Fact and fiction in the lives of street kids

Abstract

The street is the public space that street youths inhabit as if it were their natural habitat, with a genuine vocation. In it they make their learning and project their life, whether they have a home or not, a biological family of support. The article presents the artistic, social, political and, above all, the human side of street youths, those who are part of a collective of rap, hip, hop, grafiti artists, who in the past were the orphan, the rogue and the vagabond. These young people are distinguished by the type of relationship they establish with the institutions of the State and by their resistance to the figure of authority such as the father, the policeman, the judge. To this end, they are consulted in articles, studies, research, as well as in the fictional corpus of the poem, the rap song, the novel and the film, by authors whose works left their mark, such as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Mateo Alemán, Charles Dickens, Patrick Süskind, Emma Reyes, Charles Chaplin, and Víctor Gaviria, mainly. The purpose is to present street youth from reality and fiction, after consulting and analyzing documents that offer an empirical, theoretical and symbolic content or discourse. The article reveals some constants in the world of street children and youths such as assertiveness and freedom and the changes that have taken place in aspects such as public policy for the protection of vulnerable populations and the form of rebellion or resistance that they assume as a feature of their identity. The street has the connotation of threatened public space, of potential risk or danger, but also of substitute home, school of life and space where interests, expectations and dreams of the collective converge.