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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in In Search of Respect, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Anthropological Research and its Consequences
The Crack Trade and the Underground Economy
Poverty, History, and Public Policy
Street Culture and Drug Use
Gender Roles and Family Violence
Summary
Analysis
In the chapter introduction, Bourgois quotes Caesar talking about the “wild war” between Puerto Ricans and African Americans at his school and explains that the next several chapters concern his subjects’ early and family lives. This chapter is about public school and gangs, the most important institutions of adolescence.
Bourgois bridges the two halves of his book—the preceding chapters about the drug trade as an economic activity and public symbol of El Barrio life, and the final three chapters about private relationships and family life in the neighborhood. He does so by showing the interface between the two: how El Barrio youth’s socialization into violence and institutions’ failures to incorporate them into mainstream society lead them to reject conventional social norms and perpetuate violence in their personal lives.
Themes
Bourgois starts with Primo and Caesar’s earliest memories about school in “Kindergarten Delinquencies: Confronting Cultural Capital.” As a child, Primo hates school and never does homework—not only does his mother, who does not speak English and is functionally illiterate, have no idea how to deal with the school system, but moreover this system takes over her authority and makes Primo feel he has to choose between loyalty to school and to his mother. Researchers have well established that “teachers unconsciously process subliminal class and cultural messages to hierarchize their students,” and Primo’s absolute refusal to participate easily lands him at the bottom of this hierarchy. He ignores his mother’s protests and forges her signature. She sends him to Puerto Rico, where her old community rejects him. When he is caught stealing $500 from his grandmother’s purse, he gets sent back to New York.
Just as in his conflict between street and middle-class office cultures, Primo experiences the school system as an imposing, alien force that rigidly enforces uniformity. Middle-class parents with. mainstream cultural capital often are able to ensure that the interests of their children and the school system align. But this never happens with children like Primo, for whom school and family are entirely separate spheres. Torn between his mother and school system—who do not understand one another, and both assume their authority is absolute—it makes sense that Primo rejects both and acts out.
Themes
As Bourgois explains in “Violence: Family and Institutional,” Caesar fared even worse than Primo. While Primo’s mother came from “a rural plantation village,” Caesar’s mom was from a city, endured “more violent personal disruptions,” and ended up using heroin during her pregnancy and serving more than two decades in prison for murdering a doctor. He grew up with his grandmother and moved frequently among cities and schools, where he invariably got into bad fights. At a reform school, he and his cousin Eddie watched counselors abuse students and were both suicidal because of their mothers’ rejection. Eddie reveals that their grandmother publicly beat Caesar, and Caesar admits that she once threw a knife at him. In fact, Caesar and Eddie’s grandmother has a reputation for brutality in the neighborhood, “even [among] the toughest of the dealers,” although she is always polite to Bourgois.
Bourgois’s attention to his subjects’ family histories—like his summaries of Puerto Rico and El Barrio’s histories—allow him to show the intergenerational patterns that made it particularly easy or logical (although never completely inevitable) for people to choose a self-destructive path. In this case, Caesar and Eddie learn from their families to address problems through violence. Rather than pay attention to their situations or attempt to teach them otherwise, the school system increasingly treats them as lost causes and menaces to society.
Themes
Given his upbringing, Bourgois thinks Caesar’s propensity to violence makes sense. Caesar once hit a teacher with a chair, breaking his arm. He tried to rape another teacher and robbed a third repeatedly. He and Primo only went to school to meet girls and “fuck Special Ed niggas up.” They beat one student over and over, basically staging his murder—incidentally, this student had the same disorder as Bourgois’s young son, and this forces Bourgois into a moral crisis about his research, as do Caesar’s stories about raping girls at school.
Caesar and Primo’s early, severely violent behavior likely pushes the limits of most readers’ empathy. While Bourgois demands that his readers understand the broader structural reasons as to why Caesar and Primo were disposed to act this way, he does not by any means want to suggest that they lack agency and are not fully to blame for their own actions. This illuminates Bourgois’s argument in the introduction that he has a moral responsibility to write about the violence he witnessed, as much as he has a parallel responsibility to use his depiction of this violence to advocate for the betterment of the communities in which it takes place.
Themes
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In “Learning Street Skills in Middle School,” Bourgois continues to follow Primo and Caesar’s diverging paths: while the former ended up in low-level classes, the latter went to “an experimental Special Education facility at a hospital for the criminally insane.” He has gotten social security money ever since, and since almost everyone in his family does, too, he is relatively better off financially than most off the others. When he returns to a normal school, Caesar avoids class to sell pot, play dice, chase girls, and even once “shit off the roof.” He has many more violent stories about murdering animals (burning them alive, drowning them in the river, and throwing them off buildings).
Bourgois seeks to demystify and provide a comprehensive look at Caesar’s reckless violence, rather than defining him as inherently evil because of it. In fact, public policy seems to fall victim to this way of thinking, using Caesar’s “official” insanity as a basis for arguing that he is beyond reproach and unable to ever truly contribute to the economy. The fact that this concretely benefits him demonstrates that such policies result in the opposite of their intention by encouraging antisocial behavior. This reality demonstrates that many people like Caesar who are excluded from the mainstream have not chosen their fate, but are merely ill.
Themes
Instead of school, the most influential institution in Caesar and Primo’s youth is “The Peer Group,” the subject of Bourgois’s next section. Older kids, including Ray and Luis, teach eleven-year-old Primo how to steal cars and radios from rich neighborhoods, especially the Upper East Side that borders El Barrio. According to Bourgois, this is Primo’s way of taking revenge on a socioeconomic system that denies him access to the things he wants while other children, for no apparent reason, get huge allowances. Less sociable and more interested in violence for its own sake, Caesar participates less in theft and instead “celebrate[s] the public, rowdy dimensions of street culture,” for instance by showing off his clothes.
Bourgois reminds the reader that Ray, Primo, and Caesar are not just temporary friends out of convenience and mutual economic interest. Rather, their economic network is inseparable from the social one in which they have been embedded for more than a decade. From a very young age, Primo is acutely aware of New York’s deep inequality and the relative deprivation into which he was born. In this sense, he sees robbery as a way of leveling the playing field. This viewpoint shows that he has gradually moved away from the perspective of structural oppression in favor of an individualistic, agency-based explanation of success and failure.
Themes
Under the heading “Adolescent Mischief and Inner-City Rage,” Bourgois explains how crime simply is teenage play for Primo, the kind of “mischief” that would not be a problem in many social contexts (even Primo’s mom admits to stealing mangos and sugar cane from the plantations where she grew up in her teens). One of the differences is that, for Primo and Caesar, there are opportunities to escalate: soon after beginning to rob cars, Primo starts burglarizing apartments and businesses. On one occasion, Primo and a guy named Papito both badly cut their hands and end up at the hospital. They invented a story to tell their parents, and then had operations. Primo’s hand has never been fully functional since.
Many adolescents are given license by their parents, schools, and communities to go through a rebellious phase. For El Barrio youth, however, any misstep during this phase means being suddenly thrust into adulthood and labeled a dangerous criminal. While Primo’s crimes got worse and worse, contrary to common belief, this trajectory did not continue doing so into adulthood. Selling crack is far less dangerous and arguably less damaging than what he did in his teens. Primo’s motivations for crime gradually shift from centering on identity, pride, revenge, and dignity during his youth to simply making a stable income in adulthood.
Themes
Again, Caesar’s experience is quite different: he takes pride in violently mugging people, including and old lady he later says he wanted to kill. He likes to play off the stereotype of the “crazy motherfucking Puerto Rican.”
Whereas Primo gets into crime for the money, status, and sense of autonomy, Caesar—as he fully recognizes—is closer to the stereotype of a criminal who acts out of pure rage and sadism.
Themes
In the section “Adolescent Gang Rape,” Bourgois explains that this was a common and profoundly troubling phenomenon in El Barrio: Ray and Luis coordinated gang rapes of teenage girls, and Primo and Caesar gladly participated in them. Bourgois is horrified and questions how, during his research, he “had grown to like most of these veteran rapists.” He emphasizes that this discussion is difficult personally and dangerous politically (because it could lead readers to further alienate and demonize Puerto Ricans and the poor), but that he feels obligated to address the topic and cite his interviews with both perpetrators and survivors.
The problem of gang rape transitions the book to a specific discussion of the horrible gender violence that often characterizes life in El Barrio. It also raises a significant ethical challenge for Bourgois, who encounters behavior that is irrefutably harmful and unsanctionable, but has to balance his moral outrage with his awareness of the potential impacts that speaking out would have on his broader project and the trust he has built with his subjects.
Themes
Primo is around gang rape even before puberty, and starts participating it as soon as he begins it. He and his friends force women to submit by threatening violence, and he talks about which women were more and less “suitable” to be raped. Caesar insists that women like being raped and “come back for more.” Luis apparently likes showing off in front of the other men, which confirms the “homoerotic dimension” of their actions for Bourgois, who eventually gets Primo to admit that he regrets what he did, although never to fully recognize the pain he caused.
Primo and Caesar’s casual attitude about sexual violence demonstrates their deeply misogynistic perspective on sex. They view it as a transaction—like the crack trade—in which everyone is self-interested and any tactic is fair game. Bourgois indicates that he does insert his own conscience into his conversations about rape with Primo and Caesar, but admits that the results are lukewarm. While he had no illusions about turning his crack dealer friends into feminists, he also recognizes that he might be able to help them adopt another perspective on their behavior.
Themes
