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
In his new epilogue, almost a decade after the book’s publication, Bourgois offers an update on his still-active friendship with Primo (and the news Primo offers about Bourgois’s other old acquaintances). Although he has still not returned to selling drugs, he got kicked out of public housing for heroin possession, and his mother has died. He has become a Muslim and “occasionally sniff[s] heroin.” He works renovating bathrooms for a lazy boss, and hopes to start working independently soon. He gets a 13-bathroom contract, but has to reject it because he cannot find people to subcontract with, and this means he must also disappoint his 15-year-old son who is hoping to move to New York and work with him. He is dating Candy’s niece, who has a stable job as a bank teller.
Although Bourgois wrote this second epilogue eight years after In Search of Respect’s original publication and his formal fieldwork ended long ago, he still sustains the relationships that made the book possible. Specifically, Bourgois remains close to Primo, whose varied trajectory demonstrates the outside forces that inner-city residents struggle to overcome. Despite his best attempts to turn his life around, Primo’s success is ultimately out of his control.
Themes
Primo’s son, his ex Maria, Caesar, and Carmen are all living in Connecticut. Caesar has gone through rehab but continues using crack and Primo is trying to convince Maria to throw him out.
Although Primo and Caesar remain a sort of “fictive kin” because Primo’s ex and Caesar’s girlfriend are sisters, they have also clearly grown apart, and Primo finally begins to prioritize giving his son a stable upbringing.
Themes
Candy got a job taking care of elderly patients at home, but injured herself severely and can no longer leave the house. She is hooked on pain pills, “severely depressed and angry at the world.” Felix has stopped beating her and continues to work off-the-books construction jobs. Their son Junior is in prison, and they briefly took foster children, but Luis’s sons (the first they took in) allegedly sexually abused the others.
Like Primo, Candy suffers a terrible setback precisely when she is beginning to achieve both economic and personal stability. While Felix's improved behavior suggests Candy has finally forced him to respect her, Candy’s depression is an understandable response to a turn of events that, it seems, could not have come at a worse time.
Themes
Luis has quit drugs, “to everyone’s surprise,” and is living with his girlfriend and two new children, although his five old ones remain in foster care. He works with Primo and tinkers with computers on the side. Tony has a job but lost his girlfriend, Little Pete is in prison alongside his brother, and Bourgois’s old neighbors Angel and Manny are still “up to no good.” Primo’s sisters now live in the suburbs and have steady jobs, as does Benzie. And Ray is nowhere to be seen. He supposedly lives off the rent from buildings he bought with his drug money.
The whole cast of characters from Bourgois’s book drift in different directions, with some finding the stability they sought and others falling resolutely into a career of crime. This is, of course, a reminder that El Barrio residents’ fates are never set out in advance, no matter how severely restricted they may be. And yet, none of them follow a perfectly triumphant trajectory. Their dreams remain modest: to live a middle-class life, or to find respect and a steady income without having to leave New York.
Themes
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Bourgois notes “the everyday violence against children that is routinized” in places like El Barrio, and that he has to acknowledge it anew every time he visits. He includes fieldwork notes from 2000, about a woman dealing with her learning-disabled, violent grandson whose father remains in prison for life on a murder conviction. The woman, Felix’s sister Esperanza, sees another family in her building openly abuse their daughter. In fact, their five-year-old son had a brain tumor, and their older son blames them for it because they repeatedly hit the child on the head (and apparently still do). Esperanza also had to call the Bureau of Child Welfare on the neighbors (whose daughter was screaming for help during a beating) and had to evict her daughter, lest the Housing Authority kick everyone out of the apartment.
Despite all the years he spent in El Barrio, Bourgois never gets over the culture shock, especially when it means watching the neighborhood’s children grow up in parallel to his own. Esperanza’s suffering illustrates the ripple effects of that a violent neighborhood can have on entire families and communities—not just the perpetrators and victims. It also shows that the bulk of these ripple effects tend to land squarely on women. Esperanza’s ethical dilemma parallels the numerous conundrums Bourgois faced during his research—she has to weigh loyalty to her community and suspicion of the police against her genuine care for a child.
Themes
A “marijuana-selling, wannabe boxer” shows up to chat with Esperanza’s reclusive daughter, and Bourgois learns that this man is Luis’s son, whom he had last met six years before, when “his father Luis has just been jailed and his mother [Wanda] is exchanging sex for crack under the elevated railroad tracks on Park Avenue.” Luis’s son has three children. On his way home, Bourgois sees a woman nearly beat her three-year-old in the elevator and a number of “underweight children” traveling with their “emaciated mothers who are obviously on crack missions.”
Bourgois’s position is made all the more difficult by watching innocent children turn into perpetrators of violence and participants in the drug trade. It is unclear whether this son of Luis’s was one of the ones involved in abusing other foster children—but, given his parents’ fates and what Bourgois has already shown about intergenerational cycles of violence, it would not be a shock.
Themes
Bourgois explains that his last fieldnotes from 2002 emphasize “the institutional violence of the new panopticon that enforces ‘quality-of-life crimes’ on El Barrio’s streets.” In fact, a cop fines Bourgois himself for drinking on the street, but yells such a string of obscenities that it becomes clear he thinks Bourgois is seeking drugs or sex in the neighborhood.
While the police used to casually harass Bourgois and his friends, now their petty antics (such as drinking on the street) have become prosecutable crimes. This reflects both the United States’ increasingly draconian attitude toward inner-city crime in the and how longstanding prejudices against inner-city residents translate into the criminalization of their very existence. Bourgois knows that he would never have been fined, had the police not suspected he were up to something more sinister. He implies that these new laws are simply ways of giving the police wide discretion to arrest anyone they consider plausibly criminal, delinquent, or unworthy, based on very little evidence.
Themes
When he has to fly back from California to New York to pay his $10 fine, Bourgois notes that the courts are in chaos, with “most of our time [spent] waiting in hallways while the guards try to figure out which courtroom is not too crowded to take us.” A police officer tells him to deny the charges, which are not worth the state’s effort to substantiate, and Bourgois watches a series of marijuana cases get dismissed because “it’s too expensive to have marijuana tested.” After a few hours, Bourgois almost pays the fine of a man who cannot afford his own but decides not to “because [the man] might think I will demand a sexual favor in repayment.” He goes uptown to visit Esperanza.
The absolute chaos of the municipal court system—as well as the vengeful pettiness of asking Bourgois to fly across the country for a $10 fine—again suggests that there is a wide gulf between the purported aims of the criminal justice system and its actual effects on the people it polices. Prosecutors, more interested in justice than winning, use marijuana cases as bluffs in hopes that people will either not show up or admit to a crime that cannot be proven.
Themes
Just after 9/11, Primo tells Bourgois that he has grown deathly afraid of terrorism, and stopped going to his drug treatment program as a result. His girlfriend is working—she turned down maternity leave in exchange for a promotion she was never given. He continues doing heroin but has not failed a drug test.
Despite his familiarity with danger and violence, Primo is still overwhelmed by the nebulous danger of terrorism. Perhaps ironically, many Americans’ fears of inner cities during the crack epidemic operated on the same principle: fear of highly visible but relatively unlikely violence committed by a figure stereotyped as purely evil. Of course, this figure was the racialized crack dealer or user—Primo himself.
Themes
Some time later, Primo calls saying that Esperanza has sent her imprisoned son Bourgois’s book, and the prison guards have confiscated it and tried to use it to extract a confession out of the man. He assures Esperanza, and the reader, that not only is her son barely mentioned in the book itself, but that there are legal previsions against his book becoming evidence in court. Later, Bourgois learns that Esperanza’s son sued the jail and got himself moved to a closer, easier-to-visit location. Primo’s girlfriend finally got her promotion and Esperanza’s mental health is in great shape. Her and Felix’s mother has died, but they are coping well, and the city government has sent the little girl next door away to foster care.
Much like crack dealers, the prison guards have no qualms about using every possible tactic—without regard for ethics or legality—in order to get their way with Esperanza’s son. This offers one final reminder that inner city residents are treated as criminals and presumed guilty because of who they are, rather than what they have done. These tactics have only worsened since the 1990s, when Bourgois originally wrote the book. The crack epidemic was only the beginning of what effectively became a systemic war on American inner cities.
Themes
