Carcova is Love: Becoming Youth in the Slums of the Global South

Abstract

On the basis of the results of research informed by an ethnographic approach, we examine the narratives of young people who were born and/or live in contexts of extreme urban poverty in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area in order to describe the process of becoming youth in one of the impoverished neighborhoods of the global south. Through the statement ?Carcova is love??that was enunciated by a young woman to refer to the slum where she was born and lives,?we delve into the multiple connections that evidence the complexity of what it means to live in spaces marked in their very constitution by the displacement, circulation, and movement of subjects in the metropolitan city. ?Carcova is love? condenses, among other things, the struggles for seeking and having a place in contemporary societies. Far from stigmatizing images of those neighborhoods but also from any romantization, we propose on the basis of these young people?s narratives, elements to grasp the overlapping, multiple, and layered workings of that process of becoming young in these urban contexts. In this framework we suggest that those spaces are signs of the contemporary politics of urban life that draws the borders of the contemporary metropolis in the global south.