My low life as a malandro began approximately two years ago when I used to tell my father that I wanted a pair of Nike shoes that cost eight thousand bolivars and he wouldn't give them to me. My father spent everything on horse races and alcohol. I was upset , and then a friend asked me if I wanted to have money. I told him "yes, I want to buy a pair of shoes and my father won't give me the money." The guy started to give me drugs to hide and would give me two thousand bolivars per week. As soon as I realized that everything was working well I bought the shoes I wanted and I always had money on my pockets to go out with the chicks.

In this narrative, Felix a seventeen-year-old I met at the Carolina youth detention center writes about his experience in becoming a malandro. His account points at the resources that young people find to gain material wealth and to create meaning in their lives as well as the risks they are willing to take. It ilustrates how identities of displaced youth in Caracas are negotiated within a context of scarcity and violence.
Representations of self are shaped and negotiated through the symbolic capital and the consumer goods available to the young individual or those he is capable of obtaining. The jordans, or new malandros, develop a style associated with Nike shoes and NBA haircuts. Like a bricoleur, the jordans pull together elements of material culture which are mass mediated, commercial and personalistic. Connections can appear odd as Japanese owned North American basketball culture dominates Venezuelan lower class culture.
These young people growing up on city streets possess particular styles of being which are created and contested in the context of many realisms, as we live in what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls a global cultural order, a world of many kinds of realism, some magical, some socialist, some capitalist and some that are yet to be named. Many realisms that are mass mediated and processed through the imagination. More people throughout the world see their lives through the prism of the possible lives offered by mass media, communications and commodities.
In the last thirty years of Venezuelan democratic history there have been periods of great economic wealth due to the increase in oil prices in the seventies, and times of crisis emerging from dropping oil prices and mismanagement of resources in the eighties and nineties. In the "Saudi Venezuela" of the seventies different groups of people rose indiscriminately and suddenly to positions of economic and political power. In the socio-economic crisis of the last decade class structures are shifting as what was previously considered by Venezuelan standards a middle class is no longer clear and it is assumed to be rapidly disappearing. This fluidity of class relations is a new ball game in Caracas. Youth groups in Caracas exemplify a different kind of class consciousness embedded in the structure of the country.
In Venezuela it is very difficult to separate the different youth styles as subsets of a category "culture" neatly bounded by class, age and racial differences. People from similar economic backgrounds and skin color, living close to each other can see themselves as very different kind of people. They identify with different style groups. Hegemonic culture at this point in time is not necessarily a middle class box but, culture which is contested, global and transnational.
The development of style creates a space for opposition and resistance only as it recognizes the symbolic elaboration of contradictions, of transactions between forces that cannot be reconciled in reality. Youth styles in Caracas are not expressions of "subculture" or simply rituals of resistance but idioms of the contradictions of society. They are about imaginary transcendence in the larger context of the violent city. A young man from a barrio sees that white collar corruption is accepted and often praised; the white collar man in jail, comes out a presidential candidate or returns to his high power job. The same young person believes women want a man with a vehicle, at least a motorcycle. He sees himself international and cool wearing Pepe jeans. He searches for the ways of obtaining what becomes important to him not necessarily attempting to fight the structural order of things.
Youth style in Caracas exists partly in the realm of fantasy. It is lived through the imagination and is less class reductive. For young people in Caracas style creates powerful habitus as there are different dreams of what is dominant culture (there are many realisms to participate in dominant culture). Superiority is contested because there are different dreams of what is superior. For the Jordans I met superiority is related to the rhythms of salsa music, the Nike shoes and their admiration for basketball heroes.
The possibility of wealth and fame through a sport, basketball or even baseball, or through salsa singing did not seem so far to them. They borrowed the success. At the "young" age of nineteen Jerry Rivera, a Puerto Rican salsa singer, is internationally famous. He has money, fame and even a wife and a baby. His salsa songs about love are an imagined life of fast success. The songs play back to these young people what they believe to be their own situations and experiences and provide a means of interpreting them.
Youth styles in Caracas are defined in relation to distinctive rituals of consumption and to commodities through their own unique logic. Consumption for the jordans is an action of the physical order involving transactions partly violent in themselves. The jordans take many risks to obtain the money or the things they want. Risks which often go beyond the easily imaginable. Many are willing to die or kill for a pair of shoes. The matter of factness of tragic events revolving around commodities and consumption is increasingly more common in Caracas. Shoe-related deaths gradually become the early morning news, party stories, metro conversation. What is shocking is the general sense of daily dispair that anyone can be killed at any time for a pair of shoes. A step further into the surreal and even more startling, is the fact that many youngsters refuse to give up their shoes and die, heroic? or foolish acts? or is the meaning of life so insignificant?
And the tragedies pile up to haunt the families such as the mother who with immense sacrifice provides the money for the son's stylish shoes and he gets killed for them. For instance, Wilkinson Guevara, sixteen-years-old was killed on January 6, 1994 after being robbed once two weeks before. The newspaper account says
On December 24 the youngster who was later killed had received a warning from a group who had tried to rob him of another pair of shoes. On that occasion they only hit him with the butt of the gun. On this Wednesday afternoon, however, when the youngster ran away the group fired the bullet that hours later caused his death (El Nacional, January 7,1994: D-1).
The mother, who had given him part of the fifteen thousand bolívares (the minimum monthly wage at that time) so he could buy another pair for new year's eve, was most angry at the fact that he could have lived if he had not lost so much blood because everyone at different hospitals refused to take care of him.
These tragedies over shoes, however, reveal far deeper problems within the community. Territorial disputes, problems over women, personal animosity... are mediated through commodities. Things such as Nike shoes or a Chicago Bulls' jacket have become a way of dialogue, a form of violent exchange where new definitions of honor and life values are emerging. People who grew older a few houses from each other are now fighting and killing each other for shoes.
Elvis at the Carolina center described in his diary how violent social relations are mediated through shoes:
It was on April 16 of this same year when due to an argument with some kids in my neighborhood I had to commit the biggest mistake of my life. That mistake was to kill one of the kids from the group bothering me and my compa(dre) named Jhon.
Well, everything started when every time they saw me they came to me traying to rob me and to humilliate me in front of any person who was around. It was then when I wanted revenge and I began to save to be able to buy a weapon to defend myself. Not many days went by before they found me with my compa Jhon and his brother and said:

- Take off your shoes and your jacket.

And my compadre said:

- Why are you going to rob my compadre?

And they answered:

- Don't get involved John because this has nothing to do with you.

I said, "look, I am not going to give you anything because I don't like it when anyobody tries to rob me" and then one of the guys placed a 38 on my stomach and said,

- Take off your shoes because I'm going to shoot you.

I got really upset and told them:

- Well, if you're going to do it, do it now because I'm not going to give you my things.

Then the guy moved the 38 even closer to me:

- Do you want to see how I shoot you?

- Well, just do it.

For a moment he was thoughtful and then shot me and I started to move back and so did he while saying:

- Guys, lets go that this guy is a lucky one.

- I wasn't yet dead.

Very few youngsters I met on the streets and at detention centers were willing to relinquish their style even though the possibilitites of having certain things such as expensive shoes could be dangerous.
In Venezuela, a country where transnational consumer culture came along with oil wealth, social mobility is often constructed in terms of symbolic capital. Power and status are embodied in particular styles. Today, for those with wealth habitus entails commodities such as cellular phones and expensive cars. For the youngsters from the shantytown having power, or truly being someone, means to have a gun, a motorcycle or brand name clothes. A malandro or Jordan might live in a rancho (shantyhouse) but he does not simply feel proletariat, working class, poor, or marginal when he develops a particular style with those commodities. Style is a way of living which transcends mere fashion or making a statement. It provides the youngsters with identity and a sense of belonging while simultaneously marking them as delinquents or potential delinquents.
Despite all of this, there is a general refusal to see young people on the streets as part of a complex social fabric whose lives occurs beyond the geographical boundaries of a boulevard, Caracas, Venezuela. These youngsters' lives on the streets with their Nintendo Dreams and Nike shoes are experienced in the context of larger global processes. Their imagination and tactics, are shaped within local and global forces -- police beatings, video game stores, Chicago bulls' products, salsa songs, or glue-- which generate new ways of thinking about youth in relation to consumption, the body, discipline and punishment. These people exist within larger frames of power which are both embodied and international, and which respond to pressures and conditions outside the realm of formal institutions and economic structures.
We have to open up spaces to listen to children and adolescents without trivializing and lessening their voices. There is an urgent need to develop new models for better understanding what it means to grow up under trying circumstances.