Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Social World of Homeless Youth in Mexico City.

墨西哥城无家可归的年轻人有时被称为街头儿童或chav@s de la calle。 他们住在下水道里，在忙碌的十字路口清洗挡风玻璃，或者向地铁乘客讨钱。 他们的人数很难统计，但学者们估计有14 000至20 000名青年在墨西哥城街头生活和工作。 无家可归的青年是墨西哥城的一个严重问题，是一个更大的全球现象的一部分。 联合国儿童基金会估计，全世界有多达1.5亿儿童和青少年流落街头。在发展中国家的大城市中占大多数。 该项目是对无家可归青年的社会生活进行的首批深入研究之一。 这些发现有可能为生活在发展中国家城市中的无家可归和处于危险之中的青年提供政策和援助。街头青年是发展中国家城市中普遍存在的现象。这些城市的特点是普遍的非正规性，因为大多数家庭至少有一名成员从事不受管制的创收活动，许多人居住在非正规或自助住房中。学者们研究了这些城市非正规性的各个方面，但在很大程度上忽视了数百万街头青年，他们是这些城市非正规性的独特组成部分。如果不调查这些青年的社会世界，对这些环境的理解是不完整的。通过参与式观察，半结构化访谈，生活史访谈和档案研究，该项目将提供对这些青年生活的全面了解，他们如何解释自己的处境，青年在街头创造的复杂文化，以及他们如何为大城市的生活做出贡献。通过填补文献中的空白，该项目增加了对发展中世界城市中发生的社会动态的社会学理解，并提供了必要的信息，以制定更有效的干预措施和方案，更好地为人民服务。

The homeless youth of Mexico City are sometimes called street children or chav@s de la calle. They live in the sewers, wash windshields at busy intersections, or solicit money from metro riders. Their numbers are difficult to enumerate, but scholars have estimated that there are between 14,000 and 20,000 youth living and working on the streets of Mexico City. A serious problem in Mexico City, homeless youth are part of a larger, global phenomenon. UNICEF has estimated there are as many as 150 million children and adolescents living on the streets worldwide?the majority in megacities of the developing world. This project is one of the first in-depth studies of the social lives of homeless youth. The findings have the potential to inform policy and aid provision for homeless and at risk youth that live in cities across the developing world. Street youth are a ubiquitous feature of cities in the developing world. These cities are characterized by widespread informality as the majority of households have at least one member working in unregulated income-generating activities and many live in informal or self-help housing. Scholars have examined various aspects of informality in these cities but have largely overlooked the millions of street youth who are a unique component of informality in these cities. An understanding of these settings is incomplete without an investigation of the social worlds of such youth. Through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, life-history interviews, and archival research this project will offer a holistic understanding of the lives of these youth, how they interpret their situation, the complex culture that the youth create on the street, and how they contribute to life in the larger city. By filling a gap in the literature, this project adds to the sociological understanding of social dynamics that occur in cities of the developing world and offers the information necessary to create more effective interventions and programming to better serve the population.