Between 1948 and 1985, the idea of youth as a social category underwent a slow evolution in Costa Rica. From being a relatively meaningless term during the post-civil-war period that often solely denoted a regulation- or statute-based category, "youth" became a complex, identity-based signifier by the late nineteen sixties. By looking at Costa Rican state institutions, the Catholic Church, corporate philanthropists, non-governmental institutions, youth demonstrations, women's morality clubs, and the actions and discourse of a wide range of citizen stakeholders, this thesis explores changes to the conceptualization of youth in Costa Rica during this period. Using primary sources including newspaper articles and editorials, agency memoranda from child and youth welfare agencies, political pamphlets, published speeches by government officials, non-governmental organizations' board minutes, letters, and reports, this dissertation traces how youth, often conceptualized as non-citizens in post-war Costa Rica, were primarily the focus of protective efforts and the subjects of political struggles between the State, the Church and other actors. Complicating these struggles in the nineteen fifties and sixties was a rising tide of influences, many of which elites articulated as having originated outside of Costa Rica or as being foreign to Costa Rica, including commercial culture and leisure, Communism, and trans-national youth identities. These influences were publicly rejected as having the potential to negatively affect Costa Rica's youth and, by extension, the well-being of the Costa Rican nation.

Conversely, elites conceptualized some forms of outside influence, namely United States aid and foreign-funded improvements to education, as positive. State actors welcomed these influences though they had the potential to foment opposition through the creation of a more educated and politically-sensitized youth. And it was, in fact, educated youth who organized en masse on April 24, 1970 under the banner of a new rights-bearing and responsibility-wielding youth identity, and posed a dramatic challenge to the granting of a mineral exploration concession to the international corporation ALCOA. The way that Costa Rican youth articulated their coalescence around a youth identity before and after the anti-ALCOA demonstrations is one of the most notable aspects of this event.

The specific discourse youth deployed in articulating this new identity demonstrated the opportunities and limitations that had been afforded to youth within the uniquely Costa Rican cultural context. Costa Rica's myth of democratic exceptionalism factored heavily into the way these opportunities and limitations bore out. During and after ALCOA, Costa Rica's youth both appropriated and rejected trans-national revolutionary discourses of the time in an attempt to position themselves squarely within the boundaries of Costa Rica's brand of patriotism, thus legitimizing their efforts in the eyes of some elites, including Catholic luminaries and various politicians.