In Search of Respect

After quoting Candy’s proud declaration that she realized her husband (Felix) was mistreating her and decided to shoot him, Bourgois explains that gang rapes in El Barrio, the subject of the end of the previous chapter, are not an aberration but rather “a biting reminder of the pervasiveness of sexual violence in El Barrio.”

Under “Witnessing Patriarchy in Crisis,” Bourgois writes that women are actually slowly gaining rights and power in El Barrio, despite the horrific violence they continue to face. Patriarchal norms still dominate street culture, and men often “lash out against the women and children they can no longer control.” As old jíbaro identities clash with modern gender roles and financial troubles, creating a “crisis of patriarchy.”

Bourgois struggles with a methodological problem surrounding gender violence: as a male researcher, how can he get close enough to women to hear and record their stories? His friendship with Candy was uniquely close in this respect, although she is different from many women because she is “capable of commanding respect on the street.” Bourgois first meets her when she storms into the Game Room, six months pregnant and furiously cursing out all of Ray’s associates. Candy is “always angry” because Felix wasted money that was supposed to be for his lawyer on drugs, and this promised to leave his family penniless when he went to jail (which would be very soon).

In the section “Domestic Violence in Postindustnal Turmoil,” Bourgois writes that after two years, he finally gets close enough to interview Candy, on the street and close enough to Caesar to not arouse suspicion. Candy talks about her love for her “pure and innocent” child, and how it makes her respect her own mother. But her father abused her badly, which led to her leaving home and getting pregnant at age 13. (Eloping to escape abusive men, whether fathers or husbands, is accepted practice in the El Barrio community, as long as women always stay under a man’s control.) In fact, Felix and his gang raped Candy, and then he tried to marry her, but the court rejected this decision and tried to take their baby to foster care—something Candy refused to allow.

During Bourgois’s research, Candy is 34 and has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals throughout her life, giving her an understanding of how she was abused but also the ability to manipulate the bureaucracy. She “was used to […] getting beat up” by her father, so did not think there was anything wrong when Felix started doing the same. Bourgois emphasizes that “Felix’s extreme brutality against Candy” is not only about individual psychology, but also about the “structural maladjustment” caused by rural Puerto Ricans’ migration to New York. He beat her nightly for almost a decade and caused her to miscarry five pregnancies, all many months along. This kind of behavior might have been normal on a Puerto Rican hacienda, like the patriarchal beliefs that Candy herself holds—for instance, she is thrilled above all else to have a son.

In “Female Liberation Versus Traditional Sexual Jealousy,” Bourgois explains that the community supported Candy when, a month after his interview with her, she shot Felix. She thinks of this as revenge for his infidelity, which allows her to both continue believing in the “male-dominated nuclear household” and relieve her dependence on him. The worst part is that Felix is cheating on her with her sister, which wounds her deeply. From when she first met him, Felix “trained” Candy to have no life except him—she was not even allowed to look outside. When she finds him with her sister in a hotel, Candy tries to kill them both. In an aside, she says she believes she has survived her own suicide attempts because “God wants me alive, ‘cause I’m a good-hearted woman.”

One day, Candy sees lipstick on Felix’s face, pulls out her gun, and shoots him in the stomach. She calls him an ambulance, but they both lie to the police and say they were robbed. Although the cops suspected she was responsible, they let her go. Her family explains her behavior by reference to the idea of an “ataque de nervios” (nerve attack), “culturally scripted violent outbursts by [often abused] women.”

In “Recovery: Sex, Drugs, and More Romantic Love,” Candy explains how her life begins to unravel while Felix is in jail. Her fifth child is born, she runs out of money, and she grows depressed. To compensate, she starts selling crack and falls in love with Primo. Even he describes their first night together an unusual with sensitivity and care. Candy works all night, commanding attention on the street corner outside La Farmacia, before sending her children to school in the morning. Ray never worries about Candy’s safety: after she shoots Felix, nobody will mess with her. She is a wildly successful dealer, but starts a cocaine habit.

In the section “Inverting Patriarchy,” Bourgois explains how Candy uses her newfound independence to help other women, like by trying to convince Luis’s wife Wanda to retaliate for his violence—he beats her up whenever she looks out the window. But she still “accept[s] and participate[s] in the patriarchal logic that blames women for male promiscuity and violence,” for instance saying that Luis and Felix learned to treat women badly “because the women in that family like to play their husbands dirty.” And Bourgois notes that, in one sense, Candy remains under Felix’s control by “following in his footsteps: selling drugs, neglecting her children, and flaunting her sexual conquests.”

Primo is delighted to “freeload” off of Candy’s income, but secretly worries that Candy is “out-machoing all the men in her life.” Primo is unable to put up with this threat to his gender role, so he and Candy get into a bad physical fight in front of her kids that nearly ends with him getting shot, too. This is the end of their relationship, and Bourgois notes that Candy takes on the stereotypically male role in this conflict. She screams at him in public whenever she sees him with his new girlfriend, and during these confrontations he always worries that she will reach for her gun.

In “Contradictory Contexts for Women’s Struggles,” Bourgois visits Candy’s parents’ fishing village in Puerto Rico, where “gender relations have undergone a profound transformation” just like in New York City, although “the hostile migration experience and the polarized violence of the underground community” make things even harder in New York. Her capacity to succeed and win autonomy are limited by these issues as well as the script of patriarchy, which she follows because it is synonymous with power. This kind of autonomy is about “middle-class standards of individual freedom,” not about group identity or acceptance in white society. Primo’s mother, for instance, is marginalized and isolated in multiple ways in New York (gender, off-the-books work, residence in a housing project, language barrier, and racism), but gains some autonomy she would have lost in Puerto Rico. She deeply misses the sense of community she had there.

Under the heading “Confronting the State: Forging Single Motherhood on Welfare,” Bourgois turns to “the role of the state and public policy” in the gender dynamics experienced by his research subjects. While there is some infrastructure theoretically aimed at helping the marginalized, there is actually hostility in both directions between the government and the poor. Contrary to popular narratives of passive, unworthy poor people dependent on the government, the people Bourgois meets are “aggressively struggling with the system.” Candy constantly fights with the Welfare Department, which re-validates all its clients every six months and constantly demands documentation Candy does not have (or forgets to bring).

After a court case, Candy wins nine months of Welfare that the Department has denied her. But this includes her time dealing crack. When she decides to quit and get back on Welfare for her children’s safety, her case worker gets mixed up and Candy ends up attacking her in a fury. Eventually, she starts threatening to kill the case worker.

In “The Internalization of Institutional Constraints,” Bourgois explains what happens to Candy when Felix starts getting weekend release from jail: although she has a restraining order against him, he invariably shows up drunk to see the children, and she suddenly feels controlled by him once again. She looks for a job to supplement the $53 she gets weekly from welfare and the few dollars her mother makes picking cans out of the trash. She simply cannot support herself and four children on this money, so she goes back to dealing with a new crew, and promptly gets arrested on her first day, just while greeting Ray’s new baby. In fact, she was only supposed to be a lookout, and Caesar (who has the same job) considers her a “stupid ho’” for deciding to sell.

Throughout her legal process, Candy is frightened about her kids. Her oldest is 15, but she tells the police that she has a 20-year-old, so that they do not take her children away—instead, they go to her sister-in-law. Her new employer does not bail her out, and she thinks about snitching on them. Even though she is not working for him, Ray ends up bailing her out. At home, her whole extended family celebrates her return, but she feels that something is not right.

In “Mothers in Jail,” Bourgois remembers Candy’s stories about jail. Women are flooding into jails and prisons, in part because they are gaining access to street culture. Candy talks about the unsanitary conditions and bad food, lesbian prisoners who wanted to have sex with her and considering suicide. Primo interrupts and is visibly annoyed with her—the next month, this gets even worse when she gets the charges against her dropped because of her rocky mental health history. But she also clashes with the court when she shows up to court “in a skintight, blood-red jumpsuit” that the elderly judge finds disrespectful—although Candy chalks the woman’s disapproval up to jealousy. She vows to stay out of the legal system forever, although Primo is skeptical of her. She angrily pushes him into the elevator, but then tells him he is her “only true love.”