In Search of Respect (Introduction)

Cambridge Books Online
http://ebooks.cambridge.org/
In Search of Respect
Selling Crack in El Barrio
Philippe Bourgois
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562
Online ISBN: 9780511808562
Hardback ISBN: 9780521815628
Paperback ISBN: 9780521017114
Chapter
Introduction pp. 1-18
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808562.002
Cambridge University Press
INTRODUCTION
Man, I don't blame where I'm at right now on nobody else but myself.
Primo
I was forced into crack against my will. When I first moved to East
Harlem "El Barrio"1 as a newlywed in the spring of 1985, I was
looking for an inexpensive New York City apartment from which I could
write a book on the experience of poverty and ethnic segregation in the
heart of one of the most expensive cities in the world. On the level of
theory, I was interested in the political economy of inner-city street
culture. From a personal, political perspective, I wanted to probe the
Achilles heel of the richest industrialized nation in the world by documenting how it imposes racial segregation and economic marginalization
on so many of its Latino/a and African-American citizens.
I thought the drug world was going to be only one of the many
themes I would explore. My original subject was the entire underground
(untaxed) economy, from curbside car repairing and baby-sitting, to
unlicensed off-track betting and drug dealing. I had never even heard of
crack when I first arrived in the neighborhood no one knew about this
particular substance yet, because this brittle compound of cocaine and
baking soda processed into efficiently smokable pellets was not yet available as a mass-marketed product. 2 By the end of the year, however, most
of my friends, neighbors, and acquaintances had been swept into the
multibillion-dollar crack cyclone: selling it, smoking it, fretting over it.
I followed them, and I watched the murder rate in the projects
opposite my crumbling tenement apartment spiral into one of the highest
in Manhattan. 3 The sidewalk in front of the burned-out abandoned
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Cambridge Books Online Cambridge University Press, 2015
Introduction
building and the rubbish-strewn vacant lot flanking each side of my
tenement began to crunch with the sound of empty crack vials underfoot.
Almost a decade later, as this book goes to press, despite the debates of
the "drug experts" over whether or not the United States faces a severe
"drug problem," this same sidewalk continues to be littered with drug
paraphernalia. The only difference in the mid-1990s is that used hypodermic needles lie alongside spent crack vials in the gutter. Heroin has
rejoined crack and cocaine as a primary drug of choice available in the
inner city as international suppliers of heroin have regained their lost
market share of substance abuse by lowering their prices and increasing
the quality of their product. 4
The Underground Economy
This book is not about crack, or drugs, per se. Substance abuse in the
inner city is merely a symptom and a vivid symbol of deeper
dynamics of social marginalization and alienation. Of course, on an
immediately visible personal level, addiction and substance abuse are
among the most immediate, brutal facts shaping daily life on the street.
Most importantly, however, the two dozen street dealers and their families that I befriended were not interested in talking primarily about
drugs. On the contrary, they wanted me to learn all about their daily
struggles for subsistence and dignity at the poverty line.
According to the official statistics, my neighbors on the street should
have been homeless, starving, and dressed in rags. Given the cost of
living in Manhattan, it should have been impossible for most of them to
afford rent and minimal groceries and still manage to pay their electricity
and gas bills. According to the 1990 census, 39.8 percent of local
residents in East Harlem lived below the federal poverty line (compared
to 16.3 percent of all New Yorkers) with a total of 62.1 percent receiving
less than twice official poverty-level incomes. The blocks immediately
surrounding me were significantly poorer with half of all residents falling
below the poverty line. 5 Given New York City prices for essential goods
and services, this means that according to official economic measures,
well over half the population of El Barrio should not be able to meet
their subsistence needs.
In fact, however, people are not starving on a massive scale. Although
many elderly residents and many young children do not have adequate
Introduction
diets and suffer from the cold in the winter, most local residents are
adequately dressed and reasonably healthy. The enormous, uncensused,
untaxed underground economy allows the hundreds of thousands of New
Yorkers in neighborhoods like East Harlem to subsist with the minimal
amenities that people living in the United States consider to be basic
necessities. I was determined to study these alternative incomegenerating strategies that were consuming so much of the time and
energy of the young men and women sitting on the stoops and parked
cars in front of my tenement.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, slightly more than one in three families
in El Barrio received public assistance.6 The heads of these impoverished
households have to supplement their meager checks in order to keep their
children alive. Many are mothers who make extra money by baby-sitting
their neighbors' children, or by housekeeping for a paying boarder.
Others may bartend at one of the half-dozen social clubs and after-hours
dancing spots scattered throughout the neighborhood. Some work "off
the books" in their living rooms as seamstresses for garment contractors.
Finally, many also find themselves obliged to establish amorous relationships with men who are willing to make cash contributions to their
household expenses.
Male income-generating strategies in the underground economy are
more publicly visible. Some men repair cars on the curb; others wait on
stoops for unlicensed construction subcontractors to pick them up for
fly-by-night demolition jobs or window renovation projects. Many sell
"numbers" the street's version of offtrack betting. The most visible
cohorts hawk "nickels and dimes" of one illegal drug or another. They
are part of the most robust, multibillion-dollar sector of the booming
underground economy. Cocaine and crack, in particular during the mid1980s and through the early 1990s, followed by heroin in the mid1990s, 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.7
The street in front of my tenement was not atypical, and within a twoblock radius I could - and still can, as of this final draft - obtain heroin,
crack, powder cocaine, hypodermic needles, methadone, Valium, angel
dust, 8 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. Just a few blocks farther
Introduction
down, in one of several local "pill mills," a doctor wrote $3.9 million
worth of Medicaid prescriptions in only one year, receiving nearly $1
million for his services. Ninety-four percent of his "medicines" were on
the Department of Social Services' list of frequently abused prescription
drugs. Most of these pills were retailed on the corner or resold in bulk
discounts to pharmacies. Right on my block, on the second floor above
the crackhouse where I spent much of my free time at night, another
filthy clinic dispensed sedatives and opiates to flocks of emaciated addicts
who waited in decrepit huddles for the nurse to raise the clinic's unidentified metal gates and tape a handwritten cardboard DOCTOR IS IN sign to
the linoleum-covered window. I never found out the volume of this
clinic's business because it was never raided by the authorities. In the
projects opposite this same pill mill, however, the New York City
Housing Authority police arrested a fifty-five-year-old mother and her
twenty-two- and sixteen-year-old daughters while they were "bagging"
twenty-one pounds of cocaine into $10 quarter-gram "jumbo" vials of
adulterated product worth over $1 million on the street. The police
found $25,000 cash in small-denomination bills in this same apartment.
In other words, millions of dollars of business takes place within a
stone's throw of the youths growing up in East Harlem tenements and
housing projects. Why should these young men and women take the
subway to work minimum wage jobs or even double minimum wage
jobs in downtown offices when they can usually earn more, at least in
the short run, by selling drugs on the street corner in front of their
apartment or school yard? In fact, I am always surprised that so many
inner-city men and women remain in the legal economy and work nine
to five plus overtime, barely making ends meet. According to the 1990
Census of East Harlem, 48 percent of all males and 35 percent of females
over sixteen were employed in officially reported jobs, compared to a
city wide average of 64 percent for men and 49 percent for women. 9 In
the census tracts surrounding my apartment, 53 percent of all men over
sixteen years of age (1,923 out of 3,647) and 28 percent of all women
over sixteen (1,307 out of 4,626) were working legally in officially
censused jobs. An additional 17 percent of the civilian labor force was
unemployed but actively looking for work compared to 16 percent for El
Barrio as a whole, and 9 percent for all of New York City. 10
The difficulty of making generalizations about inner-city neighborhoods on the basis of official U.S. Census Bureau statistics cannot be
Map of East Harlem

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South Bronx
Randall's
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116th Street
IIII I! I K !!l .
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Sources: Housing Environments Research Group, Cfty University of New York: Kevin Kearney, New York City Housing Authorty; New York Gty Department of City Planning
Introduction
overemphasized. Studies commissioned by the Census Bureau estimate
that between 20 and 40 percent of African-American and Latino men in
their late teens and early twenties are missed by the Census. Many of
these individuals purposely hide their whereabouts, fearing reprisals for
involvement in the underground economy.11 A good example of the
magnitude of concealment in the inner city is provided by a 1988 New
York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) report, which calculates that
20 percent more people lived on their premises than were officially
reported in the official rolls. The Housing Authority arrived at this
"estimate of overcrowding" by cross-tabulating statistics from the Welfare Department and the Board of Education with the increase in expenditures of their maintenance departments. 12 On the blocks immediately
surrounding my tenement a vague idea of how many men were missed by
the Census is provided by the imbalance between males and females over
sixteen years of age: 3,647 versus 4,626. In other words, if one assumes
an equal ratio of males to females, 979 men, or 21 percent of the number
counted, were missing. In New York City as a whole, 16 percent more
men over sixteen years of age would have been needed for there to be a
perfect balance between adult males and females. Using this same yardstick of men to women, in El Barrio as a whole 24 percent of all men
were "missed."
The difficulty of estimating the size of the underground economy let
alone drug dealing is even thornier.13 By definition, no Census Bureau
data exists on the subject. Because fewer households than individuals are
missed by the Census in urban settings, one possible measure for the size
of the underground economy is the figure for households that declare no
"wage or salary income." This provides only the very roughest comparative measure for the size of the underground economy in different neighborhoods because some households survive exclusively on retirement income or on strictly legal self-employment revenues. Furthermore, this
proxy figure measures drug dealing even more tenuously since many,
perhaps most, of those households that rely on the untaxed economy for
supplemental income, work at legal tasks and shun drugs. Conversely,
many people involved in the underground economy also work at legally
declared jobs. Nevertheless, one has to assume that a high proportion of
households with no wage or salary income probably rely on some combination of untaxed, undeclared income in order to continue subsisting,
and that drug dealing represents an important source of this supplemental
Table 1. Comparative Social Indicators by Neighborhood from 1990 Census
East Harlem
New York City
% females
>16
employed
% males
>16
employed
% males
>16
missing to
balance #
of females
>16
% Puerto
Rican
% AfricanAmerican
% residents
below
poverty
11,599
56
33
49
42
46
28
53
21
110,599
52
39
40
34
40
35
48
24
7,322,564
12
25
19
13
26
49
64
16
Total
population
Crack House
micro-neighborhood
% h-holds
receiving
public
assistance
% h-holds
with no
wage or
salary
income
Sources: New York City Department of City Planning, Population Division 1992 [August 26]; New York City Department of City Planning 1993 [March];
New York City Department of City Planning 1993 [December]; 1990 Census of Population and Housing Block Statistics.
Introduction
income. In any case, according to official Census Bureau statistics, 40
percent of all households in El Barrio as a whole received no legally
declared wages or salary, compared to 26 percent for New York City as a
whole. The blocks immediately surrounding my apartment were probably
slightly more enmeshed in the underground economy, with only 46
percent of the 3,995 households reporting wage or salary income. The
percentage of households receiving public assistance is another useful
figure for gauging the relative size of the underground economy, since no
household can survive on welfare alone and any legal income reported by
a household receiving public assistance is deducted from its biweekly
welfare check and its monthly food stamps allotment. On the blocks
surrounding my tenement 42 percent of all households received public
assistance compared to 34 percent in East Harlem as a whole and 13
percent for all households in New York City. I4
Street Culture: Resistance and Self-Destruction
The anguish of growing up poor in the richest city in the world is

compounded by the cultural assault that El Barrio youths often face when
they venture out of their neighborhood. This has spawned what I call
"inner-city street culture": a complex and conflictual web of beliefs,
symbols, modes of interaction, values, and ideologies that have emerged
in opposition to exclusion from mainstream society. Street culture offers
an alternative forum for autonomous personal dignity. In the particular
case of the United States, the concentration of socially marginalized
populations into politically and ecologically isolated inner-city enclaves
has fomented an especially explosive cultural creativity that is in defiance
of racism and economic marginalization. This "street culture of resistance" is not a coherent, conscious universe of political opposition but,
rather, a spontaneous set of rebellious practices that in the long term
have emerged as an oppositional style. Ironically, mainstream society
through fashion, music, film, and television eventually recuperates and
commercializes many of these oppositional street styles, recycling them
as pop culture. 15 In fact, some of the most basic linguistic expressions for
self-esteem in middle-class America, such as being "cool," "square," or
"hip," were coined on inner-city streets.
Purveying for substance use and abuse provides the material base for
contemporary street culture, rendering it even more powerfully appealing
Introduction
Repopulating El Barrio: The stuffed animals were arranged by the former superintendent
of this abandoned building to protest the decay of his block, which had become a haven
for drug dealing. Photo by Henry Chalfant.
than it has been in previous generations. Illegal enterprise, however,

embroils most of its participants in lifestyles of violence, substance abuse,
and internalized rage. Contradictorily, therefore, 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.
As already noted, it is impossible to calculate with any accuracy what
Introduction
Memorial to a youth murdered not far from the Game Room. He had aspired to be a
professional boxer. Photo by Oscar Vargas.
proportion of the population is involved in the untaxed, underground

economy. It is even harder to guess the number of people who use or sell
drugs. Most of El Barrio's residents have nothing to do with drugs. 16
The problem, however, is that this law-abiding majority has lost control
of public space. Regardless of their absolute numbers, or relative proportions, hardworking, drug-free Harlemites have been pushed onto the
defensive. Most of them live in fear, or even in contempt, of their
neighborhood. Worried mothers and fathers maintain their children
locked inside their apartments in determined attempts to keep street
culture out. They hope someday to be able to move out of the neighborhood.
The drug dealers in this book consequently represent only a small
minority of East Harlem residents, but they have managed to set the tone
for public life. They force local residents, especially women and the
elderly, to fear being assaulted or mugged. The sight of emaciated
addicts congregating visibly on street corners provokes pity, sadness, and
anger among the majority of East Harlemites who do not use drugs.
Most important, on a daily basis, the street-level drug dealers offer a
10
Introduction
persuasive, even if violent and self-destructive, alternative lifestyle to the
youths growing up around them.
No matter how marginal they may be in absolute numbers, the people
who are carving out hegemony on inner-city streets cannot be ignored;
they need to be understood. For this reason, I chose addicts, thieves, and
dealers to be my best friends and acquaintances during the years I lived
in El Barrio. The pathos of the U.S. inner city is most clearly manifested
within the street dealing world. To borrow the cliche, "in the extraordinary we can see the ordinary." The extreme perhaps caricatural
responses to poverty and segregation that the dealers and addicts in this
book represent, afford insight into processes that may be experienced
in one form or another by major sectors of any vulnerable population
experiencing rapid structural change in the context of political and
ideological oppression. There is nothing exceptional about the Puerto
Rican experience in New York, except that the human costs of immigration and poverty have been rendered more clearly visible by the extent
and rapidity with which the United States colonized and disarticulated
Puerto Rico's economy and polity. On the contrary, if anything is
extraordinary about the Puerto Rican experience, it is that Puerto Rican
cultural forms have continued to expand and reinvent themselves in the
lives of second- and third-generation immigrants around a consistent
theme of dignity and autonomy. Indeed, some Puerto Rican scholars
refer to this as Puerto Rico's "oppositional mentality," forged in the face
of long-term colonial domination. 17
Ethnographic Methods and Negative Stereotyping
Any detailed examination of social marginalization encounters serious

problems with the politics of representation, especially in the United
States, where discussions of poverty tend to polarize immediately around
race and individual self-worth. I worry, consequently, that the life stories
and events presented in this book will be misread as negative stereotypes
of Puerto Ricans, or as a hostile portrait of the poor. I have struggled
over these issues for several years because I agree with those social
scientists who criticize the inferiorizing narratives that have predominated in much of the academic and popular literature on poverty in the
United States. 18 At the same time, however, countering traditional
moralistic biases and middle-class hostility toward the poor should not
Introduction
come at the cost of sanitizing the suffering and destruction that exists on
inner-city streets. Out of a righteous, or a "politically sensitive," fear of
giving the poor a bad image, I refuse to ignore or minimize the social
misery I witnessed, because that would make me complicitous with oppression. 19
This book consequently confronts the contradictions of the politics of
representation of social marginalization in the United States by presenting brutal events, uncensored as I experienced them, or as they were
narrated to me, by the perpetrators themselves. In the process, I have
tried to build an alternative, critical understanding of the U.S. inner city
by organizing my central arguments, and by presenting the lives and
conversations of the crack dealers, in a manner that emphasizes the
interface between structural oppression and individual action. Building
on the analytic framework of cultural production theory and drawing
from feminism, I hope to restore the agency of culture, the autonomy of
individuals, and the centrality of gender and the domestic sphere to a
political economic understanding of the experience of persistent poverty
and social marginalization in the urban United States.
As I have already noted, traditional social science research techniques
that rely on Census Bureau statistics or random sample neighborhood
surveys cannot access with any degree of accuracy the people who survive
in the underground economy and much less those who sell or take
illegal drugs. By definition, individuals who have been marginalized
socially, economically, and culturally have had negative long-term relationships with mainstream society. Most drug users and dealers distrust
representatives of mainstream society and will not reveal their intimate
experiences of substance abuse or criminal enterprise to a stranger on a
survey instrument, no matter how sensitive or friendly the interviewer
may be. Consequently, most of the criminologists and sociologists who
painstakingly undertake epidemiological surveys on crime and substance
abuse collect fabrications. In fact, one does not have to be a drug dealer
or a drug addict to hide the details of one's illicit activities. Even
"honest" citizens, for example, regularly engage in "underground economy" practices when they finesse their deductions on income tax returns.
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?
The participant-observation ethnographic techniques developed pri-
Introduction
marily by cultural anthropologists since the 1920s are better suited
than exclusively quantitative methodologies for documenting the lives of
people who live on the margins of a society that is hostile to them. Only
by establishing long-term relationships based on trust can one begin to
ask provocative personal questions, and expect thoughtful, serious answers. Ethnographers usually live in the communities they study, and
they establish long-term, organic relationships with the people they write
about. In other words, in order to collect "accurate data," ethnographers
violate the canons of positivist research; we become intimately involved
with the people we study.
With this goal in mind, I spent hundreds of nights on the street and
in crackhouses observing dealers and addicts. I regularly tape-recorded
their conversations and life histories. Perhaps more important, I also
visited their families, attending parties and intimate reunions from
Thanksgiving dinners to New Year's Eve celebrations. I interviewed,
and in many cases befriended, the spouses, lovers, siblings, mothers,
grandmothers, and when possible the fathers and stepfathers of the
crack dealers featured in these pages. I also spent time in the larger
community interviewing local politicians and attending institutional
meetings.
The explosion of postmodernist theory in anthropology in the 1980s
and 1990s has critiqued the myth of ethnographic authority, and has
denounced the hierarchical politics of representation that is inherent to
anthropological endeavors. The self-conscious reflexivity called for by
postmodernists was especially necessary and useful in my case: I was an
outsider from the larger society's dominant class, ethnicity, and gender
categories who was attempting to study the experience of inner-city
poverty among Puerto Ricans. Once again, my concerns over these
complicated issues are conveyed in my contextualization and editing of
the tape-recorded crackhouse conversations. In fact, they are reflected in
the very structure of the book.
While editing thousands of pages of transcriptions I came to appreciate
the deconstructionist cliche of "culture as text." I also became acutely
aware of the contradictory collaborative nature of my research strategy.
Although the literary quality and emotional force of this book depends
entirely on the articulate words of the main characters, I have always
had the final say in how and if they would be conveyed in the
final product. 20
Introduction
Having raised the specter of poststructural theoretical critiques, I must
now express my dismay at the profoundly elitist tendencies of many
postmodernist approaches. Deconstructionist "politics" usually confine
themselves to hermetically sealed academic discourses on the "poetics" of
social interaction, or on cliches devoted to exploring the relationships
between self and other. Although postmodern ethnographers often claim
to be subversive, their contestation of authority focuses on hyperliterate
critiques of form through evocative vocabularies, playful syntaxes, and
polyphonous voices, rather than on engaging with tangible daily struggles. Postmodern debates titillate alienated, suburbanized intellectuals;
they are completely out of touch with the urgent social crises of the
inner-city unemployed. Scholarly self-reflection often degenerates into
narcissistic celebrations of privilege. Most important, however, radical
deconstructionism makes it impossible to categorize or prioritize experiences of injustice and oppression. This subtly denies the very real personal
experience of pain and suffering that is imposed socially and structurally
across race, class, gender, sexuality, and other power-ridden categories.
Irrespective of the petty theoretical infighting of academic intellectuals, the unique insights provided on the methodological level by the
participantobservation techniques of cultural anthropology are further
fraught with fundamental analytical and political tensions. Historically,
ethnographers have avoided tackling taboo subjects such as personal
violence, sexual abuse, addiction, alienation, and self-destruction. Part
of the problem is rooted in anthropology's functionalist paradigm, which
imposes order and community on its research subjects. Furthermore, the
methodological logistics of participationobservation requires researchers
to be physically present and personally involved. This encourages them
to overlook negative dynamics because they need to be empathetically
engaged with the people they study and must also have their permission
to live with them. This leads to an unconscious self-censorship that
shapes the research settings and subjects anthropologists choose to study.
It is easier to obtain the "informed consent" of the individuals one is
writing about if one is addressing relatively harmless, "quaint" subjects.
Finally, on a more personal level, extreme settings full of human tragedy,
such as the streets of East Harlem, are psychologically overwhelming and
can be physically dangerous.
Anthropology's obsession with the "exotic other" has discouraged an-
Introduction
thropologists from studying their own societies and puts them at risk of
exoticizing what they find when they study close to home; hence, I
guarded myself consciously in this work from a voyeuristic celebration of
street dealers and inner-city street culture. The dearth of ethnographic
research on devastating urban poverty, especially in the 1970s and 1980s,
is also related to the fear addressed earlier of succumbing to a
pornography of violence that reinforces popular racist stereotypes. Most
ethnographers offer sympathetic readings of the culture or people they
study. Indeed, this is enshrined in the fundamental anthropological tenet
of cultural relativism: Cultures are never good or bad; they simply have
an internal logic. In fact, however, suffering is usually hideous; it is a
solvent of human integrity, and ethnographers never want to make the
people they study look ugly. This imperative to sanitize the vulnerable is
particularly strong in the United States, where survival-of-the-fittest,
blame-the-victim theories of individual action constitute a popular "common sense." The result, as I have noted, is that ethnographic presentations of social marginalization are almost guaranteed to be misread by the
general public through a conservative, unforgiving lens. This has seriously limited the ability of intellectuals to debate issues of poverty,
ethnic discrimination, and immigration. They are traumatized by the
general public's obsession with personal worth and racial determinism.
In the United States there are few nuances in the popular understanding of the relationships between social structural constraints and individual failure. As a result, intellectuals have retreated from the fray and have
unreflexively latched on to positive representations of the oppressed that
those who have been poor, or lived among the poor, know to be completely unrealistic. Indeed, I have noticed this when presenting the main
arguments of this book in academic settings. Progressive and often
cultural nationalist colleagues who are almost always middle class
often seem to be incapable of hearing the arguments I am making.
Instead, some react in outrage at superficial images taken out of context.
It is as if they are so terrified of the potential for "negative connotations"
that they feel compelled to suppress complex, unpleasant messages before
even listening to them. Ironically, many of their criticisms in these
public academic settings embody central dimensions of precisely what I
am trying to convey in these pages about the individual experience of
social structural oppression.
Introduction
Critiquing the Culture of Poverty
El Barrio and the Puerto Rican experience in the United States has
generated a disproportionally large literature. Puerto Ricans have been
called the "most researched but least understood people in the United
States." 21 The last major ethnographic work in El Barrio to receive
national attention was Oscar Lewis's La Vida in the mid-1960s, and it
illustrates perfectly the problems inherent in ethnographic method and
in life history case studies more specifically. In fact, La Vida as well as
Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report on the Negro family are frequently cited as the studies that scared a generation of social scientists
away from studying the inner city. 22 Lewis collected thousands of pages
of life-history accounts from one extended Puerto Rican family in which
most of the women were involved in prostitution. The "culture of poverty" theory that he developed out of this and other ethnographic
data from Mexico, focused almost exclusively on the pathology of the
intergenerational transmission of destructive values and behaviors among
individuals within families. Lewis's approach is rooted in the Freudian
culture and personality paradigm that dominated anthropology in the
1950s. He fails to note how history, culture, and political-economic
structures constrain the lives of individuals. With the advantage of thirty
years of hindsight, it is easy to criticize Lewis for his overly simplistic
theoretical framework. Class exploitation, racial discrimination, and, of
course, sexist oppression, as well as the subtleties of contextualized
cultural meanings are not addressed in Lewis's psychologically reductionist descriptions of desperately poor Puerto Rican immigrants. Nevertheless, despite its lack of scholarly rigor, Lewis's compellingly written book
on daily life in El Barrio and the shantytowns of Puerto Rico became a
best seller in the United States, where it resonated with Protestant
work ethic notions of rugged individualism and personal responsibility.
Despite the author's progressive political intent and his personal sympathy for the socially marginal, critics interpret his volume as confirming
the deep-seated contempt for the "unworthy" poor that permeates U.S.
ideology.
It is no accident that it was an anthropologist who coined the concept
of the culture of poverty and focused data collection on individual behavior. The simple practical fact of the discipline's methodology participantobservation gives it access to documenting individual actions in
16
Introduction
minute detail. Structures of power and history cannot be touched or
talked to. Specifically, in the New York City Puerto Rican context, the
self-destructive daily life of those who are surviving on the street needs
to be contextualized in the particular history of the hostile race relations
and structural economic dislocation they have faced. Embroiled in what
seemed like a whirlpool of suffering during my ethnographic research, it
was often hard for me to see the larger relationships structuring the
jumble of human interaction all around me. In the heat of daily life on
the streets of El Barrio I often experienced a confusing anger with the
victims, the victimizers, and the wealthy industrialized society that
generates such an unnecessarily large toll of human suffering. For example, when confronted with a pregnant friend frantically smoking crack
and possibly condemning her future baby to a life of shattered emotions
and dulled brain cells it did no good for me to remember the history
of her people's colonial oppression and humiliation, or to contextualize
her position in New York's changing economy. Living in the inferno of
what the United States calls its "underclass," I, like my neighbors
around me and like the pregnant crack addicts themselves, often blamed
the victim.
Political economy analysis is not a panacea to compensate for individualistic, racist, or otherwise judgmental interpretations of social marginalization. In fact, a focus on structures often obscures the fact that humans
are active agents of their own history, rather than passive victims. Ethnographic method allows the "pawns" of larger structural forces to emerge
as real human beings who shape their own futures. Nevertheless, I often
caught myself falling back on a rigidly structuralist perspective in order
to avoid the painful details of how real people hurt themselves and their
loved ones in their struggle for survival in daily life. Again, this analytical and political problem can be understood within the context of the
theoretical debate over structure versus agency, that is, the relationship
between individual responsibility and social structural constraints. The
insights from cultural production theory specifically, the notion that
street culture's resistance to social marginalization is the contradictory
key to its destructive impetus is useful to avoid reductionist structuralist interpretations. Through cultural practices of opposition, individuals
shape the oppression that larger forces impose upon them. 23
The difficulty of relating individual action to political economy, combined with the personally and politically motivated timidity of ethnogra17
Introduction
phers 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. 24 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. I have documented a range of strategies that the urban poor devise to escape or
circumvent the structures of segregation and marginalization that entrap
them, including those strategies that result in self-inflicted suffering. I
have written this in the hope that "anthropological writing can be a site
of resistance," and with the conviction that social scientists should, and
can, "face power."25 At the same time, as already noted, I continue to
worry about the political implications of exposing the minute details of
the lives of the poor and powerless to the general public. Under an
ethnographic microscope everyone has warts and anyone can be made to
look like a monster. Furthermore, as the anthropologist Laura Nader
stated succinctly in the early 1970s, "Don't study the poor and powerless
because everything you say about them will be used against them." 26 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.
18

In Search of Respect (Introduction)

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Cambridge Books Online

The Underground Economy

Map of East Harlem

ii " in ... Ill

Table 1. Comparative Social Indicators by Neighborhood from 1990 Census

Street Culture: Resistance and Self-Destruction

The anguish of growing up poor in the richest city in the world is

than it has been in previous generations. Illegal enterprise, however,

proportion of the population is involved in the untaxed, underground

Ethnographic Methods and Negative Stereotyping

Any detailed examination of social marginalization encounters serious

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