Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas by Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio

Abstract

 2014 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 24(1), 2014 Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio (2013). University of Illinois Press, 184 pages. $21.50 USD (paperback). ISBN 978-0252079207. The topic of youth civic engagement is compelling analytically because of the dual lens it requires: in paying attention to how youth make meaning of their sociopolitical world and develop civic skills, we must also pay careful attention to their sociopolitical context. Civic engagement is not a developmental process that can be reduced to brain scans or controlled experiments. Each term is contested and varies across time and place. How are “youth” defined and what kinds of rights are accorded to young people? What role have civic institutions played in the histories of different nation states and for how long have different groups had the right to elect their leaders? One weakness of the emerging literature on civic engagement has been its predominance of studies in the United States, which can contribute to weak treatments of context that take U.S. history or institutions as if they are the way things are everywhere. Thankfully, this new volume from Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio places youth civic engagement in international perspective and embraces a sophisticated understanding of context. The study draws on interviews with and essays by young people between the ages of 15 and 24, who were nominated as civically active by community or public interest organizations in three global cities: Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Chicago. In each city roughly 25 youth participated in the study. The first and last chapters of the book are coauthored ; the second, third, and fourth chapters are sole-authored by experts from universities in the respective cities: de los Angeles Torres in Chicago, Rizzini in Rio de Janeiro, and Del Rio in Mexico City. The authors draw on a mix of disciplinary traditions to frame the work. On one hand there is a strong psychological orientation: the case studies privilege interviews and take an analytic approach that emphasizes topics such as childhood influences on engagement, motivations for civic involvement, and youths’ reasoning about social issues. The authors also, however, draw on social theory, including an important point about postmodern notions of temporality. Informed by statements from the youth participants in the study, the authors question the modern assumption that youth is a time of preparation for the future and instead claim young people’s rights to participation in the present. They write: In sum, these young people moved easily between modernist constructions of politics—equality, for example—while demanding a new temporality that was highly critical of modernity’s placement of youth in the future (140). Book Review: Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas 184 Also, in a useful corrective to psychological approaches that tend to underplay cultural and historical context, the book begins with a concise account of historical and political influences on civic engagement in each country. Certain key contextual differences stand out. Brazil, for example, has codified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) into law and created child and youth councils to monitor the law. Similarly, Mexico in the 2000s passed several laws meant to recognize the rights of young people and create formal avenues for participation. Engagement with the UNCRC and its discourse of youth rights is weaker in the United States. But the treatment of context is not all about differences: the authors also argue that the single nation-state is no longer the primary determinant of young people’s future well-being, in part because of the steady pattern of transnational migration, but also because of the rise of multi-national corporations, which are not susceptible to legal or normative expectations for transparency, public participation, and accountability. As the authors write: “The nation-state is no longer the exclusive organizer of our economies, politics, or selves…” which “brings forth the question of what entity would guarantee rights that could be violated by multiple states and transnational entities” (7). This point has not received adequate...