In different ways, we are asked?and then ask ourselves?the questions ?What are you going to be when you grow up?? and ?What do you want to be when you grow up?? These questions do not lie outside the experience of those born in contexts of urban poverty in the 21st century, though the modulations that they take on are precisely what we are interested in discussing here. To that end, we will look to research underway in schools located in the slums of Greater Buenos Aires. For those born in these areas, the very possibility of imagining a future constitutes a point of inflection. In stark contrast to the apocalyptic rhetoricss and dissassembled lives under which these slums and their inhabitants operate? rhethorics that deny them the present and, therefore, the future?the young people at these schools provide us with elements that imply new approaches to those questions. Expressing the desire and fear that are part and parcel of the very act of imagining the future is, in this context, a strategy of resistance, one that surfaces and endures at the borders of metropolises, at the outer limits of what can be thought and, sometimes, stated. It is not just a question of stories: by going to school, these young people evidence?on a daily basis and with their bodies?that they have thoughts, dreams, and desires about the future. At stake is the possibility of restoring the political dimension of these stories to open up new paths in the fabric of the history that they constitute. This concern with the future appears between the lines of a past, a neighborhood, and a history that runs the risk of being repeated and becoming discontinuity and flight. In this paper, we look to the production of these young people that manages to take shape in a context in flux riddled with tensions of varying densities and intensities, reliefs and textures, tensions that run through the lives of these young people, their families, and their neighborhood.