The gift of being young. Scraps consumption and coming of age on the US-Mexico border

This article examines how a youth community in Tijuana, Mexico, creatively repurposes discarded U.S. consumer goods to navigate social growth within a context of family fragmentation and geopolitical separation from northern mass culture. Through ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores how young people transform scrap commodities purchased from local street border markets into gifts for their peers, facilitating collective transitions through local subcultural conceptions of age and social value. This altruistic consumption challenges conventional theories on youth and age transitions within a social world of supposed discontinuities between market capitalism and moral exchange. Through this process, young people emerge as active agents in the de-commodification of consumer good and their moral circulation in daily spaces, inviting us to reimagine the boundaries of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘familiar’ in an anthropology of everyday life inspired by youth consumption behaviours. The study concludes that these popular gift economies facilitate social reproduction and intergenerational solidarity, providing insight into youth creativity within the meshes of border capitalism.