In Search of Respect

Bourgois begins with a quote from a child who says he “sound[s] just like a television advertisement” and then explains that his project almost meets “a disastrous end” when he “inadvertently ‘disrespect[s]’ Ray,” the owner of a number of local crackhouses, including one nicknamed “La Farmacia” in the now-burned out building where he grew up.

Under the heading “Learning Street Smarts,” Bourgois explains that Ray both lets him conduct his research in his crackhouses and physically protects him. Ray is friendly and generous that night, in contrast to “his usual churlishness,” and Bourgois is increasingly proud of their “close and privileged relationship.” Ray and Bourgois drink Heineken beers, a status symbol compared to everyone else’s cheaper Budweiser. Bourgois shows a picture of himself in the newspaper, both to prove his “credibility as a ‘real professor’” and show Ray’s acquaintances that he is not the addict, pervert, or undercover officer they think he is. Everyone asks Ray to read the caption under Bourgois’s photo—but Ray struggles and Bourgois realizes he is illiterate. Furious, Ray screams at the whole group and drives off. Primo, Bourgois’s “closest friend on the streets” and one of Ray’s associates, tells Bourgois he messed up.

The next subheading is “The Parameters of Violence, Power, and Generosity.” The next time Ray sees Philippe Bourgois (whom he, like everyone else, calls Felipe), he portrays Bourgois’s press release as a “potential breach of security” and makes a vague death threat, before driving off with his teenaged girlfriend. Primo, who grew up affiliated with Ray’s gangs, takes Bourgois aside and tells him to stay away from the Game Room (the crackhouse Primo runs for Ray). Primo admits that he is afraid of Ray, who used to joke about raping him—and “once raped an old male transient” along with his old best friend (and Primo’s cousin) Luis. In fact, Luis has just gotten arrested, and Ray is debating whether to kill him or pay his legal fees—each cost $3,000, but Luis has lost everyone’s trust after developing a crack habit and once snitching on his own family member.

Bourgois explains that stories and displays of brutal violence are an essential part of Ray’s business: they prevent those he works with from cheating him out of cash. It is about “public relations” and retaining “human capital.” In Primo’s words, “you gotta be a little wild in the streets.” Primo and Caesar, his best friend and the Game Room’s lookout, help Bourgois flee the Game Room whenever Ray shows up, but Primo reports that Ray is having “foreboding dreams” that Bourgois is a spy, either for the government or for aliens from “Mars or something.” (For many Nuyoricans, dreams are seen as capturing hidden truths.)

Three months later, however, Ray shows up by surprise when Bourgois and Primo are busy trying to calm down a drunk Caesar—who often goes on binges, has a “propensity for gratuitous violence,” and on this occasion is complaining about Ray, deliberately yelling into Bourgois’s recorder that he wants to “kill that fat motherfucker.” Ray shows up, but fortunately misses Caesar’s diatribe and is a good mood. Within a few months, he and Bourgois have repaired their relationship to its old confidence. And this is no exception: Ray has many genuine, reciprocal friendships, including with some of the people who work for him, like a woman named Candy, who recalls him being a “nice kid,” almost like a brother.

In his section “The Barriers of Cultural Capital,” Bourgois explains that Ray is a contradictory figure: while able to run a complex drug distribution enterprise, he is “completely incapable of fathoming the intricate rules and regulations of legal society.” In other words, “Ray lacked the ‘cultural capital’ necessary to succeed” in the mainstream. This becomes even more evident when, later, he enlists Bourgois’s help because he cannot figure out how to get an ID and does not know what a passport is. He hopes to start a business to launder his money, and Bourgois does his best to avoid participating in this. Ray opens a laundromat, a corner store, and a social club, all of which fail because of bureaucratic limits.

Under the heading “Confronting Race, Class, and the Police,” Bourgois shows how he “had to confront the overwhelming reality of racial and class-based apartheid in America” immediately upon moving to El Barrio. His “outsider status” is obvious: dealers yell and scatter when he walks by, assuming he is an undercover agent. But many assume he is a drug addict, especially the police, who search him repeatedly because “there was no reason for a white boy to be in the neighborhood.” Eventually he gets used to being searched every week or two by the police, and stopped almost as often by officers telling him he must have wandered into the wrong neighborhood.

In “Racism and the Culture of Terror,” Bourgois explains that “a racist ‘common sense’” also perpetuates urban apartheid: white and middle-class people think African American and Latinx areas are “too dangerous” (including most of Bourgois’s friends). In reality, few East Harlem residents are ever mugged, and whites “are probably safer” because, as Caesar explains, “people think you’re a fed [federal agent]” or “think, ‘he’s white and he’s in the neighborhood, so he must be crazy,’” and avoid him either way. Despite wandering around East Harlem nearly every night for many years, Bourgois only gets mugged once, inside a store, and his wife is fine. In fact, his “friends living downtown in safer neighborhoods” have worse luck. However, the sense of danger is still palpable and “pervades daily life in El Barrio” because violence is “highly visible and traumatic.” (Bourgois witnesses multiple shootings in his first year there.)

The result of this violence is a “culture of terror”: most people stay off the streets and distrust the people surrounding them. And the public image of this “culture of terror” leads people to distance themselves from the marginalized people living in places like El Barrio. Like those around him, Bourgois feels he has “to deny or ‘normalize’ the culture of terror” by allowing himself to relax and seek community in the neighborhood. In fact, Bourgois grew up “just seven blocks downtown from El Barrio’s southern border,” and always bought into “the illusion of friendly public space” in El Barrio. But the neighborhood’s “violent minority” constantly pushes back with the “culture of terror.” So do the police—once, when Bourgois mentions “that the neighborhood felt safe,” Caesar tells him a lengthy story about watching two men mug and beat a woman, and then police beat the muggers nearly to death.

In the section “Internalizing Institutional Violence,” Bourgois reveals that his friends in El Barrio feared police brutality far less than what they would suffer in the holding cell in prison—Caesar, again, offers a long and colorful warning about being rape. In fact, the City has just sent new squads to round up and arrest people in huge numbers in El Barrio, and after hearing Caesar’s story Bourgois runs upstairs to get his I.D., just in case the police come for him.

Under “Accessing the Game Room Crackhouse,” Bourgois explains that his first goal upon arriving in El Barrio is convincing Primo he is not an undercover officer. Bourgois is brought to the Game Room by his neighbor Carmen, who is 39 and already a grandmother, and who recently grew addicted to crack, became homeless, and abandoned her grandchildren. Primo thinks Bourgois is undercover at first, but after a couple weeks, they become friends, since Bourgois has to pass the Game Room multiple times each day. Primo invites him inside and, astonishingly, is happy when he turns down an offer of cocaine—ironically, “street ethics […] equates any kind of drug use with the work of the devil,” even though it is everywhere. Primo and his friends are also interested to meet “a friendly white,” since the only white people they know are angry authority figures at school, work, and the police station.

As he starts hanging out more and more at the Game Room, Bourgois becomes “an exotic object of prestige,” and people want to be around him because his whiteness is intimidating (which sometimes problematizes his research). Soon, he is an “honorary nigga.’” A few years later, drunk and high on speedball, Primo’s lookout “Benzie” (Benito) admitted that he initially thought Bourgois was “a faggot” because of the way he talked. Primo calls this “intelligent talk,” and notes that Bourgois sounds like he is from Spain when he speaks Spanish. While Bourgois immediately feels vaguely offended, he later realizes that it was better he was never self-conscious about “giving off ‘dirty sexual pervert’ vibes.”

In “African American/Puerto Rican Relations on the Street,” Bourgois explains that his Nuyorican friends in El Barrio, even though whites would see many of them as black, are “explicitly hostile to African Americans.” Ray’s two African American dealers go by Spanish names and complain of racism in the Game Room. And Caesar goes on a diatribe about how he hates and wants to kill black people, “because it was a black man who killed my sister.” Nevertheless, street culture nearly uniformly comes from African Americans, and Caesar is the first to admit that he wants to have “that black style.”

Despite El Barrio’s racial politics, “everyone in Ray’s network” ultimately accepts and likes Bourgois, although those “on the periphery of Ray’s scene” remain suspicious—and even yell at Bourgois “for never tape-recording them,” since they want “‘at least a chapter’ in [his] book.” And everyone is skeptical about Bourgois’s desire “to give something back to the community” through his book, because they see “everyone in the world [as] hustling.” Some years in, Caesar and Primo start “urging [Bourgois] to make speedier progress” on what they assume will be “a best seller.” Caesar gets angry at Bourgois for “giving up on” them when he gets an injury from typing too much, and demands “a lifetime reference” in the book from Bourgois, whom he calls “our role model.”