Indigenous young people of Latinamerica and the Caribbean, face a significant and unfair social discrimination, and often institucional.

Indigenous populations usually live in less accesible places, as mountainous regions, forests and their conditions of poverty and social exclusion are evident. Those who live on urban areas, deal with discrimination and acculturation problems.

Lots of indigenous young men, specially women, only speak their native language and find development difficulties on the prevalent culture. Education systems are not bilingual in general, this operates as another element of discrimination and exclusion for indigenous young people.
From the Portal we intend to promote the promotion of our town’s ancestral cultures, and a bigger dialogue and integration among young people from different cultures, on the perspective of acknowledgment and the respect for ethnic and cultural diversity of our region, value as patrimony to preserve.

We are the Latin American Inter religious Network of the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP), formed by representatives of organizations related to young people and Latin American catholic students, protestants, evangelical, jewish, muslim, baha’i and indigenous. Our net promotes the interchange, training, dialogue and cooperation among the different youths of faith, mobilizing them towards peace construction, the transformation of conflicts and sustainable development.

During great part of the XX Century, students (specially collegians) were considered as the paradigm of youth. This was because of the great visibility of student movements, participating of big political and social dynamics on most part of Latin American countries.

But the recent changes on the last decades, on the dynamics of  average and superior education, that in almost every countries of the region implied a substantive extension of matriculation (made massive) caused by the income of a great contingent of middle and lower class young people who traditionally did not accede to this educative levels (made heterogeneous) change the situation radically.

Nowadays, nobody speaks anymore about THE student movements (in singular and in capital letters) instead it is common to make reference -more and more everyday- to THE student movements (in plural and in small letters) trying to reflect the enormous disparity of specific existent situations, among students from public and private establishments, elitists and popular, etc.

A separate chapter are having –in this frame- secondary students (or average education) that have advanced notoriously lately regarding to organization and active public presence, claiming for more and better conditions in order to  process their journey and permanence on the educative system, despite the many difficulties about it. A great presence of young women, in many of this organized new expressions, show the “new sensitivities” about this issue.

In any case, the dynamic of this important sector of young people, is still a prior issue on the public politics agenda and still have a relevant place on the priorities of researches and studies on youth that are being performed regularly on different countries of the region.

In this section of the Portal, we will try to reflect –indeed- this dynamics, providing information and the corresponding analysis, in the best possible way. We are sure that –this way- we will be contributing with technical and political reflection about it, and encouraging the design and implementation of public politics in the future, aiming to the improve the formation of human resources and citizen participation.

Affected by an evident “double exclusión” (by age and gender) young women from Latin America and the Caribbean are a very relevant group and count on a great specificity in terms of characteristics and identities. Largely, they have achieved notorious advances on their effective incorporation to relevant domains of the public dynamic (educative and labor insertion for example) but still are affected centrally by serious problems on the private dynamic (subordination relations, domestic violence, etc) and barely participate on social movements, as much in the youthful ones as in those for women, on a frame where the first ones are directed overwhelmingly by men and the second by grown women.

This section of the Portal tries to reflect –in the best possible way- the specificities of this important juvenile sector, providing elements that allow to characterize their identity profiles, their life conditions, their expectations and aspirations and their proposals and specific reclamations. For this, we resort to investigations and studies, as to designed programs, implemented and/or evaluated that incorporate them dynamically. This way, the Portal assumes as one of its central axes, the gender approach, differentiating the dynamic of young men and women of the region, at all levels.