Philippe Bourgois

"This book's argument is that people like Primo and Caesar have not passively accepted their structural victimhood. On the contrary, by embroiling themselves in the underground economy and proudly embracing street culture, they are seeking an alternative to their social marginalization. In the process, on a daily level, they become the actual agents administering their own destruction and they community's suffering."

This was a courageous and thoughtful attempt to gain insight into the question of structure versus agency in causing inner-city blight. The author moved to Spanish Harlem in the mid-90s and befriended a gang of crack dealers. The book is worth finding for chapter 4 alone, on the dealers' rancorous attempts to hold onto legal office work. Chapter 5 on their failed schooling and, shockingly, on the prevalence of gang-rape is also pretty essential, appalling reading.

The author shows how migration of large numbers of poor Puerto Ricans to New York City during a period of deindustrialization, combined with the rise of crack cocaine and the persistence of racial and cultural barriers, produced a generation of people shut out of dependable avenues for supporting themselves legally. In place of employment and self-respect, came dealing, aggression, poverty, sexual violence and a desperate yearning of the young men to make it big somehow.

The figures in the book could not overcome the structure they were born into, but we get little sense of how typical they were of the community as a whole. It would have been good to have heard from some people who did make it out: how did they overcome the barriers?… (mehr)

After reading that excerpt in my anthropology class lo these many years ago, about Bourgois's confrontation with the crack dealer Ray, I admit I thought of this book as exotic - a travel narrative, a (sympathetic) "your correspondent among the Hottentots". Reading it, though, feels like peeling off a scab in a sense - takes you back to the old wounds of youth, which it feels good to expose to the air. In other words, Bourgois does us a great service in reminding us that East Harlem, for all its particularity, is also just like Esquimalt, or wherever you grew up, only with more institutionalized racism and the inequities of American late capitalism to boot. Are they damaged people? Sure, but so are we all. There's a wealth of ethnographic and sociological information here, and there's also a lesson: These are your friends and neighbours, or if they're not, it's probably because you're profiting off their exploitation somewhere along the line, intentionally or unintentionally. Love them.… (mehr)