Young people between the rural and the urban: the case of the agroboys and agrogirls in Bela Vista de Goiás

The text undertakes an analysis of young people in their rural contexts from the perspective of understanding how this social group, whether of urban or rural origin, experiences the cultural aspects of the rural universe in Bela Vista de Goiás, a town with an agricultural-based economy. The young people studied are characterized, due to their modernized way of dressing, as “agroboys” and “agrogirls”, having been influenced by the North American country and western style, by agribusiness and by the Brazilian cultural industry, thereby evidencing their existence between the rural-urban and the countryside-city. Certain conceptions of the studied group, all high school students, were identified, regarding the countryside and the city, their relationship with work, their origins, leisure practices and professional perspectives. It was concluded that these young people are living the logic of modernity and the ideal of a globalized world, with a predominant denial of the peasant project, which is linked to representations of the caipira – a yokel, of being backward, and to the production of a modernized way of living the rural.