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Paper short abstract:

We analyse ethnographically ways in which cultural groups of young black people in Salvador, an afro-descendent metropolis, make use of and travel inside the city, and how they negotiate their right to the city from below through different forms of political, economic and cultural participation.

Paper long abstract:

We analyse ethnographically ways in which cultural groups of young black people in Salvador, an afro-descendent metropolis, make use of and travel inside the city, and how they negotiate their right to the city from below through different forms of political, economic and cultural participation.

Through an analysis of Social Networks inspired by the classical urban anthropology studies of the Manchester School and other approaches to an Anthropology of Mobility, we argue that studying and describing their movements and diverse kind of connections in their neighborhood, city, country and world outside, is the best way of reveal to us how they are constructing their own social space (and influencing the construction of social space in other parts of the city). In other words, when they are traveling, from one place to another, one institution to another, these young people are connecting different spheres of power, local and international social networks, in the artistic, cultural or political spheres in which they move, and participating actively in the development of urban life in ways that are obscured by models of the social lives of the poor that focus simply on segregation and social exclusion.