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Chapter 5
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
After quoting Candy’s proud declaration that she realized her husband (Felix) was mistreating her and decided to shoot him, Bourgois explains that gang rapes in El Barrio, the subject of the end of the previous chapter, are not an aberration but rather “a biting reminder of the pervasiveness of sexual violence in El Barrio.”
Candy’s violent response to her husband’s abuse is a small-scale representation of women’s revenge against El Barrio’s broader patriarchal structure. While shooting Felix might otherwise look like a horrific act of abuse itself, within the oppressive context of El Barrio, it could be seen as noble.
Themes
Under “Witnessing Patriarchy in Crisis,” Bourgois writes that women are actually slowly gaining rights and power in El Barrio, despite the horrific violence they continue to face. Patriarchal norms still dominate street culture, and men often “lash out against the women and children they can no longer control.” As old jíbaro identities clash with modern gender roles and financial troubles, creating a “crisis of patriarchy.”
The economy’s transition from manufacturing to the service industry means that women can now be just as successful as men at the lower levels of the corporate hierarchy (where El Barrio residents tend to work). Accordingly, men’s claim to power on the basis of their economic role begins to fall apart.
Themes
Bourgois struggles with a methodological problem surrounding gender violence: as a male researcher, how can he get close enough to women to hear and record their stories? His friendship with Candy was uniquely close in this respect, although she is different from many women because she is “capable of commanding respect on the street.” Bourgois first meets her when she storms into the Game Room, six months pregnant and furiously cursing out all of Ray’s associates. Candy is “always angry” because Felix wasted money that was supposed to be for his lawyer on drugs, and this promised to leave his family penniless when he went to jail (which would be very soon).
While Candy’s story allows Bourgois to go in-depth with one particular, compelling narrative that seems to exemplify gender roles and abuse in El Barrio, it also shows the limits of Bourgois’s research, specifically due to his being a white man from outside the neighborhood. Like Primo’s mother’s musings on her son, Candy’s reactions to Felix’s actions show the destructive side of the irresponsibility that Primo and Caesar valorize.
Themes
In the section “Domestic Violence in Postindustnal Turmoil,” Bourgois writes that after two years, he finally gets close enough to interview Candy, on the street and close enough to Caesar to not arouse suspicion. Candy talks about her love for her “pure and innocent” child, and how it makes her respect her own mother. But her father abused her badly, which led to her leaving home and getting pregnant at age 13. (Eloping to escape abusive men, whether fathers or husbands, is accepted practice in the El Barrio community, as long as women always stay under a man’s control.) In fact, Felix and his gang raped Candy, and then he tried to marry her, but the court rejected this decision and tried to take their baby to foster care—something Candy refused to allow.
Parenthood in El Barrio is emotionally charged in contradictory ways: it at once destroys and gives meaning to life. The pervasiveness of abuse means that many people’s poor relationships with their parents are somehow at the root of their problems. And yet, women like Candy see becoming parents as a way to recover the meaning they have lost in their lives. The notion that women may use their unhealthy romantic relationships with men as an escape from their equally abusive home life suggests that a patriarchal concept of men’s ownership over women lies at the heart of gender politics in El Barrio.
Themes
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During Bourgois’s research, Candy is 34 and has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals throughout her life, giving her an understanding of how she was abused but also the ability to manipulate the bureaucracy. She “was used to […] getting beat up” by her father, so did not think there was anything wrong when Felix started doing the same. Bourgois emphasizes that “Felix’s extreme brutality against Candy” is not only about individual psychology, but also about the “structural maladjustment” caused by rural Puerto Ricans’ migration to New York. He beat her nightly for almost a decade and caused her to miscarry five pregnancies, all many months along. This kind of behavior might have been normal on a Puerto Rican hacienda, like the patriarchal beliefs that Candy herself holds—for instance, she is thrilled above all else to have a son.
Candy’s lifelong trajectory suggests that she learned to understand herself through the eyes of the men who abused her, and therefore came to see such abuse as normal and acceptable. Felix treats Candy with a cruelty so horrific that Bourgois’s structural explanation cannot (and does not aim to) lighten the sense of profound injustice. But although both Felix and Candy take for granted Felix’s apparent right to control her with violence, their own beliefs—not their economic circumstances—are what legitimate this violence.
Themes
In “Female Liberation Versus Traditional Sexual Jealousy,” Bourgois explains that the community supported Candy when, a month after his interview with her, she shot Felix. She thinks of this as revenge for his infidelity, which allows her to both continue believing in the “male-dominated nuclear household” and relieve her dependence on him. The worst part is that Felix is cheating on her with her sister, which wounds her deeply. From when she first met him, Felix “trained” Candy to have no life except him—she was not even allowed to look outside. When she finds him with her sister in a hotel, Candy tries to kill them both. In an aside, she says she believes she has survived her own suicide attempts because “God wants me alive, ‘cause I’m a good-hearted woman.”
Bourgois notes that, despite his decades of abuse, Felix’s infidelity is ultimately Candy’s justification for shooting him. Bourgois sees this as evidence that, while readers might see Candy’s actions as a crusade against abuse, she herself does not. Instead, she is angry at Felix for denying her the “male-dominated nuclear household” for which she yearns and feels would resolve her sense of isolation. At the same time, accustomed to terrible treatment from everyone around her, Candy becomes self-reliant, and it is clear that she does not need a man to give her life value.
Themes
One day, Candy sees lipstick on Felix’s face, pulls out her gun, and shoots him in the stomach. She calls him an ambulance, but they both lie to the police and say they were robbed. Although the cops suspected she was responsible, they let her go. Her family explains her behavior by reference to the idea of an “ataque de nervios” (nerve attack), “culturally scripted violent outbursts by [often abused] women.”
The idea of an “ataque de nervios,” like practice of women leaving their families to elope with boyfriends or husbands, is a specifically Puerto Rican cultural concept that helps make sense of why women—considered as emotional and irrational—would lash out against a romantic partner. Although the “ataque de nervios” is acceptable behavior, this is more because it is treated as an outburst beyond a woman’s control, rather than because a man’s abuse or mistreatment justifies a reaction.
Themes
In “Recovery: Sex, Drugs, and More Romantic Love,” Candy explains how her life begins to unravel while Felix is in jail. Her fifth child is born, she runs out of money, and she grows depressed. To compensate, she starts selling crack and falls in love with Primo. Even he describes their first night together an unusual with sensitivity and care. Candy works all night, commanding attention on the street corner outside La Farmacia, before sending her children to school in the morning. Ray never worries about Candy’s safety: after she shoots Felix, nobody will mess with her. She is a wildly successful dealer, but starts a cocaine habit.
In part because Felix controlled Candy for nearly her entire life, “training” her to sacrifice her life beyond him, she feels lost when he is gone but also has an opportunity to finally live on her own terms. Suddenly, having created a reputation for violence by shooting Felix, Candy gains significant cultural capital in El Barrio, which she uses to begin her own underground drug business, thereby outdoing the men at their own hypermasculine profession.
Themes
In the section “Inverting Patriarchy,” Bourgois explains how Candy uses her newfound independence to help other women, like by trying to convince Luis’s wife Wanda to retaliate for his violence—he beats her up whenever she looks out the window. But she still “accept[s] and participate[s] in the patriarchal logic that blames women for male promiscuity and violence,” for instance saying that Luis and Felix learned to treat women badly “because the women in that family like to play their husbands dirty.” And Bourgois notes that, in one sense, Candy remains under Felix’s control by “following in his footsteps: selling drugs, neglecting her children, and flaunting her sexual conquests.”
Bourgois analyzes Candy’s relationship to patriarchy as ambivalent—despite her own strength and history of being abused, she still seems to think that women must follow men’s lead and are obligated to behave in a way that does not anger men. Instead of achieving freedom on terms unbound by gender expectations and constraints, she “invert[s] patriarchy.” Knowing and accepting that manhood confers power over others, she acts as masculine as possible. But she never seeks out another basis for power, whether because of her personal reservations or a lack of faith that the people around her might accept something other than the masculine power they are used to.
Themes
Primo is delighted to “freeload” off of Candy’s income, but secretly worries that Candy is “out-machoing all the men in her life.” Primo is unable to put up with this threat to his gender role, so he and Candy get into a bad physical fight in front of her kids that nearly ends with him getting shot, too. This is the end of their relationship, and Bourgois notes that Candy takes on the stereotypically male role in this conflict. She screams at him in public whenever she sees him with his new girlfriend, and during these confrontations he always worries that she will reach for her gun.
Primo’s pride in “freeload[ing]” points back to the contradictory nature of El Barrio masculinity—at least for the generation Bourgois studies. These men take pride in both controlling their families (which they believe is their right) and refusing to work (even though work was the original economic basis for their control over their faculties). By acting as breadwinner in addition to assuming the dominant role in the relationship and controlling her partner with violence, Candy truly does fulfill the ideal of masculine authority better then El Barrio’s men.
Themes
In “Contradictory Contexts for Women’s Struggles,” Bourgois visits Candy’s parents’ fishing village in Puerto Rico, where “gender relations have undergone a profound transformation” just like in New York City, although “the hostile migration experience and the polarized violence of the underground community” make things even harder in New York. Her capacity to succeed and win autonomy are limited by these issues as well as the script of patriarchy, which she follows because it is synonymous with power. This kind of autonomy is about “middle-class standards of individual freedom,” not about group identity or acceptance in white society. Primo’s mother, for instance, is marginalized and isolated in multiple ways in New York (gender, off-the-books work, residence in a housing project, language barrier, and racism), but gains some autonomy she would have lost in Puerto Rico. She deeply misses the sense of community she had there.
Bourgois’s distinction between these two kinds of freedom—personal autonomy versus group interests—points to the way American life becomes defined by the perspective and interests of the dominant, white, middle-class culture. For the dominant culture, which already has group acceptance, improving one’s individual economic situation (or that of one’s nuclear family) is the main indicator of status and the implied goal in working people’s lives. But for people like El Barrio residents, achieving class status on a small scale often disconnects people from the communities in which they live. The notion of individuality eventually undermines itself—while inner-city minorities can exercise economic and personal autonomy to some extent, this autonomy is always circumscribed by prejudice. As a result, those in power never view them solely as individuals, but rather as representatives of maligned groups.
Themes
Under the heading “Confronting the State: Forging Single Motherhood on Welfare,” Bourgois turns to “the role of the state and public policy” in the gender dynamics experienced by his research subjects. While there is some infrastructure theoretically aimed at helping the marginalized, there is actually hostility in both directions between the government and the poor. Contrary to popular narratives of passive, unworthy poor people dependent on the government, the people Bourgois meets are “aggressively struggling with the system.” Candy constantly fights with the Welfare Department, which re-validates all its clients every six months and constantly demands documentation Candy does not have (or forgets to bring).
While Welfare is supposed to be a means of helping the poor sustain themselves, motivated by sympathy and a sense that all people deserve dignity and opportunities, in reality the system runs on the opposite values. Welfare is undermined by the suspicion that the poor are trying to cheat and a demand for constant documentation and bureaucratic labor. Ironically, many people who oppose welfare do so because they think of it as too sympathetic—which suggests that they may have an idealized perception of the system.
Themes
After a court case, Candy wins nine months of Welfare that the Department has denied her. But this includes her time dealing crack. When she decides to quit and get back on Welfare for her children’s safety, her case worker gets mixed up and Candy ends up attacking her in a fury. Eventually, she starts threatening to kill the case worker.
The fact that Candy can abruptly lose Welfare for nine months shows that it is not the consistent or substantial income many of its detractors think it is. Bureaucracy also clearly prevents Welfare from fulfilling its intent—whereas many Americans think of the poor as incompetent, here they appear to be highly motivated agents trying to get promised help from an incompetent and reluctant bureaucracy.
Themes
In “The Internalization of Institutional Constraints,” Bourgois explains what happens to Candy when Felix starts getting weekend release from jail: although she has a restraining order against him, he invariably shows up drunk to see the children, and she suddenly feels controlled by him once again. She looks for a job to supplement the $53 she gets weekly from welfare and the few dollars her mother makes picking cans out of the trash. She simply cannot support herself and four children on this money, so she goes back to dealing with a new crew, and promptly gets arrested on her first day, just while greeting Ray’s new baby. In fact, she was only supposed to be a lookout, and Caesar (who has the same job) considers her a “stupid ho’” for deciding to sell.
Felix’s pattern of abusive and controlling behavior starts again, and unsurprisingly, he takes no interest in supporting his family. As a result, Candy takes on not only the extra burdens of making an income and putting up with him, but also the legal repercussions for doing so. Caesar’s criticism reveals that women are forced into a double-bind—if they do not work, they cannot survive, but if they do work, they violate the gender expectations placed on them. It also reveals that the men who enforce this double-bind simply have no idea that they are doing so.
Themes
Throughout her legal process, Candy is frightened about her kids. Her oldest is 15, but she tells the police that she has a 20-year-old, so that they do not take her children away—instead, they go to her sister-in-law. Her new employer does not bail her out, and she thinks about snitching on them. Even though she is not working for him, Ray ends up bailing her out. At home, her whole extended family celebrates her return, but she feels that something is not right.
Ultimately, Candy’s attempts to provide for her family end up undermining her relationship with them. Although she does not work for Ray anymore, his decision to bail her out shows that he does truly have relationships and concern for others beyond the realm of his business. Still, Candy is clearly troubled if she has to resort to him for help.
Themes
In “Mothers in Jail,” Bourgois remembers Candy’s stories about jail. Women are flooding into jails and prisons, in part because they are gaining access to street culture. Candy talks about the unsanitary conditions and bad food, lesbian prisoners who wanted to have sex with her and considering suicide. Primo interrupts and is visibly annoyed with her—the next month, this gets even worse when she gets the charges against her dropped because of her rocky mental health history. But she also clashes with the court when she shows up to court “in a skintight, blood-red jumpsuit” that the elderly judge finds disrespectful—although Candy chalks the woman’s disapproval up to jealousy. She vows to stay out of the legal system forever, although Primo is skeptical of her. She angrily pushes him into the elevator, but then tells him he is her “only true love.”
The rise of the female prison population suggests that their freedom is a double-edged sword in El Barrio. While they are increasingly free to participate in the market—including the underground economy—without men, they are now subject to constraints on their freedom on the part of the state, instead. Candy’s comments recall Primo and Caesar’s worries about prison rape and suggest that criminals fear one another. But, like Caesar, Candy’s history of psychiatric issues gets her declared officially inept. Finally, her difficulty navigating the court system’s norms and dress code shows that cultural capital is not only an economic problem, but also mediates people’s ability to be taken seriously when they encounter the legal system that has immense influence over their futures.
Themes
