Bourgois’s initial motivation for studying El Barrio was his desire to understand what he calls the underground economy: the semi-legal and outright illegal industries that dominate El Barrio’s streets, and in which many of its residents participate at one time or another in their lives. While the public tends to see drug dealing as a bad choice made by malicious people, Bourgois shows that it is in fact the natural option for youth growing up in El Barrio: not only is it the highest paying job available, but it is actually more dignified than the legal work residents can find, and it is so common on the street that children are exposed to it from an early age. Bourgois accordingly shows that, despite the enormous risks associated with drug dealing, it is actually a rational choice for many El Barrio residents, and that the best ways to eliminate the dangers of drug dealing are to decriminalize drugs and create viable options in the legal economy.
Bourgois argues that the crack trade is fundamentally like any other business, “overwhelmingly routine and tedious” except for the constant danger surrounding it. The best way to make money as a crack dealer, after all, is making consistent sales to regular customers, like in any other sales job. Accordingly, the people who do the best in East Harlem—like Ray and Primo—are quite business savvy. Ray is a “brilliant labor relations manager” and controls his displays of affection, use of violence, and family relations in order to maintain a tight grip over his network. He makes the Game Room extraordinarily profitable using the same methods as any other shrewd businessman: he turns his workers against one another, fires the more erratic lookouts, and even decides to keep Bourgois around because his white face dissuades potential robbers. The decisions about who to keep around, then, are fundamentally about personnel management. This is all why, to Bourgois, crack dealers are in fact exemplars of the American economic spirit: they are self-reliant, motivated, profit-seeking entrepreneurs, and their business operates on the same principles as the legal economy.
According to Bourgois, people become crack dealers not because they turn their back on mainstream society, but because mainstream society has turned its back on them: they chose the underground economy because they cannot find and retain dignified employment. Bourgois does the math and determines that the average dealer makes $7-8 an hour—by no means the windfall of cash most people associate with drug dealing. Even though he is a successful dealer, Primo continues to use his mother and girlfriend’s food stamps, which betrays that he is scarcely making a living. In an effort to improve their lot, he and Caesar talk constantly about their desire for “legit” jobs. The problem is simply that they consistently end up in the lowest-level entry level jobs, with little autonomy or chance of ever advancing. Nevertheless, many well-intentioned people in the community try to push El Barrio residents toward bottom-level service work, “ripping their self-esteem apart […] to build them back up with an epiphanic realization that they want to find jobs as security guards, messengers, and data-input clerks.” Besides these programs’ dishonesty about what makes a dignified life, they are often straightforward scams: at one point, Primo’s mother signs him up for a program that charges the family $2400 more than initially promised. While all of the people Bourgois interview have engaged in legal employment to some extent during their lives, then, this work is usually for minimum wage and almost always undignified. For instance, Willie loves animals, so he signs up to work at a shelter—but ends up having to collect the corpses of animals who have been euthanized. Given the horrible jobs they are limited to, the people Bourgois befriends quit and return to illegal work out of a “refusal to be exploited in the legal labor market.” They choose to deal crack, in other words, because it truly is their best job prospect.
The difficulty in bridging the underground and legal economies also hinges on El Barrio residents’ illiteracy in the ways and codes of the formal economy, and their legal employers’ illiteracy in street culture. Even though Ray and Primo are excellent crack dealers, they completely fail in the legal economy because they lack “cultural capital”: the knowledge, practices, and assumptions of the mainstream society. Accordingly, Ray’s legal businesses fail because he does not know how to get permits or pass inspections. Primo tries to go above and beyond in his job by answering the phones and throwing out out cluttered files he is asked to organize. He thinks he is helping, but people recoil when they hear his Nuyorican accent on the phone and he ends up throwing away important documents, so ultimately gets fired for these behaviors. At the end of the book, however, Ray finally does find a way into the legal economy: he buys abandoned buildings and becomes a landlord. In the vast majority of situations, however, underground workers’ lack of cultural capital makes it very difficult for them to move into the mainstream culture that is dominated by “upper-middle-class white” concepts of respectability, trustworthiness, and appropriate behavior.
For Bourgois, El Barrio’s flourishing underground economy is a sign of its residents’ economic isolation and cultural rejection from the mainstream white world. While they do consciously choose their illegal, dangerous, and socially counterproductive jobs, they do this not because they are sadists or psychopaths, but rather simply because their social contexts genuinely leave them no other option. The solution to the growth of the drug trade and its concomitant violence in East Harlem is therefore, for Bourgois, not to criminalize and persecute drugs, but rather to offer the people involved with them alternative paths to financially stable, socially respectable work with growth potential. This requires investments in education and better communication between dominant and street cultures, rather than efforts to make inner-city residents embrace their position at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The Crack Trade and the Underground Economy ThemeTracker
The Crack Trade and the Underground Economy Quotes in In Search of Respect
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.
In short, how can we expect someone who specializes in mugging elderly persons to provide us with accurate data on his or her income-generating strategies?
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’!.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Contrary to my expectations, most of the dealers had not completely withdrawn from the legal economy. On the contrary—as I have shown in Chapter 3, in discussing the jobs that Willie and Benzie left to become crack dealers and addicts—they are precariously perched on the edge of the legal economy. Their poverty remains their only constant as they alternate between street-level crack dealing and just-above-minimum wage legal employment. The working-class jobs they manage to find are objectively recognized to be among the least desirable in U.S. society; hence the following list of just a few of the jobs held by some of the Game Room regulars during the years I knew them: unlicensed asbestos remover, home attendant, street-corner flyer distributor, deep-fat fry cook, and night-shift security guard on the violent ward at the municipal hospital for the criminally insane.
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.
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.
