Playing the ‘pibe chorro’ game: masculine skills and legitimate peripheral participation in street culture

ABSTRACT

In this article, I analyse the street learning that a group of boys in a poor neighbourhood in Argentina produce when they play at being ‘pibes chorros’. Through the observation of interviews, photos and audio recordings made in the neighbourhood since 2010, I show how these games are occasions for boys to learn to pretend they know how to steal and to recreate a masculine image of toughness in order to cope with both street life and local working life. In this way, street culture, which in other studies is often seen as a constraint on available educational opportunities, in this article is a central place for learning by legitimate peripheral participation to occur (Lave and Wenger [1991]. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The masculine acquisitions and skills of street play allow these boys greater preparation and participation social for life in highly formal spaces such as oil, the police and the local state.

KEYWORDS:

• Play
• street culture
• masculinity
• legitimate peripheral participation
• situated learning

Ethics declarations

The requirement for approval was waived by the ethics committee.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the collaboration of the protagonists, as well as for the comments and suggestions of the journal's anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The name of the neighbourhood is real, but the names of the protagonists have been changed for confidentiality purposes. I use inverted commas to highlight the use of native words and italics to reference concepts of authors.

2 Translation of the Spanish version.

3 A recent review of the concept of street culture (Ross 2021) suggests the development of a dynamic and heuristic process model, in multiple domains and through different practices and forms of interaction.

4 “Porro”, “faso” and “churro” are used as synonyms among my acquaintances in the neighbourhood to refer to cannabis or marijuana cigarettes (joints).

5 Confronting and threatening someone.

6 Being high from smoking marijuana (stoned).

Additional information

Funding

The work was financed by the Universidad Nacional del Comahue within the framework of the Research Project C174 ‘The school and post-pandemic educational processes: ethnography on the sociability experiences of boys and girls in primary schools in Río Negro’ (2024–2027).