School, consumption and the labour market: "Youth" production among young immigrants

If we accept the fact that youth is a social construct hardly reducible to a natural stage of people's biological cycle, the questions that need to be answered would be the following: How is youth constructed? Is this a plural phenomenon?, and if so, which are the elements which make possible the differentiation of young people? Can ethnicity be considered as the key element in young people differentiation? Without denying the importance of elements such as ethnicity or young people families' place of origin in this construction of differentiated youths, the aim of this article is to emphasize the relevance of the production of differenciated youths in other dimensions such as the access to consumption, the employment and educational careers or the construction of employment predisposition, all of them differentiation mechanisms to reconstruct the old ethnic differentiations. This research was carried out by means of the analysis of almost a hundred of opened interviews to immigrant young people and through additional statistical data about the professional transition of young people in Spain.