1. Introduction and methods1

2Out of all these, mass consumption has provided new perspectives on how to understand and manage the advancement of youth. Among many, the transition from a symbiotic status as a family member to that of an independent and culturally aware individual has been interpreted through it. That is to say, the shift from the natural act of ‘giving life’ to that of embracing social life (Miller 2010: 178-189), a phenomenon that has also fascinated ethnologists of traditional societies (Mead 1928). Yet, despite the originality of these studies, little attention has been paid to similar phenomena of social management of growth outside the ‘classical’ agency assigned to this role: the blood family, contained within the domestic walls.

3In the face of a proliferation of conceptions of ‘family’ in marginal contexts in the Global South and in the inner margins of the North, it is worth considering how these common forms of accompaniment to growth, mediated by consumption, extend beyond the biological boundaries of the household. Besides complicating the possible meanings of the articulation between kinship, growth and consumption, this question highlights perhaps the most profound removed aspect of previous theories: the creative role of youth in developing exchanges through which social and age-related development is managed from below within the fabric of the market, yet beyond its supposed utilitarian principles. What happens when young people – navigating domestic and family voids – take it upon themselves to invent rituals and processes for managing social development according to age differences? Since the 1970s, a number of schools of (sub)cultural studies have addressed this issue by analysing the processes through which young people devise horizontal forms of social growth that are parallel or alternative to the vertical structures of biological families (Hall, Jefferson 1975; Thornton 1995; Cova, Cova 2001). However, whether the focus was on the relationship between class and generational identity (Hall, Jefferson 1975) or the postmodern consumption of more fluid global repertoires (Thornton 1995; Shields 1992), the emphasis remained on youth’s semantic reinterpretation of market cultural products. Little attention was paid to the minute, everyday and material observation of the concrete exchange practices through which young people intervene in the life cycles of goods, participate in related «value contestations» (Long, Villarreal 2002), and consequently render them global products in constant flux between commodification and decommodification. In short, while the contemporary anthropology of material culture has relegated young people to the status of subjects of devotion (Miller 2010) within households where consumption is the primary vehicle for establishing kinship alongside biological bonds, cultural studies have emphasised the youth agency precisely beyond those same bonds. However, they fail to ground the discourse in the materiality of the relationships, exchanges and objects through which young people construct horizontal alternatives for social and age-related growth.

4In this article, I seek to ethnographically integrate this gap focusing on a young community on the western U.S.-Mexico border. Tijuana (Mexico) is a social context dotted with public spaces for socialising, where the fragility of blood family ties among young people often coexists with their exposure to mass-produced goods arriving as scrap from the North. These objects constitute the main reserve of local popular consumption – regardless of age – while also often moving through anti-utilitarian exchange circuits in which young people act as both protagonists and directors. By tracing the final stages of the social lives of some of these discarded goods, I reveal the consumption and exchange strategies through which young people «de-commodify» them (Kopytoff 1986) for transforming them into material vehicles that facilitate processes of social transition between cultural conceptions of adolescence and young adulthood, as well as social reproduction from below. By bridging influential theories on youth, consumption and gift, respectively, I highlight some omissions in each field and propose their integration through an ethnographic border case study.

5After providing a contextualisation based on literature about, respectively, youth and mass consumption, and material culture and border «systems of provision» (Fine 2002), in the third section I describe some of the habits through which young people engage in what can be defined as altruistic consumption of scrap commodities in Tijuana. This represents the beginning of the de-commodification process of specific mass goods, which then undergo subsequent non-utilitarian circulations. Consequently, the fourth section explores the exchange circuits through which these items leave local street markets to become gifts that collectively facilitate the movement through an «emerging adulthood» (Arnett 2000) based on a young community’s social conceptions of value and age.

6By allowing the subjects and objects at the heart of this ethnography to speak for themselves, I am advocating for the restoration of young people as active participants in the de-commodification processes of consumer goods. The latter are some of the most immediate tools for devising collective strategies to ‘grow together’ in a context of family fragmentation and precarity. These material modalities, which characterise the social reproduction of specific youth groups in Tijuana, confirm well-established developments in economic anthropology while also complicating others through a dialogue between anthropology of consumption and youth studies. On the one hand, the circuits of altruistic consumption and gift at the core of this work reinforce the continuist hypothesis that the intertwining of market economies and non-utilitarian exchanges is the norm in most modern moral economies, rather than the exception (Hann, Hart 2009). However – compared to the anthropology of consumption that has helped consolidate such positions – my case portrays young people as autonomous, creative and active actors in such socio-economic strategies, rather than as ‘immobile’, ‘accessory’ and ‘exceptional’ counterpoints who are «allowed to be explicitly materialistic» (Miller 2017: 433) in the domestic forms of commodity moralisation. This shift is only possible by following the everyday paths through which youths – in the institutional and social voids of Tijuana – reconstruct family and domesticity within networks of peers and places of practice. Some studies on subcultures have already adopted this perspective ethnographically, though they rarely focus on the minute, interstitial and seemingly trivial exchange practices through which young people interact with commodities beyond the classic dichotomy of cultural resistance and hegemony in general (Hall, Jefferson 1975), and especially in my ethnographic area (Cruz, Nateras 2020).

7Therefore, this work lies within an anthropology of everyday consumption, of ‘minor’ social facts and interstitial transactions through which culture is reproduced. However, unlike the classic reference literature, I apply this lens to the ordinary life of a youth group within a field – the border – which is generally considered a stage for understanding the ‘grand questions’ of global contemporaneity. Contrary to popular belief, yet according to previous studies (Long, Villarreal 2002), the latter are not overlooked at all through an ethnography of micro-practices. Rather, they are reconsidered and tested against the concrete exchanges and conceptions of value of a youth community that adopt ‘humble’ goods to autonomously respond to dilemmas about social reproduction imposed by border precarity.

8The article is based on open-ended and unstructured interviews, dialogues noted down and transcribed in field diaries and prolonged periods of participation in the daily transactions and practices of my interlocutors for a total of fifteen months between 2022 and 2024 (Buchetti 2025). Unlike other results derived from the same work, in this article the names of adult interlocutors have been retained after various verbal discussions with them about the purpose and content of this article, which they would like to see recognised and attributed to their own voices, practices and inventive exchanges in Tijuana.

2. Youth, consumption, and coming of age

9Psychology and pedagogy were among the first disciplines to address the issue of young people’s agency and their social subjectivation, creating categories that defined their cultural roles according to age. Terms such as «prolonged adolescence» (Erikson 1968), «novice phase» (Levinson 1978) and «youth» (Keniston 1971) emerged at a time when young people were definitively entering the Western global stage, causing major upheavals to the psycho-sociological certainties of the time. However, early anthropology, based on proverbial encounters with ‘the exotic’, had already highlighted a dual urgency in the social study of youth. Firstly, the cultural relativisation of the Western categories used to define its boundaries (Wyn, White 1997), even within the context of universal human rights in their nascent stage. Secondly, it drew attention to the processual dimension – rather than the stages – with which different societies develop collective forms of socio-demographic transition.

10However, as the social sciences have begun to portray young people as the new subjects of post-industrial capitalism, a polarisation of approaches has emerged according to various «mythical extremes» (Blanch 1979: 130). In critical studies, young people come to represent the primary product of mass consumption: a new class – beyond class – exploited by the false consciousness of a society of opulence and ephemeral desire. Conversely, the concept of «youth» (Keniston 1971) emerged in an era where young people were challenging Western petit-bourgeois conservatism and the meanings codified in its mass culture, both politically and culturally (Hall, Jefferson 1975). Thus, consumption emerged as a significant topic of sociological study in the second half of the twentieth century, while simultaneously fragmenting the possibilities of its interpretation into subsumption and resistance, «exploitation» and «empowerment» (Cook 2008).

11Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the two fields underpinning these topics – the anthropology of consumption and cultural studies – only partially overlap in terms of their respective potentials. One achievement of the second tradition is the exploration of young Westerners venturing beyond the boundaries of home (Hebdige 1979). Adopting an ethnographic approach to collective forms of leisure, boredom, conviviality, and performance, these studies have revealed the resistant and transformative potential of everyday youth sociability in relation to capitalist lifestyles and the cultural industry’s meanings (Lury 1996). However, they have rarely allowed themselves to observe youth consumption as inventive networks of material exchange and value contestation ‘in practice’. Instead, they have remained on a semantic and identity-based level of analysis, overlooking the concrete objects and gestures that are motivated by minute yet emically urgent social concerns. Although they have been accurate in identifying the ways in which young people ‘make family’ beyond biological ties, the focus on identity has obscured the practical, material and moral processes through which such horizontal youth affiliations develop.

13Modern anthropology of consumption and material culture has therefore succeeded in disproving the inevitability of homo oeconomicus precisely where it seemed to have shaped the contemporary world in its own image and measure. Nevertheless, his presence continues to haunt it, much like a demographic ‘ghost’, as an «adult male figure who continue to animate the neoclassical thought, but who also lurks in and around theoretical accounts of cultural consumption» (Cook 2008: 222). Although a careful reading easily invalidates the gender critique (Miller 1998), it is undeniable that young people feature prominently in this field as modernity’s new objects of devotion (Miller 2010). However, their active role in the moralisation of domestic commodities for shaping familiar ties remains overlooked. Children and adolescents are often referred to as the people who create the link between profit-making environments (such as supermarkets) and domestic spaces (such as the family home), through which the simple act of purchasing can be transformed into an emotional investment. However, whether we are talking about daily shopping (Miller 1998) or periodic gift-giving occasions (Carrier 2004), young people are excluded from the practical acts by which consumer products foster social cohesion and intimacy. They make these processes possible as presences, but they have no say – or rather no hand – over them as actors. This raises the question of whether the role of young people in developing a material and creative theory of consumption should currently be limited to their formal inclusion and proxy participation in spaces shared with blood relatives. A more likely scenario would be for youth to be recognised as having their own moral demands, which would influence the way they interact with mass goods, navigating specific strategies of profit, exchange, commodification and decommodification.

14The community of young skateboarders that I worked with in Tijuana is well suited to pursuing such an approach, embracing the heuristic potential of the two aforementioned disciplines. Following the paths opened by youth studies, the fragility of blood family ties among my interlocutors means we must follow young people into the public everyday places where they reinvent kinship relationships and strategies for social reproduction from below. On the other hand, taking an anthropological approach to everyday life that extends beyond the home enables us to understand the ways in which these youths engage with, and invest in, the goods at the heart of their community of practice, which they access as scrap commodities through a border system of provision.

3. Commodities, scraps, circulations: The border system of provision

15Tijuana is Mexico’s northernmost metropolis, bordering San Diego (California). Historically, it has developed as a place of escape, both physical and symbolic, from the political and economic restrictions of its northern neighbours. This has long translated into a thriving tourism and leisure industry, which has painted the city as ‘the Mexican Las Vegas’ in the North American collective imagination (Berumen 2003). Since the mid-1990s, stricter migration policies, currency imbalances between peso and dollar, and recurring waves of violence linked to criminal cartels have reshaped the border, making it increasingly closed to human transit yet porous to the movement of goods. 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper, implemented alongside the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), exemplifies this evolving scenario, serving as a military deterrent to human mobility at a time when the border was opening to the movement of commodities according to the priorities of the U.S. market (Chomsky 2014). Notably, NAFTA also inaugurated a «third generation» (Carrillo, Hualde 1997) of the maquiladora industry on the Mexican border in response to the growing demand for labour to sustain a system of overproduction at the base of the northern mass market. Maquiladoras are production lines outsourced by foreign industries, often based in the U.S., and located just south of the border. They receive raw materials from abroad and transform them into finished goods for export back to Western markets. This system benefit from favourable customs taxation, low-cost labour and looser environmental restrictions (Bernardi 2021). The driving sectors of the maquiladora industry have traditionally been textiles, metalworking, pharmaceuticals and electronics. However, the counterpoint to the importance of the border in producing global goods lies in the «backroads» (Knowles 2014) that these same commodities take once they are no longer useful in the U.S. Routes that often take them back to their places of origin (Hill 2009). Indeed, the scraps of a northern market that has definitively transplanted its productive roots to Mexico (and then to China) since the mid-1990s constitute the basis of popular consumption south of the border when they return from their journeys of formal consumption (Sandoval 2022).

16In Tijuana, many of these same branded goods, clothing, appliances and cars whose material properties have not yet been exhausted can be purchased from countless street vendors or in traditional sobre ruedas markets (Picture 1). Although they precede recent free trade agreements, sobre ruedas have developed in symbiosis with these global macroeconomic shifts. They have evolved from mobile food and primary product stalls – hence the name sobre ruedas [on wheels] – to periodic static marketplaces for commodities increasingly discarded by the North (Ayuntamiento de Tijuana 2015). Today, sobre ruedas are the most distinctive places for socialising through consumption south of the border. People visit them on weekly shopping trips, to run errands, to have lunch with their partners at the weekend, or simply to browse for the most unusual items from el otro lado [across the border].

18In one case, the boards that escape the physical and regulatory walls of the maquiladoras by penetrating the popular economies of Tijuana are called lisas [blank, wood-coloured, without graphic designs]. Once intercepted by one of the various street collectives of adult skaters who decorate them with their own subcultural symbols, they then become so-called locales boards. The journey of boards already imprinted with U.S. brand designs – so-called internacionales – is instead different. These items rarely filter into Tijuana directly from the maquiladoras and are instead often formally consumed in the U.S. before returning south as scrap goods through the sobre ruedas. Furthermore, within the two possible macro-pathways in this system of provision, traditionally «a mantle of invisibility [...] cloaks the Mexican [maquiladora] industry » (Kamel 1988: 26), often causing young people to lack awareness of the obscured centrality of their place of life in the global cartography of their favourite consumer goods. It is precisely around this awareness – translated into different conceptions of social value around their material culture – that a specific subcultural interpretation of age develops among Tijuana youth, who use skateboards as material supports to collectively mediate their social development in a continuum between childhood and adulthood.

4. Co-consumption and the conceptions of age at the sobre ruedas

• 4 The sobre ruedas... It's important for Tijuana skateboarding because lots of things that Americans, (...)

El sobre ruedas. Es como importante para la patineta tijuanense, porque en el sobre ruedas llega mucha merca que el americano, el gringo, dona. Entonces te encuentras cosas que usar un poco y que aquí́ te las dan baratas. No sé, como una tabla que la usaron unas cinco veces, nueva que te puede costar 3.000 pesos, pues las puedes agarrar hasta en 100 pesos en un sobre ruedas. Yo creo que el sobre ruedas tiene una... Es como un actor importante en la vida de la patineta mexicana4 (Interview, Tijuana, 31/05/2023).

20Accompanying some young interlocutors on their bi- or tri-weekly trips in the sobre ruedas, enabled me to gain a better understanding of their age distribution and their relationship with the objects and imagery that drive this form of scrap consumption. Leonard, my main ‘Virgil’ among the local markets and aged 21 at the time, represented the typical sobre ruedas consumer in this respect. Indeed, his intermediate age (Instituto Mexicano de la Juventud 2017) was not irrelevant. While it was rare to encounter people under the age of 18 in sobre ruedas due to a lack of money, skaters considered ‘adults’ in the local scene disdained this type of consumption due to an ethic of value and «subcultural capital» (Thornton 1995) centred on their own material culture. They considered the purchase of used U.S. brand boards (internacionales) in sobre ruedas a betrayal of the local skater collectives (led by adults) who transform lisas boards into locales to promote the identity and craftsmanship symbols of their own cultural scene. Those who consumed boards in sobre ruedas were therefore considered naive proselytes of the ephemeral value of international brands, as opposed to a circuit of artisan producers, traders and consumers who – by leveraging the ‘authentic’ value of their objects – reproduced the essence of a local subculture. Accordingly, when distinguishing between a mature member and a naive morrillo [kid/youngster] of the community during various moments of intergenerational conviviality, the evaluative criterium was always this conception of value surrounding such leisure material culture, even before actual age.

23Net of this, however, what remains significant is the recurrence with which, behind every board encountered, in Leonard’s discourse and imagination was always present a loved one from his community of practice. It is as if that good was appropriate because, after all, it was meant for ‘that’ person, in a process of individualisation of commodities already widely noted by the anthropology of material culture with respect to consumption for the household unit (Miller 2017: 431). This human projection into the materiality of the purchased item triggers the process that negates the previous existence of the thing as a commodity, in the interpretation that Carrier (2004) – following Mauss (1966) – gives, for instance, of Christmas shopping. In my case, such altruistic tension is intrinsic not only to the moment of purchase but also to this very form of second-hand shopping, reminding us that when young people are involved, «much consumption occurs as co-consumption […] not in the sense of necessarily being accompanied by children […] but in the sense that significant others maintain a kind of presence in the practices of looking, desiring, considering and reflecting upon purchases» (Cook 2008: 235). This type of shopping therefore immediately morphs into a gift-giving process in which – in addition to being enjoyable for both the young donor and the recipient (Cross 2004) – the two moments (commercial and moral) become almost undiscernible, except for the de-commodification that permeates the exchanged object.

5. Give to grow, grow to give

25San Ángel is one of many Tijuana colonias born out of popular self-construction, the ‘invasion’ of public land for housing purposes, a phenomenon known in Mexico as paracaidismo (Cruz 2012). The only public meeting place built by the government is a skatepark that attracts many of the local young people. Most of them come from fragmented – or even non-existent – households, so that violence, neglect, or the all-too-common reality of local labour exploitation lead them to seek (and find) a community at the skatepark to fulfil the social functions of their biological families.

26Pati, known to everyone as Tía Pati [auntie Pati], is one of the skatepark’s figures of reference. She is an adult skater who, after years of irregular work as housekeeper on el otro lado, since the post-9/11 border enforcement has devoted herself to buying and selling used U.S. clothes in Tijuana. She shares many of them with the San Ángel youth, whom she also shelters when the perils of street life become more imminent. One of them was El Favela – ten years old – illiterate and with a violent family of only men behind him, who started sleeping at the skatepark and – thanks to Pati’s care – was becoming a top-tier skater. For El Favela, the skatepark was as much a makeshift refuge from family troubles as it was a place where he was exposed to the allure of street life on the outskirts of the city, once it had become his regular haunt. When I first met him, he immediately showed me the two spots where two people had been killed just a few days earlier, likely in cartel-related violence. During my time in the field, Pati and the other local young adults had successfully managed to keep El Favela within the skatepark community whilst protecting him from the associated risks. They offered him a home and food, introduced him to other areas of the city so he could socialise with peers, and finally enrolled him in school.

28One afternoon, while I was chatting with Pati, a red pickup pulled up on the road above the skatepark from which a boy got out. When he reached the skatepark, he invited Beto and another young friend to follow him. I saw them exchange something, but I could not make out what it was. When they returned to us, Beto looked much happier than before: he and his friend had just received two second-hand internacional boards in excellent condition as a gift! I discovered that the mysterious donor is called Nicolás, 27 years old, a bricklayer for several years, who also frequents sobre ruedas in his spare time, looking for internacionales to donate to San Ángel youth, where he grew up as a skater as well. As soon as we introduce ourselves, he also explains that «siempre ha sido esta la dinámica aquí [it has always been this way here]», referring to the exchange of skateboards according to small generational differences. After engaging in conversation about the moral burden that had driven him, I eventually ask him: «pero, ¿para quién lo haces? [who are you doing it for?]». Surprised, Nicolás responds as if I were asking him to explain the obvious. Firstly, it is because he has no family, «excepto esta claro... puros gatos y perros [except for this, just cats and dogs]» he says jokingly. Secondly, because his job allows him to invest in gifts; but especially because:

• 12 It's like, for you... I do it for myself. And it's also something that’s... altruistic. And it's li (...)

Es como que, para ti... yo lo hago para mí mismo. Y es algo que también es de... de altruismo. Y es como que, una copia, porque por ejemplo yo lo copié de alguien más que lo hizo por él mismo. Por eso es que, digamos es mitad y mitad. Como que mitad el amor y mitad la carga que sientes que tienes porque alguien más te hizo el paro [...] Entre los que tienen la misma visión12 (Interview, Tijuana, 14/05/2023).

29Half of it is amor [love], what Nicolás generically calls altruism; the other half is copia [copy], or rather la carga [the burden], which he feels he must repay for gifts received from older peers in the past. This suggests a bond – sometimes declared, sometimes not – of generational continuity within the community through the exchange of such seemingly futile objects. So, the conversation continues.

Andrea: ¿Y crees que ellos [los jóvenes] también van aprendiendo y un día, cuando tendrán chance, ellos también les regalaran tablas a los demás morros?”

• 13 Andrea: And do you think that they [the youngsters] are also learning and that one day, when they h (...)

Nicolás: Quizás...y si no, no importa, pero yo creo que sí. Porque, por eso sirve una internacional también13.

31In his update of Mauss's essay (1966), Jaques Godbout offers the well-known example of the contemporary «archetype» of the gift: the exchange of homemade jam between two former lovers. This is «delicious and made by the giver herself, crystallising something of her personality; therefore, because it is of high quality, the gift can thus serve to strengthen the bond» (Godbout 2002: 16). The author postulates two assumptions: first, that the bond established through the gift is between two individuals; and second, that the more the gifted object embodies the personality of the giver, the stronger the bond will be, and the more burdensome its acceptance or rejection will be. These two points are mutually consistent, but they could not be further from the type of gift I was encountering in San Ángel.

32In that context, in fact, the gift of boards seemed more akin to «sociological operators who create alliances, friendships, and solidarity» (Caillé 2010: 181), acting within a network of like-minded people who share, or may share in the future, la misma visión, as Nicolás said. Indeed, upon closer inspection, he does not intend to build an individual relationship with Beto and his young friend, or rather, no more special than the bonds that should be reproduced among members of the same community. He does not hope to be personally repaid, but that the same gesture, through a similar meaningful object, will be reproduced in the future towards another young person, thus maintaining the continuity of a plural, age-diverse community. Giving Beto a board bearing the distinctive mark of ‘his’ person would make him feel indebted and unable to reciprocate directly with Nicolás, given the age and economic disparity that the gift is based on. On the contrary, giving an internacional – identical to many other items – allows for the initiation of a pedagogy around the gift that does not place young people in an unpleasant position of insolvency with Nicolás, but rather allows them to reciprocate in deferred form towards future members of the community. Giving an internacional board essentially offers young people the opportunity to exercise the main «freedom» that distinguishes the gift from a commercial contract: «[the] freedom of when to repaying, [the] freedom of how to do so» (Aime 2013: 7-8). It is a moral freedom – a consequence of the anonymity that the market bestows upon that object – that transforms what would otherwise be a «donation» stuck in the impossibility of reciprocation into a «gift» that builds «fraternity» (Zamagni 2013: 103-104).

33However, a further step is necessary to understand how growth and reciprocity in this network are a condition for the existence of each other, creating a cycle of gift in which individuality is formed through dissolving into the others according to the temporality of growth. To reconstruct this temporal-economic relationship between gift and growth, it is helpful to consider the words that surround the exchange. Nicolás justifies his actions according to two extremes when he declares, «lo hago para mi mismo», but that it is also something «de altruismo». «It is quiet a contradiction» (Solinas 1993: 67) that reminds us that, in a context of «non-utilitarian» but «pragmatic» gift, there are no «pure» extremes (Caillé 2010). The focal function of the gift is to reproduce a community bond over time, but this does not exclude ideas of individual interest or enjoying personal status. In the first extreme, Nicolás also includes this, the pleasure of knowing that he is the ‘older’ donor, that he can afford it and thus transmit something to younger peers. However, this is not even the abstract position of the Derridian donor, who gives for the sole hedonistic pleasure of seeing himself in the position of the one who can (Derrida 1996). Rather, it is a type of individuality that is always constructed throughout the other, «very different from the crude and primitive selfishness whose universality modernity postulates» (Godbout 2002: 13). It is therefore a type of personal satisfaction that, in the gift, passes through altruism to some extent, overcoming «practically [...] the opposition between the individual and the collective [and] placing people as members of a larger concrete whole» (ivi: 30).

34However, for this individualism through altruism not to dissipate – so that it can function as an engine of social reproduction – conditions must be created to give continuity to the exchange network over time. These conditions are interdependent with a pedagogical process of growth that is triggered by the act of gifting, not only objects, but also words, or rather teachings. The other two mitades – amor and carga – which allow Nicolás to copiar the gesture that others made towards him in the past, are explained precisely in the construction of this continuity. Shortly after giving the two gifts to Beto and his friend, Nicolás calls them back, sits them down and – in front of the two boards waiting to be assembled – offers them a pedagogical counterpoint to the material exchange. Calmly, he explained to both that the boards in front of them – so precious for the U.S. market symbols they bear – are the same as the locales ones that he and many others at the skatepark were using at that moment. Furthermore, their own city, Tijuana, which all the local youth perceive as excluded from unattainable California, is actually the producer of these precious wooden objects. The two youngsters observed a religious silence – something almost surreal given their young age, the rowdy activities they were used to and their impatience to use those precious gifts. Beto’s friend was amazed, while he boasted that he already knew this thanks to his mother’s work and previous gift.

35Although this may appear to be an insignificant display of paternalism, I believe that its attachment to the exchanged material object is the key to understanding how this network of reciprocity socially operates. Indeed, it was at that moment that I understood the meaning of Nicolás’s earlier statement, «Por eso sirve una internacional también». In addition to satisfying a desire for consumption among younger people (amor), giving an internacional serves to return what was once received as a gift from older friends (carga), namely an object and a lesson, so that this can be repeated (copiar) in the future. The object is once again the board, and the lesson is an explicit explanation of its position in a global network of commodities. What Nicolás gives alongside the material gift is therefore an awareness, or rather an introduction to a collective conception of value. An awareness of the role of one’s place of life in the global cartography of one’s favourite commodities, which are usually only conceived as magical emanations from the U.S. market. This lesson educates young people towards a precise conception of the value – that is, of «the social totality» (Graeber 2001) –surrounding their subculture and specifically its material culture. It is no coincidence that this awareness is the same with which – in the local scene – a distinction is made between a morrillo [kid] and an adult community member (regardless of age). Thanks to these trivial «exchanges of goods and services, [which] are primarily words» (Godbout 2002: 20), Beto and his friend are thus offered the opportunity to grow, according to the conceptions of value on which this process is measured in the local subculture. Without explanation, they would not be able to understand the meaning of their consumer goods, and therefore would not be able to grow, hence unable to replicate that gesture in the future towards other new youngsters. It is in this articulation between growth, conception of value and reciprocity – conveyed by objects and words that «circulate [and] do not primarily have a utilitarian value» (ivi: 21) – that the moral functioning of this exchange network over time can be explained. Furthermore, it is precisely within this framework, and the timeframe it depicts, that we can understand how growth and reciprocity form an extended proto-parental relationship.

36The gift is functional to the growth of the very young ones, but this growth is also essential for them to be able to give to someone else in the future. There is no relationship between ‘to give’ and ‘to grow’ in which one precedes the other, only an interdependence throughout all the stages of exchange that supports an extended network of reciprocity. The long-term temporal dimension of growth, upon which future reciprocity is imagined, echoes the distinction proposed by Parry and Bloch (1989) between «two levels» in the moral order of exchange. While material exchange takes place on a narrower, short-term level where the donor also considers personal gain – such as the pride that comes with being the one who ‘can’ give an object and a lesson – long-term exchange presupposes a broader moral commitment. In most cases cited by the authors, the long-term sphere mobilises kinship partners who have a selfless obligation to yield resources, combining the two extremes of altruismo and egoism («para mi mismo»). It is precisely within this future, unvisualisable temporal horizon that the foundational gesture of the kinship relationship in exchange is accomplished. This is because, ultimately, «the true beneficiary of altruistic conduct [...] does not yet exist» (Solinas, 1993: 66), whether this is a future unborn person to whom the act of giving is directed, an act that «bears within itself the copy [sic!], or [...] a possible replica of the progenitors» (Ivi: 67).

37Eventually, viewing this intertwining as the outcome of verbal and material exchanges enables us to grasp how reciprocity can perpetuate itself without revealing its intentions – a feature of secrecy which is often pivotal among subcultures. Unlike the commercial contract, the gift develops in a bizarre order of meaning whereby, in order to function, it must keep «the duties of reciprocity secret» (Gallini 2008: 83) while at the same time being surrounded by verbal formulas and recurrences that are central to the exchange or clarify its purposes. Nicolas’s various gestures and improvised verbal teachings appear to operate at this subtle threshold. When I ask him about the likelihood of the gift being reproduced, he replies, «Quizás...». At the same time, however, through objects and words, he implicitly conveys to the youth the symbolic capital necessary to reciprocate to someone else in the future. That capital is an awareness of the value of goods according to one’s place in the world – the proper capital of those becoming adults. Without that awareness, without that growth, without an internacional, and without Nicolás’s teaching, it would be unlikely that Beto and his friend would be able to replicate that gesture in the future and that «Quizás...» would turn out to be more dangerous than ever. Exhibiting the wise caution of someone who knows he is operating on the edge of what can and cannot be said, Nicolás thus enables the two young men to reciprocate, grow, and become active participants in the reproduction of their own proto-familiar community of practices without violating the ‘secret’ codes on which their extended network of reciprocity is based.

6. Conclusions. From the border, beyond the borders between youth and consumption

38In this article, I have traced the circular route of a futile consumer good, examining the journeys it takes from the global production centres of Tijuana back to the same city via altruistic forms of «co-consumption» (Cook 2008). In my argument, I have sought to «take to heart the question» raised by others before me (Solinas 1993: 75) and to investigate whether – as in some classic anthropological studies – even within a so-called contemporary subculture, young people use exchange – this time of commodities – to forge networks of reciprocity through which to manage social growth horizontally and create proto-familial moral bonds. Without claiming to provide a unified model that synthesises such diverse traditions of study, the best outcome of this article might be to keep that and other questions alive. Among others, the question of what kind of subjectivity and economic behaviour is shaped by growing up immersed in such moral economies, once the morrillos reach adulthood. However, having traversed two key locations ethnographically in the development of these anti-utilitarian exchanges mediated by market goods, it is possible to revisit the theoretical hypotheses mentioned in the introduction.

39In light of what I described in the previous section, it is evident that the network of reciprocity developed by Tijuana youth could not exist without placing market commodities at the centre of the exchange and the linguistic-pedagogical processes that structure it. It is precisely the consumption of mass-produced goods with a ‘fictitious’ value – products that are serialised, inert and depersonalised – that, when «embedded» (Polanyi 1944) in local value systems and the cultural urgencies of a young border community, enables anti-utilitarian forms of exchange to develop and the social community to reproduce itself. This pragmatic integration of commodities into networks of reciprocity transcends the dichotomies of classical gift theories (Mauss 1966) and, more importantly, the versions that still postulate a clear separation between human economies and the market today (Godbout 2002). Conversely, when considering the practical ways in which human groups economically address their social priorities, it becomes evident that the gift/commodity antinomy, which has long been questioned by discontinuist economic anthropology, is more the result of ethnocentric prejudice than of ethnographic evidences (Parry, Bloch 1989).

40In my argument, the role of these consumer products in the collective, local navigation of youth social development is precisely what enable the exchange’s ‘human value’ transcending the market logics. As certain anthropologists of material culture have already noted for mass-produced goods, it is from the moment of purchase to that of domestic sharing that seemingly individualistic acts of consumption reveal themselves as deeply valued gestures expressing love, bonds and moral solidarities (Miller 1998). However, the case of San Ángel's youth complicates this picture, building on a context in which the ‘domestic’ and the ‘family’ – and the forms of socialisation they are deputed to – do not coincide either with the walls of the home or with the forms of biological kinship. In such a context – which encourages us to question the boundaries of what is ‘domestic’ in marginal global-scapes – young people take on a leading role that has rarely been recognised in anthropology of mass consumption, but which nevertheless resonates with countless cases of young lives in the Global South and the peripheries of the Global North (Thieme 2025; Di Nunzio 2019).

41The frequency with which the Western concept of ‘family’ is challenged by the autonomous and collective actions of an increasing number of young people on the margins of our global present leads us to consider a final theoretical point of particular relevance to the U.S.-Mexico border. The social sciences that paved the way for the ethnographic study of youth socialisation beyond the institutions formally recognised by the State also proposed a more unidirectional relationship between young people, mass consumption and associated power structures (Hebdige 1979; Hall, Jefferson 1975). Many of these studies have highlighted how young people develop forms of resistance to capitalist labour times and pedagogies through the interaction with material objects (Willis 1977), both within and outside formal socialisation agencies. However, these relationships with materiality often developed along a ‘vertical’ and ‘descending’ axis, observing how objects imposed from above by dominant (adult) classes and their institutions shaped the present and future subjectivities of youth in an incomplete effort of hegemonic reproduction. In recent updates to youth studies, the relationship of observation has occasionally been reversed while maintaining a vertical axis on which to study youth interventions on commodities as forms of subversion and unconscious resistance to the culture industry’s order. These shifts between an «epidemiological view» and an «aestheticisation» (Reguillo 2000: 16) of the relationship between young social actors and consumption underpin much of the literature on youth on the border between Mexico and the United States. Moreover, the nuances it takes on in my research area often tend towards the «darker» tones (Ortner 2016) of the former extreme, leaving no option but to discuss young people exclusively in terms of «the greed for the consumption of material and cultural goods; the demand to appear in a world centred on the self and the disregard for the public, the collective and the community; the emptiness of emotionality with others» (Cruz, Nateras 2020: 13).

42On the contrary, and ultimately, through this article I propose considering the possibility of a horizontal, ordinary and seemingly ‘trivial’ level on which to rethink the relationship between consumer goods and youth in a cultural context of intense intimacy with North’s mass commodities, yet of exclusion from official access to them. Rather than translating into subjugation to desire or oppositional criticism of the mass consumption, this approach involves starting from the ethnographic evidence that consumer goods are humbly the most immediate material with which Tijuana youth coexist, evade, challenge or sometimes reproduce the inequalities and social aspirations to which they are exposed as inhabitants of a threshold between stereotypical global worlds. Even before any political philosophies can be projected onto these behaviours, they demonstrate that border youth are fully capable of constructing other possibilities for exchange and sociability within the fabric of capitalist consumption through minute gestures of amor and carga, capable of surprising even the most radical intellectual predictions.