We Are the Nobodies

Adolescents’ first steps into crime in contemporary Colombia

Drawing on the research I have been conducting since 2015 in the urban peripheries in and around Medellín, Colombia, my current book project explores the lives and perspectives of adolescents who operate at the verges of criminal groups. I argue that joining a gang and becoming a dealer is, for these young people, not a process of progressive emancipation, but rather a spiral of gradual entanglement in a universe that looks at the same time attractive and scary. I also show that these youth are much less content with their criminal lifeways than we may think they are. They keep changing their mind and going back and forth between the school and the street. In this way, the book illustrates the human cost of organized crime on the lives of its most petty workers.