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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how young people navigate the precarity and violence of the urban margins in Honduras in order to build lives of meaning for themselves, and how they make use of the different organizations they have access to in these contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Youth on the urban periphery in Honduras face lives defined by precarity, marginalization, and amongst the highest rates of urban violence worldwide (Insight Crime 2024). Street gangs known as ‘maras’ who effectively control much of the urban periphery of Honduras’ cities thanks to a power vacuum left by an absent state, have been blamed for much of this violence. Naturally, this violence shapes youth trajectories in terms of the opportunities young people see to “salir adelante” (“get ahead”) in life, balancing everyday survival with longer term goals.

This paper, based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Honduras and a decade of ongoing work in the country, explores how young people navigate the precarity and violence of the urban margins in Honduras in order to build lives of meaning for themselves, and how they make use of the different organizations they have access to in these contexts – including both criminal organizations such as street gangs, as well as NGOs and other civil society spaces. It also considers, from the perspective of grassroots, youth-focused NGOs in these areas, how these organizations can better engage and support young people in violence-affected areas. I draw on Henrik Vigh’s (2009) work on social navigation to look at how young people navigate of the myriad of organizations they find within their contexts and how they balance their individual agency with social and political forces beyond their control, as well as how these forces and processes of navigation shape and are shaped by NGOs.