In Search of Respect: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Bourgois beings by noting that everyone he met during his research had worked multiple legal jobs, often from a young age, but that “virtually none” of them found stable such work by their early 20s. The main culprit was the decline of New York’s manufacturing industry, a shift with well-documented negative effects on low-wage workers’ opportunities. However, there are also “cultural dislocations” associated with this shift, and with the concentration of power and money in “the finance, real estate, and insurance (FIRE) sector.” If working-class youth want to move upward, they often have to start as entry-level workers in these industries and endure a “wrenching cultural confrontation with the upper-middle-class white world,” the values of which are opposite those of street culture.

Under “Resistance, Laziness, and Self-Destruction,” Bourgois notes that the dealers he befriended tended to oscillate between selling crack and doing “the least desirable [jobs] in U.S. society,” including “unlicensed asbestos remover, home attendant, street-corner flyer-distributor, deep-fat fry cook, and night-shift security guard on the violent ward at the municipal hospital for the criminally insane.” When they get fired, they are proud to return to dealing, “as a triumph of free will and resistance” to exploitative jobs.

More fundamentally, the people Bourgois meets are also afraid of being proven lazy or incapable—Primo, for instance, does not see the value in working a “bullshit job,” like at a fast food restaurant, for low pay. He admits that he is too “lazy” for the work and has “just got used to the street scene.” He got fired from his last job because he was still using crack at the Game Room all night, every night, and showing up exhausted. He alternates between blaming himself and blaming his horrible jobs.

Caesar, on the other hand, declares that he is “happy with [his] life,” spending every spare penny “get[ting] wrecked” and focusing on his “personal drug-addiction and self-destruction.” He feels sick and disgusting every morning, but enjoys his time “breaking shit,” “hassling customers,” and “selling them garbage drugs” in the Game Room. His girlfriend’s food stamps pay for his food, but he has no social security income at the moment because “they found out that I had worked legal” and he owes $1,500 in taxes.

In “First Fired — Last Hired,” Bourgois explains how dealers’ pride allows them to forget they are “socially and economically superfluous to mainstream society.” When he repeatedly gets turned down for a job during a bad downswing in the employment market, Primo blames the “son of a bitch guy at the job center” and starts growing depressed and increasing his drug intake. He hates that “it seems [to others] like I like to be lazy.” He almost gets a job through Benzie, who is trying to get the intellectually disabled dishwasher in the kitchen where he works fired. The same week, he becomes responsible for paying his rent, starts getting fewer shifts at the Game Room, and starts resorting to asking his mother and sister for money. He gets evicted soon after and moves back in with his mother.

In “Internalizing Unemployment,” Bourgois explains that Primo next begins trying to forget that he has no chance of getting a job. He uses more and more drugs, and berates his girlfriend when she gets fired (in his words, he “ha[s] to abuse that bitch verbally”). He transitions from seeking work to becoming one of “what the economists euphemistically call ‘discouraged workers.’” He neither wants nor can get a job for four to five dollars an hour, and he feels like “wasting a lot of money on train fare” for interviews is not even worth the trouble.

When he gets himself particularly intoxicated, Primo eagerly “admit[s] his deepest problems and anxieties.” For instance, when doing cocaine and heroin at an elementary school playground that is “one of Manhattan’s most active retail heroin markets,” he admits he “gotta stop drinking” and looks forward to being sober. But he does not know how he could enter the legal market—he would be homeless if not for his mother, and could not get the job necessary to afford an apartment. He could go work, but is so “used to being a lazy person”—having a bed and food, taking advantage of his mother’s reluctant hospitality. (He is the only person in his family who does not work.) His friend Willie is also deeply confused and spends the night “on an all-night crack binge.”

Bourgois befriends Primo’s mother, who is tired and ashamed of his addictions, his irresponsibility, and his dependence on her. Primo and his mother then get scammed out of $2,400 sending him to “a so-called maintenance engineering training program,” and another $2,400 when the school closes down suddenly before he can get his certificate. Meanwhile, he is on trial for selling crack to an undercover police officer and his lawyer berates him for refusing to get a job. Caesar is Primo’s “only source of solidarity and understanding,” and together they extol “the street-defined dignity of refusing to work honestly for low wages.” They take pride in dealing—enough that when some recent Mexican immigrants berate Caesar for his irresponsibility, Caesar responds that Puerto Ricans are proud to “Fight the Power!” and “live off the system,” seeking “easy money” and rejecting “stupid jobs.”

In “Crossover Dreams,” Bourgois admits that Caesar is also “ridden with self-doubt over his exclusion from mainstream society,” although his chances of overcoming this are even lower than Primo’s. Once, Ray buys a bodega to launder his money and contracts Primo and Caesar to work there. They are thrilled at the prospect of “legit” work, which they reveal when rambling about their fantasies during a late-night psychedelic trip. Unfortunately, Ray is unable to figure out the paperwork and never opens the store. Bourgois sees the contrast between Ray’s failure in the legal economy and his success in the underground economy of evidence of “the different ‘cultural capitals’ needed” in each context. Ray is a master of street culture but looks like “an incompetent, gruff, illiterate, urban jíbaro” when trying to run a legal business.

Primo’s attempt to offer “Mr. Fix-It Services” also fails—his clients did not want a Puerto Rican from the projects entering their houses to fix their appliances. He says “it’s like they hear my voice, and they stop.” He misses appointments and does not know what to charge people—both of which present a problem when Bourgois contracts him to fix his mother’s stereo system.

In “Pursuing the Immigrant’s Dream,” Bourgois turns from the cultural gaps between the legal and illegal markets to the patterns of marginalization throughout  his friends’ lives. When they first start working “in their early teenage years,” they desperately want consistent work—many leave school to work in factories that quickly close, and then “rotat[e] from one poorly paid job to the next” because of their lack of education and cultural capital. Primo did this in the garment industry, and Caesar in metallurgy—Caesar remembers watching his uncle fall into a vat of acid after working at the factory for 45 years. Willie is the only person Bourgois interviews who finished high school, and he remembers being jealous of Caesar’s money and women.

In “Shattered Working-class Fantasies in the Service Sector,” Bourgois explains how Primo, Caesar, and Willie’s factory-worker dreams were “replaced by the  nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office-support service work.” Factory work meshes better with hypermasculine street culture, unlike “the humble, obedient modes of subservient social interaction” that define ununionized office work. Office bosses deride street culture, and people like Primo and Caesar have difficulty adapting to “the ‘common sense’ of white-collar work.” They lack the social skills for watercooler talk and respectful interactions with women, and ultimately “they look like idiotic buffoons to the men and women for whom they work.” While they use street culture to try and overcome their marginalization, this culture entrenches it instead.

Under “Getting ‘Dissed’ in the Office,” Bourgois recounts Primo’s difficulties working in a mail room at a magazine, like Gloria, the boss who calls him “illiterate” (he has to look up this word in the dictionary, which hurts him far more than the original insult) and the supervisors that constantly monitor him. He tries to help out by answering calls that nobody is around to take, but then gets banned from the phone because of his Puerto Rican accent. (Furious, he starts exaggerating the accent.)

In the section “The Gender Diss,” Bourgois explains that Primo and Caesar were particularly offended by having to answer to female bosses like Gloria, because of “the machismo of street culture.” They understand the corporate hierarchy—when he works in the mailroom, Primo holds the executives’ checks up to a light before handing them over. New York’s immense wealth, like that of the usually white female executives who order around men of color making minimum wage, “exacerbates the sense of sexist-racist insult.”

Bourgois begins “Work Site Wars” by explaining how the corporate bonus system turns low-wage workers against each other, which makes them more disposable. Primo is often the first worker fired when a company decides to downsize. On one of these occasions, although he while he first blames his female boss, he later realizes that the company was “looking for reasons to let people go.” His pleas do not save his job. He simply does not understand his bosses, like when Gloria tries to convince him to go to school. He lacks a “frame of reference to interpret and understand” his work. When asked to do inventory, for instance, he decides to “throw some of this shit away. Just to make it look neater […] ‘cause I knew she was never gonna use any of that stuff again.” He sees Gloria’s orders as personal attacks.

In “Weapons of the Weak,” Primo complains about the mailings he is forced to prepare at the magazine, often at night and always under highly specific instructions from Gloria. He hates that she checks his work, offers to buy him food, and forces him to deliver work at her house. He over-reports his hours to get back at her. Although they both have good intentions, they both see something as wrong with the other. Primo still thinks about work in terms of a union forcing the boss to pay them better, not a worker sucking up to their boss for a promotion. When his hours get restricted, the money is no longer enough and he decides to leave. And Primo has nowhere to turn within the company. So he starts stealing, whether by taking the mail money or getting petty cash twice for the same errands.

Under “‘Fly Clothes’ and Symbolic Power,” Bourgois explains how dress codes become a medium for the battle between street and corporate culture. For instance, Caesar has to wear a shirt and tie to his job at the mail-room, but is sent to do so much construction work that he ruins the clothes and has to buy new ones. But he cannot wear clothing appropriate for what he is actually doing, only for his job description, lest his boss say he “look[s] like a hoodlum.” Despite his “fly clothes on the street,” he does not know what clothes to buy for work. Similarly, Primo left a job training program focused on fixing his “attitude” because he does not have the right clothes to wear. Ultimately, both are afraid of looking ridiculous because they do not know what professional attire means.

In “Unionized Travesties: Racism and Racketeering,” Bourgois shows how construction work is the most accessible and acceptably macho entry-level work for people like Primo and Caesar, who are nevertheless often excluded from the industry by white unions with ties to organized crime. One group trying to help African American and Latinx people find work hired Caesar to protest a white construction company, which then hired him for the sake of diversity—but he could not stand being surrounded by racist whites and excluded from the union, not to mention away from crack during the day, so stopped showing up. The two most dangerous construction jobs, “building demolition and high-rise window replacement,” are open to African Americans and Puerto Ricans, but the former is a means to gentrification and the latter a strategy landlords use to bypass rent control and evict poor tenants. In short, these jobs facilitate the displacement of their workers, and often treat them horribly.

In “The New-Immigrant Alternative,” Bourgois explains that union work remains the gold standard, but that it can prove elusive: Primo gets a janitorial job but his employer steals some of his pay and fires him, like everyone else, two weeks before he would qualify to join the union. Rather than blaming their bosses, they blame recent Mexican, African, and Dominican immigrants who they believe are willing to work for much less. El Barrio Puerto Ricans deride and attack Mexicans in the 1990s just as Italians did Puerto Ricans a few decades earlier, and earlier residents did Italians before that. In fact, the constant influx of new workers allows companies to continue lowering wages and the government to continue reducing public support, to the detriment of everyone (including the new immigrants who face older immigrants’ racism).

In “The Bicultural Alternative: Upward Mobility or Beyond,” Bourgois combines the insights of his previous sections in this chapter. Because FIRE sector service jobs offer inner-city youth their best chance of upward mobility, they have to balance two competing cultures and often feel like they are forced to betray one or another. An El Barrio resident named Leroy says that those who work in office buildings “wanna be white” and quit his job to sell crack after a white woman ran away from him on sight—when he was making an effort to be chivalrous. In fact, he is stunned by and afraid of the white woman, and he tries to understand how whites who have never been around black people might “automatically” be afraid of them.

In contrast, one of Caesar’s cousins has an insurance job and lives in the suburbs, even though he used to be a heroin addict. He understands this move in terms of his religious conversion, and tries not to make his friends feel that he has “betrayed” them when he goes back to visit El Barrio. He is used to his white neighbors fearing him and shouting racist insults at him.