Looking towards the future: intersectionalities of race, class and place in young Colombians’ lives

Abstract

In this chapter, Sonja Marzi considers the ambivalent, complex aspirations of young, urban Colombians in Cartagena. The chapter shows how young people’s aspirations are profoundly constrained by intersecting inequalities relating to class, race, gender and neo-colonial structural inequalities. However, despite these inequalities and exclusions, the chapter shows how young people demonstrate creative ways of sustaining hopes and constituting opportunities for social mobility. The chapter tracks these ambivalences through evocative accounts of independence day celebrations and beauty pageants. The chapter argues that care is needed to critique commonplace assumptions that many young people ‘lack aspirations’ and that their social immobility is a consequence of this lack. Instead, the chapter shows how young people manage to carve out aspirational opportunities for aspirational social mobility despite countervailing structural barriers. Nevertheless, the chapter shows how young people’s everyday lives and hopes are profoundly affected by pervasive inequalities and discrimination on bases of race, class, gender and neo-colonial inequalities.