“Io vengo da qui”. Identità plurali, agency e cittadinanza situata nei Centri di Aggregazione Giovanile (CAG) nelle Marche

Resumen

This article explores Youth Centers (CAGs) in the Marche region as key sites for observing the construction and negotiation of plural identities among young “coming from migration”. Based on ethnographic research (2021-2022), the study shows how everyday practices – linguistic, aesthetic, bodily, and relational – enable young people to articulate fluid and situated forms of belonging, resisting essentializing categories such as “migrant” or “Italian.” CAGs emerge as local ecologies of belonging, where citizenship is not bestowed from above but continuously enacted through interactions, affective ties, and modes of self-representation. In these contexts, youth are not simply recipients of services but co-producers of meaning and agents of social transformation, capable of reimagining inclusive models of coexistence. The research also highlights the structural tensions that shape these spaces: scarce resources, territorial inequalities, and the marginalization of youth policies. Nevertheless, CAGs function as social and cultural laboratories, nodes of relational welfare, and symbolic arenas of community-making, where new generations can exercise agency and redefine the coordinates of belonging. The article thus seeks to redirect anthropological attention to these spaces, underscoring their transformative value in contemporary processes of situated citizenship.