In Latin America, 60% of the population is under 30 years of age. This demographic fact, in itself, demonstrates the importance of youth and adolescents in the region. However, the young people represented in public and media discourses are often criminalized, infantilized and shown, in a reductive way, as problematic people or groups destined for consumption.

The essays gathered in this volume arose in the context of the Graduate Academy "Perspectivas de los jóvenes frente a las crisis. Identity, violence, social inequality and environment" that CALAS held in early April 2018 at its main venue in Guadalajara, Mexico. The main objective of the congress was to convene young graduate students (masters, doctoral and postdoctoral) belonging to Latin American and German universities to present academic papers around the general topic of crises in Latin America and their possible ways of solution.

The articles give rise to new debates on segregation, racism, public policies, environment, multiplicity of violence, emergence of new affectivities and interactions that remain alive and seek ways of legitimacy, despite the fact that in official discourses young people continue to be stigmatized, from essentialist ideas that tend to represent them as people inclined to exercise gratuitous violence, often incapable of adapting to the social order accepted by majorities. Faced with such a state of affairs, the young researchers propose reflective guidelines, in order to investigate how it would be possible to deal with so many public devices that, obsessively, have forged all kinds of schematic representations when linking the idea of youth with phenomena of social crisis.