Bourgois notes that life in El Barrio is not structured around the cultural norms that prevail in the rest of the United States, but rather follows a distinct “street culture” developed in opposition to the mainstream. He defines this culture as a system of “beliefs, symbols, modes of interaction, values, and ideologies” within which El Barrio residents can seek the dignity and respect denied to them in society at large. Indeed, the drug dealers Bourgois befriends are seeking this kind of status within their communities—hence the book’s name, In Search of Respect—but, in doing so, actually undermine themselves, their communities, and their chance to succeed in the dominant culture. For Bourgois, then, street culture epitomizes how El Barrio residents’ search for dignity proves self-undermining, and drug use in turn epitomizes the contradictions of street culture.
Street culture emerges from what Bourgois calls America’s entrenched “racial and class-based apartheid”—because the mainstream culture denigrates poor El Barrio residents, they develop an alternative culture that instead denigrates the mainstream. American society’s “apartheid” is clearly demonstrated in the vicious responses of those on all sides when he, a white man from the upper classes, crossed into El Barrio. Everyone he meets, from the police to his neighbors, is initially suspicious of his motivations and presence, and his friends who live elsewhere in New York refuse to visit his new apartment and worry about his safety. As he puts it, “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.”
Street culture bases dignity on power in the local community, conceived through criteria like shows of masculinity, status symbols (cars, girlfriends, drugs), and the ability to command assent through violence. Autonomy—going one’s own way and refusing to listen to conventional authority figures—is paramount. A key figure of street culture is the jíbaro, a formerly derogatory term for rural Puerto Rican plantation workers who “lived outside the jurisdiction of the urban-based state,” which Nuyoricans have turned into a source of pride. The rejection of conventional state and economic power becomes a defining feature of this jíbaro, Nuyorican street culture, and Bourgois’s friends repeatedly refer to themselves as jíbaros.
While street culture is a powerful form of resistance that allows El Barrio residents to develop a collective identity, Bourgois shows how it also undermines the collective itself, fracturing people’s lives and turning mainstream society further against them. For instance, street culture clashes with office culture, the latter of which requires people to interact tactfully and dutifully carry out their boss’s orders. This leads many residents of El Barrio to lose their legal jobs. But the best example is clearly drug addiction. Crack tears people from their families, leads people like Primo and Caesar to ruin their families and friends financially to fund their addictions, and feeds violence. For instance, Primo spends his money on drugs instead of buying his son Papito a birthday present. For Bourgois, the epitome of this issue is the pregnant drug users he meets, who justify their use by suggesting that they smoke crack in a way that will not harm—or will even help—their babies. And society at large tends to associate street culture with the perceived failures of inner-city residents. The mainstream sees street culture as a mark of incapacity and inferiority, and uses this belief to justify discriminating against El Barrio residents. This in turn further entrenches their poverty.
For Bourgois, street culture therefore gives way to an unfortunate paradox: precisely because people “are seeking an alternative to their social marginalization, […] they become the actual agents administering their own destruction and their community’s suffering.” Perhaps the deepest irony is that street culture gets taken up and recycled by the mainstream: Bourgois notes how the terms “‘cool,’ ‘square,’ or ‘hip’” entered the public vocabulary, much like hip-hop gained wide appeal. Despite this interplay between street culture and society at large, however, it remains a concrete disadvantage to its participants when they try to make it in the mainstream.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Street Culture and Drug Use ThemeTracker
Street Culture and Drug Use Quotes in In Search of Respect
“Man, I don’t blame where I’m at right now on nobody else but myself.”
Cocaine and crack, in particular during the mid-1980s and through the early 1990s, followed by heroin in the mid-1990s, have been the fastest growing—if not the only—equal opportunity employers of men in Harlem. Retail drug sales easily outcompete other income-generating opportunities, whether legal or illegal.
The street in front of my tenement was not atypical, and within a two block radius I could—and still can, as of this final draft—obtain heroin, crack, powder cocaine, hypodermic needles, methadone, Valium, angel dust, marijuana, mescaline, bootleg alcohol, and tobacco. Within one hundred yards of my stoop there were three competing crackhouses selling vials at two, three, and five dollars.
The street culture of resistance is predicated on the destruction of its participants and the community harboring them. In other words, although street culture emerges out of a personal search for dignity and a rejection of racism and subjugation, it ultimately becomes an active agent in personal degradation and community ruin.
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.
“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.”
It is only the omnipresent danger, the high profit margin, and the desperate tone of addiction that prevent crack dealing from becoming overwhelmingly routine and tedious.
The contrast between Ray’s consistent failures at establishing viable, legal business ventures—that is, his deli, his legal social club, and his Laundromat—versus his notable success at running a complex franchise of retail crack outlets, highlight the different “cultural capitals” needed to operate as a private entrepreneur in the legal economy versus the underground economy.
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.
It almost appears as if Caesar, Primo, and Willie were caught in a time warp during their teenage years. Their macho-proletarian dream of working an eight-hour shift plus overtime throughout their adult lives at a rugged slot in a unionized shop has been replaced by the nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office-support service work. The stable factory-worker incomes that might have allowed Caesar and Primo to support families have largely disappeared from the inner city. Perhaps if their social network had not been confined to the weakest sector of manufacturing in a period of rapid job loss, their teenage working-class dreams might have stabilized them for long enough to enable them to adapt to the restructuring of the local economy. Instead, they find themselves propelled headlong into an explosive confrontation between their sense of cultural dignity versus the humiliating interpersonal subordination of service work.
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.
Candy went back to defining her life around the needs of her children. The irony of the institution of the single, female-headed household is that, like the former conjugal rural family, it is predicated on submission to patriarchy. Street culture takes for granted a father’s right to abandon his children while he searches for ecstasy and meaning in the underground economy. There is little that is triumphantly matriarchal or matrifocal about this arrangement. It simply represents greater exploitation of women, who are obliged to devote themselves unconditionally to the children for whom their men refuse to share responsibility.
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.
