Desarrollo Integral y Fronteras/Integral Development and Borderspaces

Abstract

This paper is about the work of young people and the boundaries of capitalism. I theorize consciousness and identities from the Deluezian perspective of ‘I-do’ and ‘I-am’, focusing on the doing/the working (the I-do's) of young people as part of the ghoulishly indirect discourses of globalization on la frontera (the I-am's). Put simply, I am concerned that the work of young people and its relations to their identity is lost in larger global discourses that seek other ends. In critique of those ends, I task proclamations of the International Labor Organization and the United Nations on young people's work as a series of empty effects that are inappropriately structured around developmental outcomes. I then suggest a different way of looking at young people's work and identity as a series of ‘I-do's’ that cohere to their notions of identity. Borderspaces—exemplified in this paper by the work of children in Tijuana but also relating to broader notions of borders—are important here. In merging with these borders young people's identities are not randomly conceived and yet they are not predictable either.