This paper reports on the progress of the research project Youth and honor: media representations of poor young people in Cali, Colombia. A review, systematization and analysis of news records of the four major newspapers in Cali, Colombia, between 1985 and 2009 was performed. These years have been characterized by an escalating violence (social, but also mediatic) among poor young people from different sectors of the city. The article focuses in the ways in which the feminine and masculine bodies appear in the tabloids El Caleno and Q’hubo, and attempts to provide answers to the problem on the relationship (expressive, symbolic, stylistic, etc..) between the body and the identity configuration of Cali.