| Summary: | In agrarian societies across the globe, rapid social and economic change associated with urbanizing and globalizing processes, increased educational opportunities, and livelihood diversification are shaping intergenerational differences. Young people are navigating new dreams, ideas, and desires while mediating expectations to perform and maintain social roles as rural, indigenous, and "traditional" peoples. In protected areas, rural youth face additional pressure to carry out their role as future environmental stewards. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with riverine inhabitants in the Gurupá‐Melgaço Reserve in Pará, Brazil, I analyze how young Amazonians negotiate their desires with generational expectations and discourses of "traditionality." As small cities urbanize and transportation improves, young people have greater mobility to seek education and employment outside the reserve. Mobile youth continue to contribute to their rural communities in various ways, yet as they interact with urban areas their expectations of rural life are changing. I argue that young Amazonians desire the autonomy to creatively engage with rural and urban areas, diverse livelihoods, technologies, and commodities to both fulfill their aspirations for a "good life" and to challenge essentialized notions of "traditionality." [rural–urban circulation, Amazonia, middle ground, traditional populations, indigenous people, youth cultures]
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