ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Bosco traces young people’s urban experiences of loss and hope through an engagement with the 2009 Argentine film Anita. The film centers on Anita, a girl with Down syndrome who gets lost in the city after the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Association in the main Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires in 1994. Drawing on a mobilities framework, he draws on the notion of journeying as an avenue to explore young people’s spatiotemporal relationships to the everyday geographies of a global Latin American city. Anita’s journey through the city makes her confront a world unknown to her, as she traverses different parts of the city characterized by racial, gender, and class inequality. Reading the film though the notion of journeying lets us see Anita’s intense personal transformation. By documenting her encounters with people who also have experienced their own losses or misfortunes, he describes the physical, social, and emotional ways in which young people relate to others in the city, and how Anita herself becomes a source of hope and agent of change for those she interacts with in her own unexpected journey.
