Relational Mobility of Street-Connected Youth in Urban Northeast Brazil

Abstract

This article scrutinises the relational processes regarding how street-connected young people's families, relationships and societal influence affect their mobility and vice versa, and how these young people navigate between important settings in their lives. It explores how street-connected youth practise and describe their decision-making regarding socio-spatial mobility in relation to the multiple settings in which they move. The study draws on ethnographic data collected in two Brazilian cities—Recife in 2018–2019 and Salvador in 2022–2023—with fifteen street-connected young people. The article illustrates how young people's movement within survival was fundamentally formed in relations with others, while not ruling out the existence of their own agency in these mobility practices. The results elaborate on the nuanced contexts in which the young people were both thrown out of and ran away from difficult situations. The article argues that, despite their desire to move, street-connected youth are not solely agents moving as they wish; rather, their mobility decisions are relationally embedded in both society and the people around them. Thus, street-connected young people's relational mobility practices and multilocality need to be recognised in related policy and practice.