Identities within contexts of vulnerability and pauperization

We start from considering that youth experience social, cultural, and axiological disenchantment at early ages, among other things, depending on the interpretation of this situation from contextual references such as age, gender and social stratum. The combination of these three elements helps define an actor as a marginalized social being. The four interviewed youth, in their own words on their short biography, identify the fact of being marginalized actors, since they experienced social, physical, and symbolical violence, as the following narrations make it clear:

María: [sighs] I didn’t have mother or father. They died already. My dad died in 2015 and my mother, when I was six, when I was very young (María, personal communication, October 17^th, 2018).

Genaro: [answering the question about his childhood] well, more or less; I didn’t live with my mom, but with my grandma and she sent me to a boardinghouse. I was about eight when she sent me to Jinesekia.⁴ She told me: ‘we’re going with an aunt of yours!’, and there was no aunt [laughter] and she took me to a boardinghouse of DIF [Sistema Nacional para el Desarrollo Integral de las Familias / National System for the Integral Development of Families] [in] Nogales, and from there, they sent me to Hermosillo, to Jinesekia, I was there (Genaro, personal communication, November 21^st, 2018).

In these two narratives, there was social, cultural and axiological disenchantment in their childhoods. Their individual capacity to positively value their identity is limited by the experience of life at so short an age, as it means to become an orphan, in the first case, whereas in the second, become institutionalized in a social assistance center. This disenchantment significantly influenced the election of social role. As regards other of the respondents, family disenchantment was similar:

José: well… I have always been at the crossings [road intersections with traffic lights], I work at the crossings; I cleaned windshields and sold flowers. In fact, I was the one helping my mom, sometimes we both supported each other when she divorced from my dad, in the end she went with me to the crossings and we supported my sister because she was still studying (José, personal communication, September 23^rd, 2019).

The social, cultural and axiological disenchantment reaffirms the institutional abandonment, to a large extent because their demands (observance of rights such as education, health care, or housing) are not satisfied; and these demands are interpreted by children between five and nine years of age. This disenchantment may produce “hatred, concern, frustration, emotional states [that] substantially influence the construction of contemporary subjectivities” (^{Torres, 2018, pp. 33-35}).

It is important to consider that identity is not something given and immovable, but built in daily interaction and is attained by means of a legitimization process that looks for acceptance and recognition (^{Reguillo Cruz, 1991}). Identity is an objective relationship between the youth and the social environment where they develop and project as in a stage that enables them to interact with the rest and it is necessary to exteriorize it, objectivize it. When these relationships are objectivized, youth reinterpret them as something that was destined for occurring –a normalization– and face pauperization conjunctures that turn them into circumstantial victims and products of a system that excludes them.

One of the scenarios for significant interaction with the social environment they experienced as social actors was (public) school, as it was in such place where the actors were able to objectify relationships and exteriorize the identity they were forging for themselves. In these experiences during their terms in a public school, their biographies make the normalization of precariousness evident.

María: in elementary ok; grades alright, even A’s. I attended elementary in various schools. [I got expelled] because I was very naughty [laughter], I beat the girls and threw wet toilet paper, [I was expelled] from about four or five [schools]. All of them because I was naughty. I didn’t go to middle school, I just [studied] elementary, but I finished secondary in an open [secondary] of ISEA.⁵ My sister helped me, she talked to the lady to go to my home because I was married (María, personal communication, October 17^th, 2018).

Genaro: I attended middle school too, but I ran away [from Jinesekia, in Hermosillo, Sonora] and I came here, to Nogales, I studied no more. I was in secondary and I had already tried marihuana, cigarettes and pills. I was about 13 [years] when I became a mariguano [marihuana smoker], at 14 [I smoked] rock [drug], and at fifteen, I got here for theft (Genaro, personal communication, November 21^st, 2018).

During the process by means of which they were defining their identity, the youths above (María and Genaro) experienced a precipitated transit into adulthood, which forced them to take up responsibilities, for example, being a mother and entering into the labor sphere so that they were able to have the economic resources to satisfy their drug consumption. It was a first approach to the pauperization process, in which these youths underwent experiences that would later lead them to a fragile and uncertain existence.

For the cases of the other two youth, their experiences at school are not far from those previously exposed, this hasty transit to adulthood may be noticed as well.

José: in elementary I was in Matamoros [Tamaulipas], and I finished it in San Fernando [Tamaulipas]. I was in about four elementaries, [I was expelled] basically because my dad was a bit down, my old man did drugs and all that. Sometimes, we didn’t finish school because, because of him, the things he did, he got drugged and, in the end, he didn’t even support us at all, and we had to look after ourselves, I started working at 10 (José, personal communication, September 23^rd, 2019).

Mario: I was thrown out [of the school] like a month early, but anyways they gave me my certificate. The teacher was fed up with me and she told me that she would give me the certificate, but I had to leave, she’d had enough, she would give me my certificate but I had to stop going. That was in elementary, I just lasted like three weeks in middle school because I was already working and used to fall asleep during classes (Mario, personal communication, September 22^nd, 2019).

The youth interviewed define spaces and social places they gradually interiorize and they do it in the sense of who they are, who they have been and what their objective possibilities are, they perform a representation of themselves and for the rest in relation with their identity. In this way, “young identity is a vital disposition of performative nature regarding reality from the construction with others. Hence, a young condition entails a political will with immense possibilities to build shared horizons of life” (^{Agudelo López, Villada López & Patiño, 2020, p. 286}).

The young respondents’ educational experience accounts for situations of precariousness in their social relationships that influenced the definition of their identity in a space fraught with social, cultural and axiological hostile events. Social relationships that imply an intersubjective interpretation about what to do, how to continue and what to do it for. These youths faced a crossroad of axiological ups and downs that modeled their identities shrouded in a veil of circumstances that rendered them victims and left them unprotected with neither education nor labor opportunities. Objective and symbolic violence was present in their short biographies and was assimilated as a normal fact of life, considering that:

In the imaginary of children and adolescents, organized crime, in the best of cases, is too attractive and promising, as it offers them identification models for being youth, that is to say, narcos and sicarios, or the lover of a capo; following a logic of life: I’d rather die young and rich than old and poor, which means, whether we like it or not, having money, power, fame, jewels, trucks and above all, building a place, a social status (^{Nateras Domínguez, 2016, p. 81}).

When facing the heterogeneity of violence, with its various faces and masks, the youth face sociocultural occurrences that entail life-or-death situations and the objective impact they have on their health (mental, physical and social). The above has repercussions on their daily life. As an instance, two respondents expressed:

María: [I lived] with my dad’s mom, she hit us with her cane. When my dad died we went with my sister again and there I grew distant from my sister because of the drugs. I have 11 siblings alive and two dead, a girl and boy. I was in elementary when they took me to DIF. They found out I was raped, my brother raped me when I was six, my sister found out because he raped her too, to my twin and my sister the one he lived with, he raped them too (María, personal communication, October 17^th, 2018).

Genaro: my mom, well she hanged out on the streets, she did drugs. In fact, my mom is here next door, in the female center, in prison. I was never with her, [mom] was like a sister to me. [I lived] in some caves at the border line, I went and looked at them and said, I don’t have where to live. I did, but I said ‘what for, what am I going to make my grandmother suffer for?’. I better stayed to live there [in the caves] (Genaro, personal communication, November 21^st, 2018).

Under conditions such as those narrated by María and Genaro, models of vulnerable actors are configured, in which projects of life have to be articulated around physical survival over expectations that enable them to choose what it’s rightfully theirs; for example, the right to live as a family. The figure of a family for the other two youth has also an important presence that pushes the actors to search for alternatives that produce economic incomes that enable them to follow a plan of life.

José: I saw my mom struggling and because of that, basically that, I started working. There was a time when I was down, real down, I was at a low, bad habits. From cleaning windshields, to become a delinquent, you may say. So far, my dad does everything: coke, rock, huachicol,⁶ he is a real all-terrain boy. I was also a sicario for some time; from 2013 to 2014 I was a sicario (José, personal communication, September 23^rd, 2019).

Mario: well… when I was at school I was 12 or 13, I looked at my partners or friends [and I thought] ‘someday, I will be a hitman’. That was my dream; my first dream was to ride trucks and I said, well I’ll be a sicario one day. I was at school and I studied and did well, but one day I didn’t like it. I wanted to be well dressed and I had friends and suddenly one day, we were there and some vatos arrive and told us: ‘want a job or what?’, ‘hell yeah, I want a job’, ‘well that’s it’ he took me to work as a guard [a soldier in organized crime] (Mario, personal communication, September 22^nd, 2019).

The narrations by José and Mario are interpreted as process of social self-exclusion, which is possible to analyze from the standpoint of a chain with disadvantage links (^{Saraví, 2015}), along which “a substantive link is the violence that represents an inflection point in the biography of the youth in a context of social and economic disadvantages that detach them from institutional spaces and places them at risk of performing unlawful activities” (^{De la O Martínez, 2020, p. 156}).

Social self-exclusion is implicit in the recognition of the structural absences that would allow their full development. From this standpoint, organized crime appears as a window for immediate opportunities for it promotes allegories of sudden wealth and social recognition. Paradoxically, these actions “promote isolation and social alienation, though this they do ‘by means of’ and ‘in interaction with’ other subjective inequality dimensions, as they are based on the subject’s experience” (^{Saraví, 2015, p. 38}), for instance, the fact of being recognized as no-students as compared with the rest of youth who attend school.

So far, the narrations by María, Genaro, José, and Mario are not the way by means of which they can incorporate into the social world via the emotions these experiences caused them, but are ways to objectively interpret their social reality, since they are objectifying it, exteriorizing actions linked with some crime. The subjective dimensions –emotions and the axiological context– reproduce structural inequality and significantly contribute to the affirmation of two things: 1) a precariousness situation; and, 2) social fragmentation. The social inequalities, which interact in a relational manner with the youth, live, hide, produce and reproduce.

these youth face a crossroad of intense violence in the country that has turned them into merchandise with a price, into circumstantial victims, and into products of a system that excludes them. They live in disenchantment with the lack of education and labor opportunities, and for many, violence has been an ever-present factor in their short lives (^{De la O Martínez, 2020, p. 153}).

In the biographies, organized crime is an illusion that promotes allegories of wealth, since it promises immediate gratifications through various activities with two possible eventual results: death or prison. Interaction with activities proper to organized crime implies three things: 1) the erosion of future imaginaries; 2) the increase of structural and subjective precariousness; and, 3) the crisis of the State’s political legitimacy.

Analyzing the youth’s narrations as regards interactions with organized crime activities allows us to identify what those experiences meant for them, since they recall them and reveal the importance of relationships with other people from substantial actions and decisions at defining moments that produced their deprivation of liberty. That is to say, their futures erode, while structural and subjective precariousness increase at once, and add to the loss of State legitimacy for the youth. As it is the case of the circumstances owing to which they were or are deprived of their liberty:

María: [I’m here because I possessed] firearms, some three or five makeshift shotguns. We were in a hotel when patrols arrived, the hotel owner called them. No! I didn’t even know they were there [the guns], there were only two and the other two were added by policemen when they took us on detention, they said we had them, be we didn’t have anything. I mean, I didn’t know they had them, but it was as if I had them (María, personal communication, October 17^th, 2018).

Genaro: once in the barrio there was this man called B, and he told me: “do you want to cross?” Uncle B they called him. ‘Do you want to cross into the U.S.? We pay you good’ and well, I didn’t know and said yes, truth is I wanted money; they would pay by the pollo [migrants] I managed to cross. Yeah… [crossing] people, and I would be the guide… well I went, and I crossed and I got caught [laughter]. The second [second attempt to cross people], I managed to cross with seven pollos. Five hundred per pollo they gave me; five hundred dollars for each pollo (Genaro, personal communication, November 21^st, 2018).

In the narrations, geographic spaces with high crime rate are identified; they become the place where youth have to learn to live in a hostile environment with aggressions from their young rivals, adding to the symbolic violence expressed by police coercion and the absence of public policies. The geographic space turns into a heavy burden on the shoulders of new generations.

In the face of these violent attacks, the socialization process orients toward immediate satisfactions that enable them to live. In words by Encinas Garza (2016) “receiving the most advantage without investing much time and effort is a guilt-free pleasure whose only end is being autonomous from the family and hold power in the barrio” (p. 60). Violent attacks are expressed by other actors as follows:

José: No, the place my mom lives [San Fernando, Tamaulipas] are the salideras [roads], though which maña [organized crime] enters and leaves town, there are also safehouses. I went to the crossroad and sold and so I started to meet people and eventually I got involved, making friends. I had been invited, right, but I hadn’t said yes. Suddenly, one day, after two or three months, they told me I was in the payroll, that someone above had said I was already in the payroll, just by hanging out with them, and that my check was on its way, that day was payday, and the check arrived ‘how much was the check worth?’, well, it was 15 thousand pesos (José, personal communication, September 23^rd, 2019).

Mario: [at first, I was] a lookout. And then I knew of places where drug was sold and I started as a pusher. The dude told me: ‘What’s up! Come and help me with the balance’; ‘Yeah’, it was done. Well, I carried on, I liked math a bit, it went alright, the balance was correct and all. Then, this guy told me: ‘well, when do you want to start? We find you a spot’ and I said: ‘sure, I can do that’. And they put me there in gran canal, they call it like that, they got me there and started selling rock, weed, and fixes [crack, marihuana with coke]. Well, the money was coming in and all of a sudden, I didn’t like it and I told him ‘No, my dream is to ride patrols, buzzing around [being armed and equipped]’. My first confrontation was at 14 [years], I faced the Navy [Mexican Navy]. After being a hitman, they moved me to the kitchen,7 but I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t put up with it, I looked at the face of one [guy] and it broke me. And I said: ‘no, I’m not ready for the kitchen, I’m not ready’ (Mario, personal communication, September 22^nd, 2019).

As regards historic beings with agency capacity, youth tell stories in which past, present, and future intermingle in an intersubjective manner with the times of their peers. “These narrations are the measurement, as co-production of reality, as an alternative to consolidate worlds shared in function of the constructed meanings, histories and empathies” (^{Agudelo López et al., 2020, p. 293}). It is visible that it is only in everydayness where the feasibility of identity configuration is secured on the basis of their realities. In words by ^{Hernández Baca (2020)}, the relationship between youth and law is explained as:

it is a structural confrontation in two senses: on one side, the youth who share criminalized environments interact by means of social recognition codes that contest the statutes of a society from which they feel excluded; on the other, the stigma built around their condition of youths, masculinity and marginalization turns these youth into suspects for the authorities that constantly harass and discriminate them (^{Hernández Baca, 2020, p. 133}).

The quote above implies that participating in an action linked to organized crime is normalized, and it may be interpreted by the actors as productive, giving an account of the way various societies perceive and value the world, and by doing so, certain social actors. In this sense, youth are social systems and products of the social contract where the social action of involvement in criminal activities is normalized from its acceptance by the society itself in terms of assuming it as something predestined, from the actors’ individual particularities. Under this premise, the young respondents build their identity as “a set of interiorized cultural and social repertoires, by means of which, define their boundaries and distinguish –or intend to– from the rest of the actors in a similar situation” (^{Giménez Montiel, 2002, p. 38}).

Taking part in criminal activities becomes a substantial element at the moment of defining as an actor of society, for the self-representation schemas configure uneven fields of action (^{Reguillo Cruz, 2008}). Presently, behaving as a responsible social actor is increasingly needed and valorized.

The pauperization process experienced by the respondents during their short lives, exemplifies the way uneven conditions are directly linked with institutional capacity to ensure fundamental rights such as education, health care, and housing for youth in a hostile border context. This inability polarizes human segments, being less favored those groups –the youth, for instance– for which economic and social conditions, as well as the systematic violation of their human rights, lead them to a risk society which at once, reconfigures social incorporation spaces and other forms of building themselves as subjects (^{Valenzuela Arce, 2015}). In words by ^{Torres Maestro (2013}):

we are facing a rupture in the social fabric, where youth are deprived of a future, it is a social holocaust; an actual euthanasia of the poor owing to the existence of large masses of permanently unemployed individuals, and pauperized occasional, informal workers. Diluting the certainties inherent to the mechanisms of social incorporation, such youth without a future are product of social fascism because extensive population segments are ejected from any sort of social contract (^{Torres Maestro, 2013, p. 15}).

On the basis of the previous quotation, we infer that the fact of being a young person in a particular situation allows involving in criminal activities, which may be interpreted as an accomplishment to reach power and the desire of becoming a social actor recognized within a violent context. Violence produces in youth a different rationality around the social position that they must occupy in the collective; their –antisocial– practices enable them to insure their life by means of volatile loyalties and enforced adscriptions (^{De la O Martínez, 2014}). At this point, youth reproduce a stigma from the events experienced, since participating in criminal activities deeply marks them for life. Youth are at critical time in the process of socialization and identity construction that defines the spaces for social integration.

On the basis of the pauperization processes these youth experienced in their biographies, they articulated the support for the definition of their identity. Understanding that “the notion of identity responds to a social construction by means of which the subjects objectify their own self-awareness and self-reference capability” (^{Trejo Quintana, 2008, p. 40}). By considering identity as a process in permanent construction, youth are projecting their lives by means of the narratives, since exteriorizing an identity entails an individual interpretation, in which the context is fundamental. However, the context should not be considered the only reason for the pauperization process, structural lacks (education, health care and housing) added to the contextual elements are important from the interpretation, construction, and assimilation the subjects make from their intersubjectivity.