In Search of Respect: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

After an epigraph from a Catholic priest decrying the danger of East Harlem in the 1930s, Bourgois explains the importance of historical context, and especially the “oppressive colonial history” of Puerto Rico, in his introduction to this chapter. Because of its importance amid shipping routes, the island was long contested by major powers uninterested in its inhabitants’ lives or safety. Even as a slave society, Puerto Rico was “above all, a locus for military control,” and its contemporary status as the same has led to a mass migration to the mainland United States over the last century. A “Free Associated Commonwealth,” Puerto Rico remains a disenfranchised colony largely economically dependent on funds from the mainland.

In “From Puerto Rican Jíbaro to Hispanic Crack Dealer,” Bourgois explains that the U.S. expropriated and consolidated farmers’ lands after initially occupying Puerto Rico. After giving that land to large corporations, the government turned its previous owners into a class of wage-laborers who became associated with the term “jíbaros,” which is both a derogatory term and a “symbol of Puerto Rican cultural integrity and self-respect,” depending on the context. The term originally referred to Puerto Ricans who refused to work on Spanish plantations and “lived outside the jurisdiction of the urban-based state.” This parallels “street culture’s resistance to exploitation and marginalization by U.S. society,” and in fact Primo sometimes calls his group “jíbaros.”

While likely unaware of Puerto Rico’s social history after its transfer to U.S. control, El Barrio residents are the direct descendants of the mass migration after World War Two, during which 1.5 million people (a third of the island) moved from Puerto Rico to New York in two decades. Most of them worked in garment factories, and then service jobs when the manufacturing sector collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s. And now their children are people largely working in the underground economy, like Primo, who when revising his family history declares, “fuck it! I’m just a jíbaro.”

Meanwhile, given U.S. tax exemptions in Puerto Rico after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, corporations have turned Puerto Rico into a tax shelter, extracting “the highest corporate profit rate of any country in the western hemisphere” but sending nearly all those profits back to the mainland. And Puerto Ricans experience “an overtly racist ‘cultural assault’” too: forced to navigate a second language and treated as racial inferiors in the United States. The combination of these “overwhelming changes” in a few generations has contributed to Puerto Ricans’ disproportionate levels of poverty and unemployment, drug use and health issues—they fare the worst on these measures among any ethnic group in New York.

In “Confronting Individual Responsibility on the Street,” Bourgois contrasts his academic take on Nuyorican hardship with the fact that history does not exonerate individuals on the ground for “impos[ing] suffering on their families, neighbors, and friends.” In fact, the dealers Bourgois studied “firmly believe in individual responsibility,” like most Americans, and blame themselves for their poverty. But there is also an “almost political” form of street culture that indicts the limits of mainstream America. Caesar defends this view in an argument with Primo, who declares that “if I have a problem it’s because I brought it upon myself.”

In “East Harlem’s Immigrant Maelstroms,” Bourgois turns to “another historical legacy of social marginalization,” that of the neighborhood itself. The Dutch forced Manhattan’s native inhabitants out of the area by 1669 and covered it in tobacco plantations. It was briefly a “countryside retreat for wealthy New Yorkers” in the 1700s and 1800s, and then immigrant workers moved in in the 1880s-90s after public transportation opened connected it to the rest of the city. “One of the poorest and most culturally diverse neighborhoods in the history of the United States,” East Harlem saw waves of German and Irish immigrants, then Jews moving North from the Lower East Side, Scandinavians, and African Americans. At the time, however, researchers considered this incredible diversity a hindrance to assimilation.

In the section “The Italian Invasion of East Harlem,” Bourgois explains how East Harlem became, according to the New York Mayor’s office, “probably the largest Italian colony in the Western hemisphere” around the beginning of the 20th century. In East Harlem’s dense cluster of ethnically-stratified shantytowns, Italians suffered horrific discrimination, which the few remaining Italian residents remember vividly. Mostly Sicilians, they were sometimes considered “of ‘African racial stock’” and stereotyped in schools and by researchers, as well as of course in everyday life. As one writer put it, they “were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of [their] parents.”

Under “The Puerto Rican ‘Invasion’ of El Barrio,” Bourgois reveals that the Puerto Ricans moving into East Harlem just before World War Two “received as negative a reception as had the Italians,” and often from Italian gangs themselves, which is a conflict many of Ray’s friends and acquaintances remember. Until even the 1970s, Italian organized crime kept certain buildings and blocks white-only, and mob threats continued even after Bourgois began his research. In the 1930s, middle-class Jews started leaving the neighborhood and African Americans moving in. But the area’s growing Puerto Rican population, many of whom were malnourished due to conditions on the island, were vilified in New York: academic medical experts called them full of “tropical diseases [and] venereal diseases,” government reports spoke of their “inferiority in native ability,” intelligence researchers complained about their IQs, and popular publications decried their lack of English and propensity to live on welfare.

In “Poverty and Ecological Disrepair,” Bourgois looks at the wealth of literature decrying East Harlem as Manhattan’s poorest and dirtiest neighborhood, a body of work catalyzed by the neighborhood’s location next to New York’s wealthiest. In the 1920s-30s, a criminologist named Trasher studied the area and developed a theory “that crime and social pathology emerged in expanding concentric circles from out of core urban poverty areas.” Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty theory” in the 1960s was next, and it is still often dishonestly employed to blame poverty’s victims for their condition. Creative works include a film by James Agee and Helen Levitt, the hit song “A Rose in Spanish Harlem,” and most importantly “the Nuyorican literary genre” that has won global acclaim.

In “The Reconcentration of Poverty in Easternmost East Harlem,” Bourgois notes that the part of East Harlem where he, Ray, and their network lived has long been considered “the poorest and most delinquent section.” In the 1950s, the government spent millions of dollars destroying everything that existed in the neighborhood and replacing it with housing projects, which only concentrated poverty even more intensely in the area, a tendency that continues to the present. In fact, during the same period, one of the buildings on his block burned down—and while he lived there 24 years later, he watched the same fate befall another.

Under “From Speakeasy to Crackhouse,” Bourgois explicitly turns back to the problem of substance abuse and crime in East Harlem, which was originally filled with tobacco plantations and then overrun with speakeasies in the 1920s, and then of course the crackhouses that Bourgois studied. In fact, the Game Room used to be a speakeasy, and the library next door documented its frustration with both halves of this history. The historical density of “speakeasies, brothels, crackhouses, and shooting galleries” has created a hostile environment—one the librarians’ animosity toward the public exemplifies. (When Bourgois takes a young neighbor to get a library card, the library kicks him out, assuming he is trying to steal books or molest the boy.)

Under “The Omnipresence of Heroin and Cocaine,” he notes that these drugs have been a fixation of the literature about East Harlem since the 1920s, and that pictures of La Farmacia and clients who buy Ray’s drugs have even been shown in recent works of journalism on the subject. In a school across the street from a popular drug-using corner, teachers put black paper over the windows so their students would not watch people inject drugs.

In “Mafia Legacies in the Underground Economy,” Bourgois explains that “the historical continuity of visible substance abuse” in East Harlem “repeatedly socializ[es] new generations of ambitious, energetic youngsters into careers of street dealing and substance use.” In the 1920s, the Italian Mafia first began selling drugs on a mass scale in the neighborhood, and the legacy of organized crime in El Barrio has “redefin[ed] ‘common sense’ in favor of crime and violence.” The police are corrupt, guns and drugs are easy to come by, it is common to see shoot-outs and murders, and “the Genovese crime family […] controlled the neighborhood” up to the end of the 1980s.

In fact, the Genovese family runs their scheme out of the same block where Bourgois lives. (The leader, “Fat Tony,” is sentenced to 175 years in prison during Bourgois’s residence.) After they murder his real estate agent, Bourgois decides to avoid the Genoveses, although they are always suspiciously using payphones and unloading mysterious bags in a fruit store they own. Nevertheless, the Genoveses are the laughingstock of the New York organized crime world. Their decline impacts the neighborhood’s real estate market: they sell various buildings and it becomes easier to rent to black tenants.

In the chapter’s last section, “The Free Market for Crack and Cocaine,” Bourgois explains that the Mafia’s decline coincides with the rise of cocaine and crack, which result largely from the U.S. government shifting its focus to targeting drug traffickers (and cocaine is easier to transport than marijuana). In turn, crack emerges—a smokable mix of cocaine and baking soda, which is stronger and quicker than cocaine, and cheaper initially but better-suited for drug binges. With the mob’s heroin trade disappearing, this crack economy takes over, with “upstart Puerto Rican, African American, and Dominican entrepreneurs” leading the way. But the Mafia’s impact continues to be felt, since it taught people that, in Caesar’s words, “you got to be making your money dirty.”