The Social Construction of the Youth-migration Nexus in Contemporary Spain. A Critical Overview

The article identifies the different features that mark the academic debate in Spain over the youth migration nexus: a) the ideological production of youth as a classless subject; b) the ethnification of national young people in terms of tribes and vulgarisation of a culturalist discourse; c) the oblique visualisation of class under the sign of race and ethnicity in a post-migrating society and d) the construction of differential integrability criteria by culture.  The emergence of a migrant youth issue in Spain in 2003/2004 was strongly marked by the discourse of gangs termed Latin, as the children of the undeserving poor, judged for making a non conforming use of the city. Paradoxically, these subjects, thought initially as culturally close, could suddenly make a shift in the public representation, enacting with their memberships and behaviours the panic and the virus of imagined gangs and violent young people, not as a product of the receiving society, but rather as an imported product.