The importance of looking at the border from a young person's perspective

Abstract

This essay reviews and interrogates a writing contest for high school students in Baja California in terms of the ways it elaborates worldviews with a specific focus on common and fundamental elements of perception (symbolic forms) that are then changed by students' focus on their surroundings and themselves. These issues appear and were expressed in the selected texts of the young participants.

Keywords:

• youth
• border
• culture
• perception
• symbolic forms

Notes

Educational Services Department.

Center for Cultural Research – Museum.

A very common border expression used to describe the US; the literal meaning is ‘the other side’. (Translator's note.)

Folk songs that chronicle fictional or non-fictional people and events. (Translator's note.)

One's neighborhood and source of social identify and affiliation. (Translator's note.)