In Search of Respect

Bourgois begins this chapter with Candy’s complaint about girls who “only think of their sexual pleasures” and not about their children. He then cites prominent psychological research that shows children can be scarred forever after experiencing or witnessing violence at a young age. But such research would immediately define Bourgois’s research participants as “antisocial sociopaths,” and miss the complicated forces that lead to detrimental childhood experiences—one of which is the expectation in street culture that women make an income, in addition to caring for their children. Unfortunately, in the public eye this process is simply redefined as personal failure—a lack of “family values.”

Under the heading “Street Culture's Children,” Bourgois notes that fears about the moral degradation of the youth have been omnipresent in East Harlem since the early 20th century. Bourgois, too, sees many young people “fall apart as they passed from childhood to adolescence.” Children are a valued pillar of community in El Barrio—everyone smiles at, cuddles, and blesses each other’s kids, something very uncommon among white Americans. Of course, Bourgois has a young son, Emiliano, whom he eventually tries as hard as possible to keep inside and away from the violence and drugs on the streets.

Bourgois takes neighborhood kids downtown every few weeks, usually to museums, and notices that everyone seems to treat them with suspicion. They blame themselves for their parents’ addictions and romantic troubles, and often find themselves hanging out in crackhouses and on the street from a young age.

Candy’s son Junior, who talks early on about trying to join the police, soon becomes “a bona fide drug courier” and then a lookout for the Game Room. When Bourgois confronts him about this flip, Junior insists that he does not do or have any interest in drugs.

In the section “Punishing Girls in the Street,” Bourgois notes that Junior’s sister Jackie goes through “the rites of passage of street culture” much faster. When her father Felix returns from jail and uproots the family, she runs away with her boyfriend, who abducts her for three days and enlists some friends to gang-rape her. While searching for Jackie, Caesar breaks down, because his own sister was murdered years before. Jackie soon returns and Candy forces everyone to admit that the men raped her, “despite street culture’s double-standard denial of this form of violence.”

However, Primo and Caesar blame Jackie for getting raped, thinking about her through the lens of the women they used to rape themselves. Primo calls rape “getting influenced into screwing” and insists that Jackie “knew what she was doing.” He thinks she should “just settle down” with her boyfriend-turned-rapist. They blame Candy’s morals—and Candy also blames the victim by going after the family of the other girl the men raped alongside Jackie.

Under the heading “In Search of Meaning: Having Babies in El Barrio,” Bourgois notes that people were not reluctant to have kids given their socioeconomic troubles—in fact “virtually all [his] friends and acquaintances” had a child in his five years of residency in El Barrio. Primo’s girlfriend Maria, who is forced to move in with her severely alcoholic mother and watch Primo go through a felony trial, is “overjoyed to be pregnant,” because the thought of a child represents “a romantic escape” from her life. And it can also help her get a subsidized apartment from the City Housing Authority, although she ends up giving birth to her son in a homeless shelter.

At the same time, Carmen—Maria’s sister and Caesar’s girlfriend—also gets pregnant and is relieved. Caesar has sent Carmen’s older daughter away to live with Carmen’s sister and “frequently beat[s] her two-year-old son,” whom he also wants to send away. Caesar’s grandmother invites Carmen to move in with the family, and like Maria, she is delighted to be pregnant because the mother-child relationship is one of the few potentially stable ones in the social context of El Barrio. (This is, for instance, why Candy stopped using drugs and tried to set her life straight: for her children’s sake.)

Under the heading “The Demonization of Mothers and Crack,” Bourgois notes that single-mother households are actually “predicated on submission to patriarchy”—namely, “a father’s right to abandon his children.” It does not empower women, but rather just exploits them further. They cannot choose to put themselves before their children, but they cannot provide for their children without becoming independent. For instance, Primo and Caesar denigrate Candy when she starts selling crack, saying that she is a failure of a mother, even though they have no expectations at all for Felix.

Although every drug epidemic in American history has been accompanied by moralistic denunciations of a community, usually racial, associated with the drug in question, during the crack epidemic inner-city women are specifically considered tied to the drug. Because many are mothers and many end up earning money through prostitution, public perception begins to speculate that crack causes hypersexuality and destroys the “maternal, loving instinct.” In fact, during this time period it is essentially impossible to take a child outside and not come into contact with drugs.

Bourgois is still heartbroken at what he sees and tries his best to get pregnant women to avoid crack (and Primo and Ray not to sell it to them). Benzie recalls a customer once giving birth in the Game Room—an ambulance comes, there is chaos, and two days later the woman is back smoking crack there, with her baby in the hospital. Bourgois is particularly distraught at this time because his infant son has just been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and “crack babies” supposedly have similar symptoms. He manages to convince most of the dealers he meets not to sell to pregnant women “at least in front of [him],” but Ray insists he “don’t care” and even Candy strangely argues that “the [baby’s] body doesn’t belong to [the mother].”

Bourgois begins investigating the issue with an African American female colleague, who can much more easily get through to the minority women most at risk. Many of these women were uncertain about becoming mothers, and others even argued that crack was good for their babies. They “criticized the hypocrisy of the street culture” but never “the society that refused to fund treatment centers and support services.” The shortage of programs is so severe that Bourgois and his colleague cannot get a single person into treatment.

Later, Bourgois realizes that these women are “desperately seeking meaning in their lives and refusing to sacrifice themselves to the impossible task of raising healthy children in the inner city.” An important study on Brazil showed that women sometimes allowed their children to die when they knew they could not take care of them. This is a similar situation, except that kids in El Barrio tend to suffer and die in their teenage years. Harlem is more dangerous than the World War II battlefield. By “poisoning their fetuses,” crack-addicted pregnant women “accelerate the destruction of already doomed progeny” and “escape the long-term agony” associated with raising children in El Barrio, without resources and tightly bound to “a patriarchal definition of ‘family’” that has not caught up with women’s changing roles.