (O'Donnell 2001). They ask: Can political democracies be sustained in societies marked by profound economic inequalities (APSA 2004)? Some argue that citizenship can be conceived as a space of "condensation of accumulated disadvantages" at the same time as the site of possibility of agency as it is also a mediational category that defines the relationship of social subjects to the state and at the same time protects these same subjects from the power of the state (Reguillo Cruz 2005). This is a particularly urgent question for young people who seek a voice in their political communities, since they do not have an institutionalized voice, and they are disproportionately affected by poverty and vulnerable to state abuses.

Democracies were also conceived as residing within specific nationstates where some form of legal system set up participatory procedures and defined the rights of citizens. Yet recent economic and cultural changes across the world have affected the structure of politics and identity, as well as the spaces in which youth can engage (Cannella and Kincheloe 2002; Kaufman Hevener and Rizzini 2002). Globalization challenges the boundaries of nation-states but does not necessarily provide protections beyond them. The nation-state is no longer the exclusive organizer of our economies, politics, or selves, especially for immigrants and their children, whose lives span multiple states. This brings forth the question of what entity would guarantee rights that could be violated by multiple states and transnational entities (Bauman 1998). Indeed, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack in the United States, especially designated areas, such as Guantanamo Base in Cuba, have been exempt from any international or national rights protection. Some scholars have proposed that cities would become the critical links in a new global economy and consequently that cities would become the spaces in which meaningful politics could be played out (Sassen 1991). But cities themselves are deeply divided along a multiplicity of lines, and they, too, function within a larger set of societal rules and structures just as they respond to the exigencies of global capital.

These profound economic and political changes raised questions about politics in general and specifically about the nature of public engagement (Klymlicka 1999). At the same time that large systemic changes could be limiting access to policy making, they could also be creating new public spaces in which young activists might forge new practices (Driskell, Fox, and Kudva 2008).

Our Study

Studying Youth Engagement: Receptors or Protagonists?

An important part of our comparative research process was developing an understanding of the ways in which youth engagement has been studied. This included reading studies done in our individual countries as well as looking at the more contemporary global literature of youth engagement.

In the United States, political socialization studies were in vogue in the late 1960s, when great youth movements worldwide were demanding radical changes, and notions about the place of children and their care were changing (Block 2002). Social scientists began asking how children and youth acquired their political ideas and habits (Sapiro 2004). They found that children do have a political life that in part begins with a sense of place, usually the nation, and includes feelings about authority figures and knowledge about political processes and issues (Greenstein 1965; Hess and Torney 1968; Easton and Dennis 1969; Sigel 1969). Children's political development was initially studied following Piaget's stages of development (Piaget 1932). There seemed to be certain stages of development in political attitudes, although these varied for young people of different backgrounds and nationalities (Jahoda 1963). A variety of socializing agents, from parents to teachers to peers, influence children's political behavior (Jennings and Niemi 1974). Class differences can change the ways in which political socialization unfolds (Hirsch 1971). And some traditions also mattered (Connell 1971; Jennings and Niemi 1981). Other scholars have looked at the role of political knowledge and how this may affect political behavior. Some found that race, class, and educational attainment had an impact on political knowledge (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997).

The emphasis of these studies was on how young people became socialized into an existing political order, not how they acted on it, much less how they tried to change it. Recently, there are those who have urged a more transgressive view of youth activism. Community psychologists, for instance, have insisted that social justice and change-oriented activism should be studied alongside more traditional forms of activism (Prilleltensky and Fox 2007; Watts and Flanagan 2007). And political scientists have again turned their eyes toward youth political engagement (Niemi and Hepburn 1995).
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Citizens in the Present by Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, Norma Del Río. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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