Territorios baldíos : identidades juveniles indígenas y rurales en América Latina

The theories about the historical invention of childhood and youth have been almost exclusively based upon western sources (to be more precise, central European and Anglo-Saxon sources). One of the conclusions of the conference «The child and the young in Latin America» («A criança e o jovem na America Latina»), held in Marilia (Brasil) in November 2001, organised by ISA, was the need to reconceptualise childhood and youth from a Latin American perspective (geographically, academically and culturally). We will focus on a reconceptualisation of youth in a diachronic and transcultural view. We are offering two ethnographic studies from Mexico (Feixa, 1998b) and Chile (González, 2004a, 2004b) as examples of the reconceptualisation that needs to take place.