ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the girls from the Bijlmer, especially their networks and their identity formation. Youth culture in the Bijlmer was well-known outside Amsterdam and even the Netherlands for its music and street language. During the last decades quarters like the Bijlmer became populated by increasing streams of migrants, in particular from poor countries in the South. The problem of migrant integration has been intensified by a growing discontent with regard to the Muslim population, and with Moroccans in particular. The Bijlmer is characterized by an increasing diversity of migrants from different continents: Latin America, Africa and Asia. This large variety of immigrant groups means that Bijlmer children grow up in a context of super-diversity, a term introduced by Vertovec to identify the relatively new, intensified forms of multicultural coexistence in neighborhoods and cities. Vertovec examines the new patterns of creolization that accompany increasing super-diversity.
