[R-G] 2010: Year of the Nini

[Romi Elnagar]

2010: Year of the Nini
				
				
					
				

By Kent Patterson

If Time magazine had any inkling of sense, it would name the Nini the person of the year for 2010. Just what, you might ask, is a Nini? Adopted in Mexico during the crisis, the slang word means a young person who does not work or study

In Mexico, the Nini has been front and center in the press 
in recent days. Surrounding the World Youth Conference held late last 
month in the central Mexican city of Leon, Guanajuato, a sharp polemic 
developed over the number of Ninis in the country and the government’s response to them.

Reacting to different reports of upwards of eight million Ninis
 in the country, a good half million of whom are estimated have enlisted
 in the ranks of organized crime, officials from the federal interior 
and education ministries claimed the number was exaggerated and only 
about 280,000 idle youth were  in the land.

Alonso Lujambio, secretary of education, inflamed the debate when he declared that estimates of  millions of Ninis
 devalue the young women who stay home to raise families and perform 
domestic chores.  Wasn´t it a woman who works for him that first said 
this?

A torrent of ridicule gushed forth on the Internet and from prominent
 personalities. Jose Narro, rector of the prestigious National 
Autonomous University of Mexico, joined the verbal fray. Refuting 
Calderon administration officials’ low estimate, Narro insisted that 
million of Ninis did indeed exist and it was incumbent on the government to do something about the problem.

Aureliano Pena Lomeli, rector of the Autonomous University of 
Chapingo, Mexico’s main agricultural school, was quoted as saying the 
crisis was even worse for the country’s rural youth. According to Pena, 
less than one in ten rural youth pursue higher education.

The Nini is not just a Mexican phenomenon. According to the 
International Labor Organization, 81 million young people across the 
globe were unemployed at the end of 2009. Enough to populate a country 
the size of Iran, the legions of jobless youth represent “the highest 
number ever,” in the words of the ILO.

Globally, massive youth unemployment is the backdrop for the United 
Nations International Youth Year, which kicked off in August. A report 
prepared for the ILO warned of a “lost generation” made up of young 
people who “have dropped out of the labour market, having lost all hope 
of being able to work for a decent living”.

If any place could be considered the epicenter of the Nini, 
it might be violence-torn Ciudad Juarez on the Mexico-US border. With 
few opportunities for earning livable wages in the galleys of the 
foreign-owned export assembly plants and economically excluded from 
advanced education, youth are easily recruited as look-outs, contraband 
smugglers, drug dealers and killers by rival drug cartels.

Ciudad Juarez’s young have topped the list of among the more than 
6,000 murder victims since 2008. Of 1,623 murders reported in the border
 city between 2008 and early 2010, 1,073 were against persons less than 
26 years of age, according to the Reforma news service. 
Separately, Mexican journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio reported that 54 
percent of the victims of the narco war throughout the country during 
2008 and 2009 were aged 21 to 35.

Symbolized by the massacre of 15 young people at a party in the 
Ciudad Juarez neighborhood of Villas de Salvarcar last January, the 
slaughter has produced another new word for the popular vocabulary: juvencidio- “youthcide.”

The needs of young people languish at the bottom of the public policy
 priority list. While Mexico’s federal government pledges $300 million 
to reconstruct Ciudad Juarez, it doles out $6 billion to beef up 
security forces.

For many youth, criminality is the “only option,” said Julian 
Contreras, a young activist with Ciudad Juarez’s Plural Citizens Front. 
“We are in a country where there is no future for us as young people, 
and this is blowing up and radicalizing us,” Contreras said in an 
interview earlier this year.  Contreras’ group has protested 
militarization, violence and government human rights violations.

For decades the Mexican Nini was a phantom, hidden in large 
measure by the entrance of young immigrant workers into the US labor 
market.  Now, however, the economic crash in El Norte coupled with the  
border security crackdown have pushed the contradictions of high 
unemployment, limited educational opportunities and the raging narco war
 to a boiling point. The multi-faceted crisis has erupted at precisely 
the moment when Mexico is experiencing a so-called “demographic bonus” 
of people in the 15-29 age group.

Ninis have long been a part of the US social landscape too, 
though largely shunned by media, government and the broader society. Who
 remembers the thousands of inner-city youth killed during the crack 
wars of the 1980s and early 1990s? The young people of color who 
continue meeting violent deaths in places like Oakland and Chicago?

Routinely, millions of US Ninis are funneled into the prison-industrial complex or military. Now, there appears to be more Ninis than ever.

In July, the peak month of summertime employment, the US Bureau of 
Labor Statistics reported that only 48.9 percent of young people aged 
16-24 were in the workforce–the lowest number on record since statistics
 first began to be collected back in 1948. The Washington, D.C.-based 
Center for American Progress earlier reported the number of young people
 aged 20-24 who attend school in the United States dropped by 10 percent
 from 2008 to early 2010. As always, unemployment strikes youth of 
color–immigrant and non-immigrant–the hardest.

“This is a state of emergency,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson on his 
weekly radio program. On August 28, Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition 
joined with the United Auto Workers to lead a march of several thousand 
people for jobs, justice and peace in Detroit, Michigan, a city that has
 suffered the hemorrhaging of thousands of well-paid industrial jobs to 
Mexico and other low-wage havens. Like Ciudad Juarez, Detroit is a place
 beset by soaring youth unemployment, crammed with tens of thousands of 
abandoned homes and littered with dashed dreams.

The Detroit-Ciudad Juarez model is spreading. While record U.S. 
military budgets enrich the satraps of empire, states like California 
and Arizona  turn away university applicants, classrooms bulge with 
overcrowding coast-to-coast and government support for both basic and 
higher education is dwindling.

It has been said that a society can be judged by the way it treats 
its young and old. 

Currently in vogue in the United States and other 
so-called developed countries, proposals to extend the retirement age 
portend denying even more job opportunities to the young while promising
 prolonged pain and slashed benefits for the elderly.

Some youth are fighting back, perhaps even in a prelude to a 
1968-style revolt- considering the numbers of frustrated young in the 
world. So far, their success has been mixed. Young people were in the 
forefront of recent protests in Greece against an austerity regime. 

Inspiring broad popular support against cutbacks, university students in
 Puerto Rico occupied their campus for weeks this year and forced 
concessions from administrators. Young faces were prominent at the U.S. 
Social Forum held this summer in Detroit under the slogan “Another World
 is Possible, Another US is Necessary.”

In multi-cultural California and other states, students are joining 
with faculty and workers to stage an October 7 action for public 
education.  Significantly, the protest coincides with the anniversary of
 the Afghanistan war.

At the World Youth Conference, attended by more than 27,000 people 
from about 100 countries, Calderon Cabinet member Felix Guerra implored 
the young to not become “victims of circumstances” and blame their 
parents, their government and their world for the state of affairs. 
Urging young people to become entrepreneurs, Guerra evoked the “four Ms”
 as the solution: “market, market, market, market.”

For activists like Julian Contreras, laissez-faire capitalism, which 
has trounced the globe for nearly three decades, is precisely the 
problem. “Deep, drastic changes are needed–a change in economic policy 
and a more equitable distribution of wealth and not just spare change,” 
Contreras contended. “What we Mexicans need are real opportunities for 
development and education.” Collective activism, he said, is the key to a
 “better future, a better planet.”

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who covers the 
southwestern United States, Mexico, and Latin America. He is an analyst 
for the Americas Program at www.cipamericas.org
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/3050