Rural youth: conceptual and experiential explorations in fellow students

Abstract

The article makes a conceptual and experiential exploration of rural young people from the provincial admission program of the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Higher University of San Andres). The first approach carried out is the conceptual revision of the definitions of rural youth, in which the perspective of the sociocultural construction and the valorization as social actors are retaken. A second aspect refers to migration and identities of rural youth, in which the main study perspectives are described: the loss of identity and acculturation, self-identification and cultural affirmation, the latter being presented in the study carried out. The third aspect addresses the socio-discursive constructions from the voices and trajectories of young rural scholarship holders about their youth identity: "being young"; their institutional-university identity: "young university students"; and their ethnic-cultural identity: "rural and indigenous youth". The latter being the evidence that this group of young scholarship recipients do not lose their identity during their transit through the university, but rather affirms itself in relation to their territorial bond, their culture, and their family and community ties.