Psychology, psychosocial processes and rural scenarios *

ABSTRACT

Emigration of rural Chilean youth to the cities has not provided an answer or a way out of poverty;on the contrary, this territorial uprooting is considered one of the main problems of increasingly depopulated and aging rural areas. [...]an alternative to address poverty in rural Chile has been to encourage the return of young people, understanding their leadership and work as a practice that stimulates local economies at the rural level (FUNASUPO, 2021). Since health and social crisis resulting from COVID 19 pandemic, it has been detected the beginning of a trend to return to rural areas by young people, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of rural-urban migrants. According to Fundación Superación de la Pobreza (2021), these returning decisions respond to individual choices of their protagonists and, in practice, they have little support from the governmental-social context, having to face a myriad of odds and obstacles. Latin American Psychology has rarely stopped to think about the specificities of rural areas, both in relation to the knowledge it generates and its professional practices. [...]findings of research and psychological work, in general, tend to be transferred uncritically from urban to rural contexts without a proper discussion of their scope and contextual relevance, which implies a naive assumption that human beings are identified with urban.