Although many Americans are quick to blame poverty on a lack of effort or moral fortitude, Bourgois argues that historical factors and institutional failures are the primary sources of El Barrio’s poverty and its residents’ lack of opportunities. Yet the common American narrative tying personal responsibility to economic outcomes in fact drives much of the mistaken policy that entrenches and multiplies poverty in the American inner city. Accordingly, Bourgois attempts to combat this narrative, revealing the true and far more complex factors that lead to urban poverty, without suggesting that the people he interviews are anything less than fully responsible for the violence and suffering they create.
Bourgois suggests that El Barrio’s endemic poverty is the product of a number of intersecting historical factors. El Barrio has virtually always been an impoverished neighborhood, except for a short phase in the 1700s-1800s when it served as a “countryside retreat for wealthy New Yorkers.” Since then, one group of immigrants after another have moved to the neighborhood for its proximity to their low-wage jobs, and each group of such immigrants has turned against the next—German and Irish immigrants discriminated against Jews, who discriminated against Italians, who now discriminate against Puerto Ricans, who are beginning to discriminate against Mexicans during the period of Bourgois’s research. In the mid-20th century, Puerto Rican drug gangs begin taking control over the neighborhood, which had long served as an Italian mafia stronghold.
Similarly, Bourgois’s Nuyorican subjects are conditioned by their history: their families have been subjugated and displaced for generations. First enslaved by the Spanish, and then forced to work on rural plantations that were taken over by the United States, the ancestors of the novel’s protagonists moved to New York to escape adverse economic conditions in Puerto Rico but ended up not much better off, as vilified manufacturing sector workers. Nevertheless, these displaced older generations of Puerto Ricans fared better than their children, who have to face the evaporation of East Harlem’s manufacturing sector as such work is outsourced internationally. They are instead forced to work in non-union, socially subservient service positions in “FIRE” (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate).
Nevertheless, Bourgois argues, American politics does not much care about history—it prefers to treat poverty as an individual rather than systematic problem, one that individuals are responsible for resolving on their own rather than one that relates to the structure of society as a whole. Bourgois by no means wants to argue that the people he studies should not be morally blamed for choosing to deal and use drugs, abuse their families, and so on. Rather, he wants to show that these decisions are conditioned by social factors, which can be transformed by government policies. In short, while American “common sense” says that people’s personal failures cause their poverty, Bourgois argues that poverty is the root cause of personal failure. However, policy remains married to the belief in personal responsibility, and therefore a sense that there is something unfair about providing opportunities to the poor. Even the people Bourgois studies internalize this belief. For instance, Primo firmly believes that “if I have a problem it’s because I brought it upon myself,” even though he and those around him realize that those born into more favorable circumstances share none of their problems. As a result, when he has trouble finding work—albeit during an economic recession—Primo blames himself and falls into a deep depression, which leads him to stop looking for the work he needs. In Primo’s case, as in many others, personal failures stem from poverty, not the other way around.
As a result of the assumption that poor people are responsible for both their own poverty (due to moral failure) and getting themselves out of poverty (through hard work in the respectable legal economy), the policies aimed at the poor actually end up entrenching rather than helping those who are impoverished. The welfare system, for instance, punishes those who seek to switch over to legal work. One of Bourgois’s closest friends in El Barrio, Candy, keeps two social security numbers so she can work without losing her welfare, and when Primo starts sending child support money to his ex-girlfriend, it does not increase his income because the amount he sends is deducted from her welfare payments. Tax policy punishes the poor, too: Primo prefers to work illegally because, when he does get a legal paycheck, the government comes after him for back taxes. The state evicts whole families from apartments when any single family member commits a crime, punishing the innocent and destabilizing communities. But most of all, growing up in El Barrio means learning to see crime and delinquency as normal. Crime is everywhere on the streets, and teachers treat students as potential criminals from a young age, “unconsciously process[ing] subliminal class and cultural messages to hierarchize their students.” As children, people like Primo and Caesar reject school—along with its potential to integrate them into mainstream society—because it rejects them. While schools fail, prisons multiply, and have become the primary institution caring for African-American and Latinx youth in the years since Bourgois’s research. Such policies not only prevent many people from participating in the legal economy (by keeping them in prison and making it harder for them to get work after release), but also shatter their families in the process and waste government resources that could be better spent economically supporting those trying to escape poverty.
In Bourgois’s eyes, “middle-class standards of individual freedom” simply should not be the priority for individuals surrounded by impoverished family and community contexts. While Bourgois insists repeatedly that he refuses to ignore his subjects’ responsibility for the damage and crimes they commit, he also believes that it is necessary to demystify the historical and institutional factors that sustain poverty in neighborhoods like El Barrio. This, he argues, can give Americans a clear picture of the solution they have overlooked for too long: providing meaningful poverty relief programs, rather than allowing them to continue eroding, as they have for decades.
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Poverty, History, and Public Policy Quotes in In Search of Respect
“Man, I don’t blame where I’m at right now on nobody else but myself.”
The difficulty of relating individual action to political economy, combined with the personally and politically motivated timidity of ethnographers in the United States through the 1970s and 1980s have obfuscated our understanding of the mechanisms and the experiences of oppression I cannot resolve the structure-versus-agency debate; nor can I confidently assuage my own righteous fear that hostile readers will misconstrue my ethnography as “giving the poor a bad name.’’ Nevertheless, I feel it imperative from a personal and ethical perspective, as well as from an analytic and theoretical one, to expose the horrors I witnessed among the people I befriended, without censoring even the goriest details. The depth and overwhelming pain and terror of the experience of poverty and racism in the United States needs to be talked about openly and confronted squarely, even if that makes us uncomfortable.
Furthermore, as the anthropologist Laura Nader stated succinctly in the early 1970 s, “Don’t study the poor and powerless because everything you say about them will be used against them.” I do not know if it is possible for me to present the story of my three and a half years of residence in El Barrio without falling prey to a pornography of violence, or a racist voyeurism — ultimately the problem and the responsibility is also in the eyes of the beholder.
My mistake that night was to try to tell the police officers the truth when they asked me, “What the hell you doin’ hea’h?” When they heard me explain, in what I thought was a polite voice, that I was an anthropologist studying poverty and marginalization, the largest of the two officers in the car exploded:
“What kind of a fuckin’ moron do you think I am. You think I don’t know what you’re doin’? You think I’m stupid? You’re babbling, you fuckin’ drug addict. You’re dirty white scum! Go buy your drugs in a white neighborhood! If you don’t get the hell out of here right now, motherfucka’, you’re gonna hafta repeat your story in the precinct. You want me to take you in? Hunh? . . . Hunh? Answer me motherfucka’!.”
Most people in the United States are somehow convinced that they would be ripped limb from limb by savagely enraged local residents if they were to set foot in Harlem. While everyday danger is certainly real in El Barrio, the vast majority of the 110,599 people—51 percent Latino/Puerto Rican, 39 percent African-American, and 10 percent “other”—who lived in the neighborhood, according to the 1990 Census, are not mugged with any regularity—if ever. Ironically, the few whites residing in the neighborhood are probably safer than their African-American and Puerto Rican neighbors because most would-be muggers assume whites are either police officers or drug addicts—or both—and hesitate before assaulting them.
Primo, Benzie, Maria, and everyone else around that night had never been tête-a-tête with a friendly white before, so it was with a sense of relief that they saw I hung out with them out of genuine interest rather than to obtain drugs or engage in some other act of perdición. The only whites they had ever seen at such close quarters had been school principals, policemen, parole officers, and angry bosses. Even their schoolteachers and social workers were largely African-American and Puerto Rican. Despite his obvious fear, Primo could not hide his curiosity. As he confided in me several months later, he had always wanted a chance to “conversate” with an actual live representative of mainstream, “drug-free” white America.
My long-term goal has always been to give something back to the community. When I discussed with Ray and his employees my desire to write a book of life stories “about poverty and marginalization” that might contribute to a more progressive understanding of inner-city problems by mainstream society, they thought I was crazy and treated my concerns about social responsibility with suspicion. In their conception everyone in the world is hustling, and anyone in their right mind would want to write a best seller and make a lot of money. It had not occurred to them that they would ever get anything back from this book project, except maybe a good party on publication day. On several occasions my insistence that there should be a tangible political benefit for the community from my research project spawned humiliating responses.
To summarize, New York-born Puerto Ricans are the descendants of an uprooted people in the midst of a marathon sprint through economic history. In diverse permutations, over the past two or three generations their parents and grandparents went: (1) from semisubsistence peasants on private hillside plots or local haciendas; (2) to agricultural laborers on foreign-owned, capital-intensive agro-export plantations; (3) to factory workers in export-platform shantytowns; (4) to sweatshop workers in ghetto tenements; (5) to service sector employees in high-rise inner-city housing projects; (6) to underground economy entrepreneurs on the street. Primo captured the pathos of these macrostructural dislocations when I asked him why he sometimes called himself a jíbaro:
Primo: My father was a factory worker. It says so on my birth certificate, but he came to New York as a sugarcane cutter. Shit! I don’t care; fuck it! I ’m just a jíbaro. I speak jíbaro Spanish. Hablo como jíbaro [I speak like a jíbaro].
“Everybody is doing it. It is almost impossible to make friends who are not addicts. If you don’t want to buy the stuff, somebody is always there who is ready to give it to you. It is almost impossible to keep away from it because it is practically thrown at you. I f they were to arrest people for taking the stuff, they would have to arrest practically everybody.”
In the five years that I knew Primo he must have made tens of thousands of hand-to-hand crack sales; more than a million dollars probably passed through his fingers. Despite this intense activity, however, he was only arrested twice, and only two other sellers at the Game Room were arrested during this same period. No dealer was ever caught at Ray’s other crackhouses, not even at the Social Club on La Farmacia’s corner, even though its business was brisker.
It’s like they hear my voice, and they stop…There’s a silence on the other end of the line.
Everyone keeps asking me what race I am. Yeah, they say, like, ‘Where’re you from with that name?’ Because they hear that Puerto Rican accent. And I just tell them that I'm Nuyorican. I hate that.
The male head of household who, in the worst-case scenario, has become an impotent, economic failure experiences these rapid historical structural transformations as a dramatic assault on his sense of masculine dignity.
Primo’s mother, however, is dissatisfied with the autonomy she “gained” by uprooting herself to New York. Part of that dissatisfaction is related to the individual isolation that pervades much of the U.S. urban experience. It also stems from being forced to define rights and accomplishments in individualistic terms. She longs for the women/family/community solidarity of her hometown plantation village in Puerto Rico.
As the historian Michael Katz and many others have noted, U.S. policy toward the poor has always been obsessed with distinguishing the “worthy” from the “unworthy” poor, and of blaming individuals for their failings.
Based on my relationship to the fathers who worked for Ray, public policy efforts to coax poor men back into nuclear households are misguided. The problem is just the reverse: Too many abusive fathers are present in nuclear households terrorizing children and mothers. If anything, women take too long to become single mothers once they have babies. They often tolerate inordinate amounts of abuse.
Substance abuse is perhaps the dimension of inner-city poverty most susceptible to short-term policy intervention. In part, this is because drugs are not the root of the problems presented in these pages; they are the epiphenomenonal expression of deeper, structural dilemmas. Self-destructive addiction is merely the medium for desperate people to internalize their frustration, resistance, and powerlessness. In other words, we can safely ignore the drug hysterias that periodically sweep through the United States. Instead we should focus our ethical concerns and political energies on the contradictions posed by the persistence of inner-city poverty in the midst of extraordinary opulence. In the same vein, we need to recognize and dismantle the class- and ethnic-based apartheids that riddle the U.S. landscape.
Almost none of the policy recommendations I have made so far are politically feasible in the United States in the short or medium term. I only attempt to raise them for discussion in the hope that in the inevitable ebbs, flows, and ruptures around popular support for new political approaches to confronting poverty, ethnic discrimination, and gender inequality in the coming years, some of these ideas could be dragged into the mainstream of public debates, and that maybe bits and pieces of them could be instituted over the coming decades in one form or another. Once again, on a deeper level, the U.S. common sense, which blames victims for their failures and offers only individualistic psychologically rooted solutions to structural contradictions has to be confronted and changed. We have to break out of the dead-end political debates between liberal politicians, who want to flood the inner city with psychiatric social workers or family therapists, and conservatives, who simply want to build bigger prisons, cut social welfare spending, and decrease taxes for big business and the wealthy.
