Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in In Search of Respect, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Anthropological Research and its Consequences
The Crack Trade and the Underground Economy
Poverty, History, and Public Policy
Street Culture and Drug Use
Gender Roles and Family Violence
Summary
Analysis
Bourgois’s epilogue, written a few years after his research and just before the book’s publication, begins with a quote from Caesar pleading for Bourgois’s help figuring out “what the fuck I’m doing in life.” Bourgois reveals that Primo’s life has changed substantially: he is sober and has not dealt drugs for three years. He is working as a building porter during the summer, but has to go to the hospital for asthma related to his work and manages to convince the doctors not to write down the diagnosis (which might influence his ability to get a permanent job). A debt collection agency is after him, and his most recent girlfriend Maria has kicked him out for sleeping with someone else, although they still have a relationship and Primo remains close to his son.
Bourgois remains close to his research subjects, not only in his capacity as an anthropologist but also as a friend, role model, and source of advice. Primo's sobriety and refusal to let the truth damage his job prospects both suggest that he has seriously committed to achieving middle-class stability. But, even despite his best efforts, the battle remains uphill. He faces a number of new obstacles from the moment he embraces the legal economy.
Themes
Primo’s mother is very sick, with AIDS and dementia that may be related to an old abusive boyfriend’s beatings, and the City Housing Authority is bugging her to find out how much tax money they can get from Primo. He is also getting close to another son and giving Maria child support money when he is working—but everything he gives her gets subtracted from her government aid, so ultimately makes no difference.
The fate of Primo’s mother (which has nothing to do with her own actions) is nothing short of tragic. The state penalizes Primo and his family when he finally begins to perform his duty as a father. This, again, shows how the mainstream culture that demands inner-city residents to morally reform themselves actually does nothing to encourage this reform, but rather deliberately makes it more difficult.
Themes
Caesar has stopped selling drugs but still spends most of his money on them, and reportedly beats his girlfriend Carmen’s children, who are in the process of moving out of the house. Carmen soon throws him out of the house and forces him to go to rehab.
While Primo has fully embraced his aspiration of building a middle-class future, Caesar continues to reject mainstream culture and any modicum of responsibility. This contrast shows that, while people have no control over the structural circumstances into which they are born, they still have agency to mold their futures. Structural conditions do not, by any means, determine their fate.
Themes
Candy has also transitioned away from drugs and into the legal economy—but her first job was in a fraudulent doctor’s office that treated imaginary diseases to make money from Medicaid. She is still married to and living with Felix, who ostensibly no longer beats her, and has adopted two of Luis and his wife Wanda’s children. Felix works occasional construction jobs, but the family still receives welfare (his pay is cash and Candy works under a false social security number). Their son Junior is only 20 but already has two children, dropped out of high school, and has spent more than a year in prison (alongside Luis, his uncle) for dealing crack. He still sometimes sells drugs and lives at home. Their daughter Tabitha works and lives independently in the projects in Brooklyn, and another daughter is 17 and still in high school.
Like Primo, Candy seems to have turned her life around and charted a path toward stable work in the mainstream economy. Her first work experience, though, is a reminder that the underground economy does not have a monopoly on moral wrongdoing. Candy’s epiphany and transformation unfortunately do nothing to protect her son from repeating her mistakes.
Themes
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Benzie kept his food preparation job for five years, got in a car accident, won a settlement, and spent it starting a weed operation. Willie has married and moved out of the city to work in the military again. Tony manages other dealers in the neighborhood. And Ray is almost never around anymore—he has moved into the Bronx and acts “like he’s a retired drug kingpin.” Little Pete got shot and then thrown in prison for selling crack, where he is serving time with another former salesman of Ray’s, Nestor, who shot a Mexican immigrant (tensions between El Barrio’s Puerto Rican residents and new Mexican immigrants remain high).
Like when he quit his maintenance job to sell drugs, Benzie again subverts the assumption that people choose the underground economy only when the mainstream economy fails them. While Benzie uses legal money to invest in the underground economy, Ray does the opposite, effectively retiring from the underground economy as the only person in this book to actually rise up socioeconomically through the drug trade.
Themes
Luis is out of prison on probation and seems to be staying away from crack while he looks for a place in a treatment program. However, his wife Wanda is divorcing him and living with another man—he wants “to beat both of them up once he completes his probation and parole.” Their children are all in foster care.
Luis hovers in the grey area between legal and illegal, perhaps recognizing the evil of his drug addiction without rejecting violence as a way of resolving his problems.
Themes
Bourgois’s old neighbors still live in the same place: the mother is a bartender, her boyfriend sells crack, and one of her sons is now helping him, while the other sells for another crew. One shot a cabdriver but managed to get off on probation, and lives with his girlfriend and son. Eddie, Caesar’s cousin, is still a bus driver. And Abraham, the alcoholic elderly man Primo “adopted” as a grandfather, died—this precipitated a housing catastrophe in the family, which ended up with Candy’s sister in a psychiatric hospital and two of her daughters pregnant by her boyfriend. Primo’s three sisters are all financially stable and doing relatively well.
The stories of the various characters who only played minor roles in Bourgois’s book remind the reader that Bourgois’s relationships and experiences in El Barrio ran far deeper than he had room to express in the final draft. The stories also demonstrate that the neighborhood’s various residents remain interconnected—their troubles and triumphs have ripple effects and unintended consequences for one other.
Themes
Finally, Bourgois’s old block “has not changed appreciably,” although the Game Room shut down in 1992. Two storefronts and two teenage crews are still selling crack. A “well-run and completely legal bodega” has also opened, and an old abandoned building turned into public housing, but another building has become nearly “uninhabitable.” The area around La Farmacia has also seen little change. When he sees one of the pregnant crack addicts from his research days again pregnant and on crack, Bourgois realizes that he has “lost the defense mechanisms that allow people on the street to ‘normalize’ personal suffering and violence.”
The small-scale changes in El Barrio do little to change the neighborhood’s environment as a whole—if things truly are getting better, it is difficult to tell from the few minor differences on Bourgois’s old block. The environment continues to advertise the criminality and dereliction that define the neighborhood’s streets, even if they do not accurately represent the experiences of most of its residents.
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