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
Between the book’s initial publication in 1995 and 2003, Bourgois identifies four major shifts in the place he studied: economic growth, the increase in Mexican migration to New York and East Harlem, the widespread jailing of “the poor and the socially marginal” under the guise of “the war on drugs,” and the turn toward marijuana and away from crack, which was decreasingly available on the street and noted less and less in “hospital emergency room and arrest statistics.” Overall, heroin became more common, as well as “cheaper and purer,” but involved another population—young whites, not the Latinx and African Americans at the heart of this book. Nevertheless, especially among older users, “both heroin and crack continued to be multibillion-dollar businesses that ravaged inner-city families with special virulence.” However, many young people nevertheless started selling these drugs.
Bourgois’s attention to the changes in El Barrio life shows that this book is ultimately a portrait of a specific time period and group of people, not a comprehensive study of the neighborhood nor an attempt to capture the essence of it. This is important for the contemporary reader, who encounters this book decades after its original publication. Indeed, El Barrio is now vastly different from what it was in the 1980s, but the lasting appeal of drugs in the neighborhood shows that a significant portion of its population continues to seek illegal, dangerous work in the drug trade as an alternative to the formal economy.
Themes
Many of the dealers Bourgois profiled in 1995 got low-paying jobs by 2002, and the few who were still dealing had largely switched to marijuana. But three were in jail, and many young people in neighborhoods like East Harlem remained “completely superfluous to the legal economy.” This is unsurprising: the United States is the world’s most unequal industrialized country, and continues to get worse. The influx of immigrants from rural Mexico and new construction in the neighborhood were also notable shifts, which contributed to the shrinking—but not elimination—of space dedicated to drug dealing.
Bourgois makes it clear that the contraction of the drug economy does not necessarily imply that life is getting better for El Barrio residents, who are more than just incidentally poor, but rather systematically excluded from the social mainstream. Contrary to popular narratives of continual social progress and change in the United States, Bourgois shows that the economic conditions of the American poor have worsened since the mid-20th century. This suggests that the narrative of progress serves only to hide the fact that the contemporary United States has a permanent underclass largely created and sustained by government policies.
Themes
However, public policy dealing with low-income people effectively replaced any semblance of social welfare with “an expensive, rigorous, criminal dragnet” that doubled the nation’s incarceration rate in the 1990s and disproportionately targeted African American and Latinx people. Rudolph Giuliani’s “get-tough-on-crime policy” not only expanded police brutality but also charged the state billions of dollars at the expense of funding health and education programs. While many have attributed the 1990s’s reduction in crime rate to this policy, in fact cities without “tough-on-crime” strategies reduced their crime rates more than New York did. And draconian policies like the “one-strike-you’re-out” approach to public housing—in which one person’s crime leads to their entire family being kicked out of public housing forever—and the cyclical character of American poverty rig the game against the next generation that Bourgois has seen grow up during and after his research.
Although Bourgois’s book is largely about the War on Drugs, his research took place before the emergence of what is now U.S. drug policy’s defining factor: the widespread imprisonment of people for even minor drug offenses. The crack epidemic that Bourgois studied, which was heavily associated with poor, urban black and Latinx Americans, became the basis for this shift. As a result, for many such communities, the state has become a greater enemy than drugs themselves. Contemporary scholars tend to view incarceration, at the expense of education and community development, as intimately tied to the economic shifts that have continued to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of a few. These individuals tend to remove poor Americans from the underground economy only by turning them into sources of profit for the legal economy, such as unpaid prison labor.
Themes
