This article analyzes the youth policy promoted by the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration. We contend that, although this government claims to be implementing an alternative approach to promote social inclusion for the youth, its actions seem to be far from fulfilling this commitment. “Jóvenes Construyendo el Futuro,” the chief youth program of this government, hardly improves employment prospects for the most deprived youth and brings about no improvement in terms of the existing social stereotypes concerning this population. By assuming that this group of marginalized youth faces the risk of being recruited into organized crime, the authorities’ narrative contributes toward reinforcing conventional social stigmas that exacerbate social marginalization.

Transferencias condicionadas y reducción de la pobreza en México: Entre lo real y lo imaginado Israel Banegas-González y Minor Mora-SalasResumen: El estudio consiste en un análisis longitudinal sobre la evolución de las condiciones de vida de hogares beneficiarios del Programa Oportunidades-México. Tiene como propósito determinar en qué medida los programas de transferencias económicas condicionadas propician procesos sostenidos de superación de la pobreza. El análisis demuestra que es muy difícil cumplir este acometido. En este sentido, se concluye que Oportunidades no constituye una alternativa eficiente para disminuir la vulnerabilidad estructural de los hogares pobres y para reducir la pobreza en el corto plazo. Palabras claves: pobreza, vulnerabilidad, política social, focalización, transferencias condicionadas, Oportunidades, México.

This chapter demonstrates how upper middle-class Mexican families mobilize a vast array of social, cultural, and economic resources to expand their children’s opportunities in life and ensure the intergenerational transmission of their social position. The authors analyze salient characteristics of families’ socioeconomic and demographics in the life histories of a group of young Mexicans from an upper middle-class background. Many believe that micro-social processes, especially surrounding education, are key to understanding how upper-class families mobilize their various resources to shape their children’s life trajectories. These families accumulate social advantages over time that accrue to their progeny and benefit them upon their entrance to the labor market.

The study of social inequality has been one of the main topics of Latin American sociology since the second half of the twentieth century. It is possible to organize the academic trajectory of this field into three periods. During the first developmental phase, the research was inspired by comprehensive theoretical frameworks such as modernization theory, dependency theory, and structuralist-development theory; the historical-structural approach constituted the hegemonic analytical model. In a second period, the sociological approach was relegated to the background as the study of poverty and income distribution came to the fore. This shift owed as much to major economic and social changes that the region experienced as to the waning of the historical-structural paradigm. Finally, the sociological approach has gained renewed prominence in light of the changes that have occurred in the region at the end of the past century and the first two decades of the present one. During this period, Latin American sociology of inequality becomes more multifaceted and its theoretical approaches more complex as it incorporates new analytical perspectives to problematize the persistence and reconstitution of social inequality patterns in the region.

No abstract