Conflicting Aspirations in the City of Sand: Citizenship & Cosmopolitan Youth in Neoliberal Peru

Abstract

The thesis is an investigation into citizenship, schooling, urban anthropology and global youth cultures in a settlement town called Pachacutec north of Lima, Peru’s capital city. The thesis analyses the tension between the expectations of the youth at a national level (access to citizenship and its entitlements, like land and education) and at a global level (in terms of consumption and cosmopolitan identities, and the possibility of travel and working ability). Each chapter discusses conflicts in the neoliberal model of progress through ethnography carried out in the school of Our Lady of Sorrows. Starting with an analysis of the relevance of prior and on-going colonial relations to the setting, the thesis argues that previous power dynamics were destabilised in the everyday cosmopolitanisms that young Pachacutenos use. These destabilizations were however often fleeting and rivalled with the continuing precarious standing in which many citizens were enmeshed, demonstrating how the neoliberal project builds on previous relations of power. The hypothesis is that the destabilizations remain subtle as the ongoing power dynamics seek to maintain them so. This has wider implications to the citizenship model, and the thesis discusses the ethnographic findings in relation to analysis that stresses the need to move away from the model of labouring man, merit and mobility, to a formulation of citizenship that acknowledges the ways by which these contribute to ephemeral spaces.