For more than eighty years my family has subsisted thanks to the streets and informality. My grandparents and my parents were “NEETS”, what a violent word, right?, as if someone simply decided neither to study nor to work, as if it were not the system that forces and forces millions of young people to renounce their rights.

I have always believed in the power of stories, in the power of safe spaces to listen and be heard. My name is Jaqueline García, I am 24 years old, I am a promoter and defender of the labor and educational rights of youth and I want to tell you a story, which is not just mine or my family's, it is also the story of 21.5 million young people who They are in poverty, exclusion and precariousness.

My mother and father were born in peripheral communities, they lived in adverse contexts where there was always precariousness and lack of opportunities. No matter how hard my grandparents tried, even having left their towns to make a life in the capital cities, since they were not even able to complete primary school, they were never able to exercise their right to education or decent work. Thanks to monumental sacrifices, my parents were able to finish primary and secondary school; However, when high school arrived they were forced, like their parents and their parents' parents, to drop out.

My father obtained a technical certification and has dedicated himself since then to working as a mechanic, on the street, because there were no funds to have a workshop. In addition, his technical certification was never valid to be accepted in a formal job, and when he was finally given an opportunity, the salary they offered him was not enough to support himself, much less a family. My mother became a housewife and when the economy didn't hold up, they became street merchants.

My grandparents have always worked informally: my grandmother knitting, making food and selling it, my grandfather singing on trucks. For more than eighty years my family has subsisted thanks to the streets and informality. My grandparents and my parents were “NEETS”; What a violent word, right? As if someone simply decided neither to study nor to work, as if it were not the system that forces and forces millions of young people to renounce their rights.

Then I was born; My parents wanted the ending of my story to be different. They looked and looked for opportunities for my training, scholarship after scholarship, call after call, and support after support, I was able to complete all my professional training, even when on different occasions it hung by a thread because we never knew if I would have enough strength, money or the will.

But the whole difference in this ending, which today is my story, was that I always had someone to accompany me. I clung to figures that made me believe that there were other things possible for me, I clung to the thought that I could decide about my future, and although I never saw anyone like my family or me occupying spaces of power, influencing or making decisions, I began to create and believe that these spaces were possible for me and for other young people in the community.

Today I am the first person in my family who was able to finish university: I have a degree, I am a professional. Through my eyes and hands my parents, grandparents, ancestors and community have seen the world, have fulfilled dreams and have lived all the first times that were taken from them. Nothing is an individual merit when you are the result of a collective effort. Over the years I realized that my education was financed, facilitated and accompanied by all sectors of society: the family, the private sector, the public, civil society - civil society saved me - and the government. I am the result of resources strategically invested in youth, and the result of a system that, even with its shortcomings, protected me more than mine at the time.

With this story I do not intend to romanticize precariousness, I intend to call for reflection. It should take no one more than eighty years to achieve social mobility. In my case, it took more than three generations to be able to exercise the right to education and decent work! And yet my story is a success story, because the majority of young people who come from these contexts do not achieve social mobility at all, ever.

My parents were not “NEETS”, they were young people of opportunity who did not have the support networks or the platforms or the opportunities to develop and exercise their rights in freedom. Today I can also see that precarious work wreaks havoc for life: my parents did not have social security, they were not able to build assets and their old age is not insured. I have always lived and live with them all the havoc that precarious work causes in all spheres of life, but especially in health.

Hence my vocation, because in Mexico there are 21.5 million young people with opportunity. People between 15 and 29 years old who, due to structural barriers and accumulated disadvantages, cannot exercise their right to decent work. They are disconnected from school and work, or have precarious employment. Young people who are not figures, we are not numbers, we have names, stories and families.

When I was a child and even today I still see my parents get up to work every day at 4 in the morning and go to sleep at 11 at night, thinking how can I grow faster to help them? Should I stop studying? to help them? How to prevent them from getting sick? How to make them rest? How to give them even a certainty? The pandemic reminded us that no one thinks about the millions of families who live day to day with the income left by the streets; the months of confinement for us were unsustainable.

Precarious work forces people to deal with the uncertainty of a future where there is no promise of anything. Today I am spokesperson for the Young People with Decent Work Alliance and the Coordinator of Development and Advocacy Strategies for young people of the Global Youth Opportunity Network, GOYN Mexico City. I was born to serve and I work for my community because I owe it to it, and because for me there is no more beautiful way to honor your history than by plowing the land so that those who come after you can reap the fruits.

The Young People with Decent Work Alliance and GOYN Mexico City are multi-stakeholder networks in which we work every day to ensure the right to education and decent work for those 21.5 million opportunity youth at the national and local level.

From the alliance we believe in the power of collaborative work, we believe and work so that entrepreneurship is a dignified and sustainable way of work for youth, so that precarious work is eradicated, so that youth know and exercise our labor rights, so that young people of opportunity can access upper secondary education without discrimination and with schemes that allow them to complete it, so that employers can improve and correct their discriminatory and violent practices. In other words, we develop initiatives and projects to generate long-term systemic changes to reverse trends that affect the free exercise of the right to decent work.

Therefore, when faced with the question: how can we collectively face the context of different violence that plagues us and what can we do to build and articulate a culture of peace from society? The answer for us is to build a comprehensive employability policy for the country's youth. Youth fall into violence and organized crime because the system rejected them in the first instance.

We need, first, to link young people with work from their educational training, especially those who study technical and technological modalities during high school; second, we need to develop second chance options for upper secondary education linked to job placement for those who have already passed the normative age to return to school; Third, we have to create a public care system, with sufficient coverage and access conditions that allow young women who are dedicated to care and domestic work, to have a decent job.

From the Young People with Decent Work Alliance we call to join the construction of the comprehensive employability policy for youth in Mexico. We call to recognize that individual efforts, although necessary and powerful, can be enhanced through collaborative work in intersectoral multi-actor networks, and that there are already platforms to be able to join this impact, share, give and receive, such as the Youth Alliance with Trabajo Digno and GOYN Ciudad de México, which we invite you to learn about and join.

To build a culture of peace we need support networks, safe places to listen to each other, to think, rethink, construct and deconstruct ourselves, and express ourselves freely. We also need representation and support. We youth do not look the same, we are not the same, we youth are diverse.

Assuming that young people fit into the same mold, that we are “lazy”, “disrespectful”, “rebellious”, “disinterested” and “useless”, to name a few labels, are prejudices that we have to eradicate. We also call for a change in narrative, because through language we create, through language we can and must dignify our stories and our knowledge.

Nothing for the youth without the youth! Because these spaces that have taken us so long to occupy have always belonged to us, even though we have been led to believe not to, even though we have never seen ourselves represented. These rights that have been taken from us for so many years have always been ours and we are going to defend them.

I believe in the power of education, I believe in youth, I believe in peace, and as I once heard it said: “all systems and institutions were created by human beings, and everything created by human beings can be changed. ”; To that I would only add, as many times as necessary, together.

To all the families and young people who survive through informality and the streets, this is a voice of voices. Let's act! We are making space for ourselves, let's raise our voices until decent work and access to education are no longer a privilege.

* Jaqueline García Cordero is a promoter and defender of the labor and educational rights of youth, transformative youth, spokesperson for the Young People with Decent Work Alliance and coordinator of Development and Advocacy Strategies for young people of the Global Network of Young Opportunity, GOYN Ciudad de Mexico.