Coming of Age in Times of Crisis is an ethnographic study of secondary school youth growing up in a rural town in the Venezuelan Andes in the 1990s. Janise Hurtig draws on her experiences as a school ethnographer, English teacher, and student advisor, to provide an engaging, intimate, and critical exploration of the ways Santa Lucian students learned about, made sense of, and worked with the conflicting dreams and disillusions, promises and expectations of formal education and negligent patriarchy, to create individual adult identities. Through the concepts of coming of age and crisis, Hurtig explores connections between the ethnographic subject and the ethnographer's subjectivity.