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This article explores the childhood of a Mexican Indigenous activist, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, who was born in 1963 in the Oaxacan market town of Tlaxiaco. Growing up in poor circumstances, Gatica would become a leader in the social movements that between the 1980s and early 2000s pushed Mexico toward gradual democratic reform. The article seeks to describe what it was like to grow up poor and Indigenous at a time (later dubbed the Mexican Miracle) of impressive social and economic advances. Paying special attention to the experience of racial abuse, the article also asks how Gatica's childhood came to inform his political militancy. While other historians have linked the phenomenon of political radicalism in twentieth-century Latin America to particular social conditions, or to the influence and adaptation of global ideologies, this article seeks the origins of Gatica's radicalism in the experience of a racialised childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I was so unimpressed with the city council. ... They had a line of homeless people who were allowed to vote because Kevin [Michael Key] was running for councilman and everything. So, they wanted IDs ... [The person tabling] asked me, "Well I need some id. Do you have any ID?" And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any id. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible. He was just going through the motions of making the sound. But he didn't know he was dealing with R-C-B. So when I dropped my passport, and I do mean dropped my passport on the table, that's when I got respect. —RCB, Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. "And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible." As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how young Brazilian men from poorer areas transcend socio-geographical boundaries by inhabiting the streets of an elite neighbourhood. Drawing on several periods of qualitative fieldwork, the article demonstrates the complex and dynamic character of the relationship between the young men and the formal residents and traders. It reveals temporal patterns of day and night, where the young men's social positions shift from subordinate diurnal (as serving workers) to dominant nocturnal positions (as potential attackers). Analysing the interactional patterns between the two groups regarding sentiments of trust and fear, the multifaceted and sometimes incoherent relations reveal social inclusion and exclusion as well as street protection and crime. The article also dismantles some common dichotomies within research on crime and fear of crime, emphasising that these young men are both victims and offenders, fearful and fearsome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relief of travellers in Warwickshire, England. By using an unusually rich set of Constables’ Accounts for the parish of Grandborough, it interrogates the relationship between charity, local justice, and both official and popular perceptions of migration. It argues that the large number of migrants who passed through rural parishes were categorised by the local constable according to cultural and discretionary criteria. This ‘typology’ of travellers determined the nature and extent of the relief they might receive and the actions that might be taken against them. Socially threatening migrants, such as poor pregnant women, the sick, and vagrants, also found themselves affected by this same ‘proscriptive calculation’, often to their detriment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on homelessness tends to focus on risk factors in people's social and personal lives that contribute to their situation of being without a permanent home. Alternatively, the following describes innate factors of intimate relationships that contribute to a situation of homelessness for men and women. We conducted interviews with 61 people experiencing homelessness in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We were particularly interested in documenting with greater specificity their perceptions of their individual pathways to and from homelessness. Three themes emerged from the data describing the intersection between respondents’ intimate relationships and their situation of homelessness: (1) relationship breakdown; (2) the role and impact of having intimate partners during a period of homelessness; and (3) the nature of the intimate relationship and its impact on housing. The data suggest that aspects of intimate relationships should be considered by social service agencies when addressing a person's situation of homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]