Globalizing the Streets

Book excerpt: Not since the 1960s have the activities of resistance among lower- and working-class youth caused such anxiety in the international community. Yet today the dispossessed are responding to the challenges of globalization and its methods of social control. The contributors to this volume examine the struggle for identity and interdependence of these youth, their clashes with law enforcement and criminal codes, their fight for social, political, and cultural capital, and their efforts to achieve recognition and empowerment. Essays adopt the vantage point of those whose struggle for social solidarity, self-respect, and survival in criminalized or marginalized spaces. In doing so, they contextualize and humanize the seemingly senseless actions of these youths, who make visible the class contradictions, social exclusion, and rituals of psychological humiliation that permeate their everyday lives.