Youth Power in Precarious Times: Interview with Melissa Brough (Part Two)

Why did you choose Medellin, Colombia, as the focus for your project? What makes this city a particularly rich site for understanding "youth power in precious times"?

I first visited Medellín in 2009 to attend the Our Media/Nuestros Medios conference on community/participatory media. I was struck by the ways in which Medellín was rebranding itself as a participatory city, with taglines like, “Medellín gobernable y participativa” (“Medellín, governable and participatory”). The Mayor’s Office had pasted its insignia and phrases like this throughout the city. On the very same streets, I noticed graffiti messages about non-violence and participation, or witnessed hip hop concerts in which young people were talking about making their voices heard and engaging in community development. It seemed like everywhere I turned people were invoking the idea of participation as a way to stabilize and rebuild a city that had been devastated by narcotrafficking and urban warfare. 

Until the early 2000s, Medellín had been famous on the world stage as the murder capital of the world and the home of the notorious drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. In 2004 the Compromiso Ciudadano party (which can be translated as “Civic Engagement” or “Citizens’ Commitment” ) came into power -- the first independent party to hold the Mayor’s office -- built on a unique coalition that included leaders of grassroots organizers as well as business leaders and others.  The administration oversaw the development of dramatic changes to the urban landscape, like park libraries, situated in some of the poorest parts of the city. These served as striking physical symbols of their various efforts to integrate poorer neighborhoods and make the city more stable and governable. 

During this period Medellín enjoyed an era of relative peace and became internationally recognized for its urban revitalization projects -- so much so that some even referred to it (hyperbolically, I would argue) as “the miracle of Medellín.” In 2013, for example, Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal, and the Urban Land Institute named Medellin, Colombia, the “Innovative City of the Year,” describing Medellín’s transformation thus: 

“Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, has in the past 20 years. Medellín’s homicide rate has plunged, nearly 80% from 1991 to 2010. The city built public libraries, parks, and schools in poor hillside neighborhoods and constructed a series of transportation links from there to its commercial and industrial centers. . . . The local government, along with businesses, community organizations, and universities worked together to fight violence and to modernize Medellín. . . . In addition, Medellín is one of the largest cities to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to define priorities and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community organizations, health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens to declare ownership of their neighborhoods.”

 During this period the city also fashioned itself as an emerging digital hub of Latin America, drawing tech companies like Hewlett Packard to open regional offices there, and launching a number of digital portals with the stated aim of cultivating more “digital citizens”. These initiatives had varying degrees of success, but nonetheless added to the ethos of citizen participation that the Compromiso Ciudadano party was advocating.  

So the first reason I felt Medellín was an important site of study was because of the strategic use of discourses of participation at multiple levels of society, from the grassroots to the business sector to government officials. The second reason was that young people had been both the primary protagonists and victims of the violence that had decimated the city’s social fabric. This was largely due to an economic downturn and political disenfranchisement suffered by the city’s low-income youth, who often felt they had no better choice than to join a gang. Young people were recruited by multiple armed actors, from street gangs to guerrilla groups to paramilitaries to carry out their violent biddings in what some described as a “death market.” At the same time, young people also became central actors in the non-violent social movements that were struggling to shift the dynamics of violence.   

One of my first interviews with youth in Medellín was with two hip hop artists/activists who lived in Comuna 13, one of the poorest and most notoriously violent parts of the city. At the end of our interview they offered to give me the cell phone numbers of some officials in the mayor’s office. In Colombia, large municipal governments have a relatively high degree of autonomy and power, and operate somewhat like city-states in which mayors enjoy fairly high-profile visibility and influence. What’s more, the city’s political elite had traditionally been just that -- elite, quite distanced from the lower-income communities in the city. So I was rather surprised that youth from one of the most marginalized communities in the city had a direct line to the city’s center of power. As I investigated this dynamic I realized that it was a sign of the ways in which the people of Medellín, under the two Compromiso Ciudadano administrations (Mayor Sergio Fajardo, 2004-2007, and Mayor Alonso Salazar, 2008-2011) were cultivating an ecology of participation unlike any I personally had ever seen before. As I describe in the book, it was a civic polyculture, in which the participation of youth from low-income neighborhoods was, at its best, valued as much as that of civil society organizations or political institutions. This polycultural ecosystem of participation was a key dynamic in helping to transform the city -- and harnessing youth power toward that end. For all of these reasons, it offered an important case study for understanding the powerful role young people can play in challenging and changing systems of inequality, violence, economic precarity, and injustice. 

As I describe in the final chapter of my book, the case of Medellín offers several insights that are relevant around the globe today pertaining to: the disconnection between youth and traditional civic and political institutions; democracy-building and peace-building; participatory budgeting, which is growing in popularity in several countries including the U.S. and Canada; and fostering meaningful digital participation, citizenship and activism, among others. I also describe the limitations of discourses and practices of participation while still offering a hopeful way forward. 

All of that said, the way forward is not to reify youth power, placing all hope in future generations as a way for those currently in power to turn a blind eye or remain complicit while public institutions around the world are floundering and human societies seem to be careening toward global ecological disaster. Youth Power in Precarious Times advocates listening to, empowering, and engaging youth voices -- but not as a way to abdicate older generations’ (including my own) immediate responsibility and accountability for the impact of our actions on the future. It is not their job to save us.

Works Cited

Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari, eds. Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books, 2001.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum, 2003.

Garcés Montoya, Ángela. Nos-otros los Jóvenes: Polisemias de las Culturas y los Territorios Musicales en Medellín. Medellín, Colombia: Universidad de Medellín, 2005.

Gumucio Dagron, Alfonso, and Thomas Tufte, eds. Communication for Social Change Anthology: Historical and Contemporary Readings. South Orange, NJ: cfsc Consortium, 2016.

Participatory Budgeting Project, https://www.participatorybudgeting.org/case-studies/

Reguillo, Rossana. Culturas Juveniles: Formas Políticas del Desencanto. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2013.

Riaño, Pilar. Women in Grassroots Communication: Furthering Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994.

Rodríguez, Clemencia. Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict: Disrupting Violence in Colombia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

 Melissa Brough is Assistant Professor of Communication & Technology in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University Northridge. Her research focuses on the relationships between digital communication, civic/political engagement and social change. Much of her work considers the role of communication technology in the social, cultural, and political lives of youth from historically disenfranchised groups. Her research has been published in Social Media + Society, Mobile Media and Communication, the International Journal of Communication, and the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, among others. Her first book, Youth Participation in Precarious Times: The Power of Polycultural Civics (2020), is now available from Duke University Press.

For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount please visit Youth Power in Precarious Times: Reimagining Civic Participation and enter the coupon code E20BROGH at checkout.