Heterotopic Caracas. Identity spaces and symbolic borders

Abstract

This article analyzes the internal borders that divide Caracas and the imaginaries and identities that fill the heterotopic spaces comprising it. These borders are expressed in the symbolic distinction between “East” and “West”, urbanizations and slums, which reproduces a social and moral hierarchy. In this context, excluded young men are produced as border bodies that articulate the city while summarizing their exteriority. The heterotopic nature of Caracas is the materialization of the symbolic exclusion that cuts through the types of rhetoric that formally oppose, yet coincide in the criminalization of poverty and youth from low-income neighborhoods.