Global Vocabularies, National Outcomes: Latin American Youth Activist Strategies For Bringing Transnational Social Justice Rhetorics Home

This paper explores how youth in Latin America draw from global vocabularies of social justice to imagine and advocate for social change at home.  The globalized circulation of media, interpersonal communication, and commodities has, we argue, shifted the cultural repertoires youth use to imagine citizenship.  This is a heterogeneous phenomenon, but many examples point to a cosmopolitan sense of justice and ethics among youth.  Youth draw on social media to engage with transnational publics to demand rights and new definitions of citizenship.  They hybridize non-Latin and Latin musical genres to argue for pro-indigenous equality and student rights. Finally, they obtain information from global sources to argue for policy changes on issues pertaining to the environment, same-sex rights, and Latin American sovereignty.

 Amidst this turn to what can be seen as globalized ethics, we draw from Latin American youth studies literatures to argue that the outcome of this transformation requires scholars to pose young people’s relationship to politics as a question in need of investigation rather than assuming a pre-defined relationship.  As youth from Latin American imagine the future from global vocabularies, they seek to transform the national, the local, and the personal. Rather than localities serving as a barrier to cosmopolitan outlooks, Latin American literatures on youth political activism indicate that an awareness of an unequal world is embedded in transforming the immediate spaces in which they live.