Abstract: This chapter draws from fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro peripheries to examine the creative ways whereby young research interlocutors rewrite the socio-historical and material subtexts that underlie inequities in Brazil. In conversation with what the youths speak of their communicative and artistic practices, the chapter analyses how they mobilise various semiotic resources as they do culture, become agents of literacy practices and regauge registers. Based on interviews and participant observation of a poetry gathering and a youth collective oriented to literacy socialization, this paper showcases how peripheral youths reclaim their voice and respond to structural violence, systemic racism and stigmatisation through repurposing literacy practices, language regimes and embodied sensibilities Ver menos