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Chapter 6
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
Bourgois begins this chapter with Candy’s complaint about girls who “only think of their sexual pleasures” and not about their children. He then cites prominent psychological research that shows children can be scarred forever after experiencing or witnessing violence at a young age. But such research would immediately define Bourgois’s research participants as “antisocial sociopaths,” and miss the complicated forces that lead to detrimental childhood experiences—one of which is the expectation in street culture that women make an income, in addition to caring for their children. Unfortunately, in the public eye this process is simply redefined as personal failure—a lack of “family values.”
As when delving into Primo and Caesar’s histories of crime, Bourgois opens his discussion of children in El Barrio by noting the danger of essentialism. One way of understanding this concept is that everyone has a limit to how much violence and how many misdeeds they can accept from someone, while still empathizing with that person. After this point, people tend to declare those intolerable others somehow essentially or irreparably evil. One example of this is labeling children “antisocial sociopaths” rather than confronting the complexity of the matter and the many years of formation these children have left.
Themes
Under the heading “Street Culture's Children,” Bourgois notes that fears about the moral degradation of the youth have been omnipresent in East Harlem since the early 20th century. Bourgois, too, sees many young people “fall apart as they passed from childhood to adolescence.” Children are a valued pillar of community in El Barrio—everyone smiles at, cuddles, and blesses each other’s kids, something very uncommon among white Americans. Of course, Bourgois has a young son, Emiliano, whom he eventually tries as hard as possible to keep inside and away from the violence and drugs on the streets.
Bourgois suggests that the community’s fears are well-founded: watching children “fall apart” morally, socially, and legally scars him as a father. Everyone’s good intentions when meeting one another’s children seem to contrast with the actual effects of the community on children it trains into criminals.
Themes
Bourgois takes neighborhood kids downtown every few weeks, usually to museums, and notices that everyone seems to treat them with suspicion. They blame themselves for their parents’ addictions and romantic troubles, and often find themselves hanging out in crackhouses and on the street from a young age.
People’s assumption that Bourgois is somehow taking advantage of the children he tries to break out of El Barrio’s bubble again shows how the “culture of terror” and a pervasive sense that poor people lack moral worth get in the way of his attempts to help.
Themes
Candy’s son Junior, who talks early on about trying to join the police, soon becomes “a bona fide drug courier” and then a lookout for the Game Room. When Bourgois confronts him about this flip, Junior insists that he does not do or have any interest in drugs.
Junior clearly does not make a conscious decision to get involved in the world of drugs, but rather ends up there almost by default, simply because it is the path of least resistance to an income. It is, after all, the only industry that advertises in his neighborhood.
Themes
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In the section “Punishing Girls in the Street,” Bourgois notes that Junior’s sister Jackie goes through “the rites of passage of street culture” much faster. When her father Felix returns from jail and uproots the family, she runs away with her boyfriend, who abducts her for three days and enlists some friends to gang-rape her. While searching for Jackie, Caesar breaks down, because his own sister was murdered years before. Jackie soon returns and Candy forces everyone to admit that the men raped her, “despite street culture’s double-standard denial of this form of violence.”
Even more disturbing than her brother’s fate, Jackie is quickly inaugurated into El Barrio’s patriarchy. This is made all the more complicated by her own father Felix gang-raping her mother, Candy, when they were teenagers. Caesar’s distress about his sister shows that he does truly care about his family behind the veneer of violence he puts on, but perhaps not to the extent that he can control his actions.
Themes
However, Primo and Caesar blame Jackie for getting raped, thinking about her through the lens of the women they used to rape themselves. Primo calls rape “getting influenced into screwing” and insists that Jackie “knew what she was doing.” He thinks she should “just settle down” with her boyfriend-turned-rapist. They blame Candy’s morals—and Candy also blames the victim by going after the family of the other girl the men raped alongside Jackie.
Even though they have children of their own, Primo and Caesar have little sympathy for Jackie because they are so used to seeing rape from the perpetrator’s perspective that they cannot imagine her experience and terror. Even Candy responds to sexual violence by turning against its victims and defending men—perhaps, for her, this is an easier and more direct way to defend her daughter.
Themes
Under the heading “In Search of Meaning: Having Babies in El Barrio,” Bourgois notes that people were not reluctant to have kids given their socioeconomic troubles—in fact “virtually all [his] friends and acquaintances” had a child in his five years of residency in El Barrio. Primo’s girlfriend Maria, who is forced to move in with her severely alcoholic mother and watch Primo go through a felony trial, is “overjoyed to be pregnant,” because the thought of a child represents “a romantic escape” from her life. And it can also help her get a subsidized apartment from the City Housing Authority, although she ends up giving birth to her son in a homeless shelter.
Although readers might expect that El Barrio residents are reluctant to have children—as they understand the pain of growing up in the neighborhood—in fact, they think of children as a means to return to innocence and protection from their problems. Like in street culture, the attempt to escape one’s troubles by having children often ends up multiplying and prolonging people’s suffering.
Themes
At the same time, Carmen—Maria’s sister and Caesar’s girlfriend—also gets pregnant and is relieved. Caesar has sent Carmen’s older daughter away to live with Carmen’s sister and “frequently beat[s] her two-year-old son,” whom he also wants to send away. Caesar’s grandmother invites Carmen to move in with the family, and like Maria, she is delighted to be pregnant because the mother-child relationship is one of the few potentially stable ones in the social context of El Barrio. (This is, for instance, why Candy stopped using drugs and tried to set her life straight: for her children’s sake.)
Given his reputation for violence, it is unsurprising—if disturbing—that Caesar also terrorizes his family, and that his grandmother steps in to care for Carmen and her children when Caesar does not. Just like stable work (selling drugs) for Primo, parenthood offers Carmen a means of refocusing her energies on something productive and consistent. In this sense, having children allows people to create their own opportunities.
Themes
Under the heading “The Demonization of Mothers and Crack,” Bourgois notes that single-mother households are actually “predicated on submission to patriarchy”—namely, “a father’s right to abandon his children.” It does not empower women, but rather just exploits them further. They cannot choose to put themselves before their children, but they cannot provide for their children without becoming independent. For instance, Primo and Caesar denigrate Candy when she starts selling crack, saying that she is a failure of a mother, even though they have no expectations at all for Felix.
Although single mothers do exercise autonomy and power in their households, they only do so out of necessity, which is why Bourgois argues that they are actually being controlled by (absent) men in doing so. Essentially, women are forced to pick up the pieces of men’s neglect. Again, this double-bind means that women are denigrated for no matter what they do (whether providing for their children or focusing entirely on motherhood), creating an impossible double standard, while men are accepted no matter how little they contribute to their families.
Themes
Although every drug epidemic in American history has been accompanied by moralistic denunciations of a community, usually racial, associated with the drug in question, during the crack epidemic inner-city women are specifically considered tied to the drug. Because many are mothers and many end up earning money through prostitution, public perception begins to speculate that crack causes hypersexuality and destroys the “maternal, loving instinct.” In fact, during this time period it is essentially impossible to take a child outside and not come into contact with drugs.
El Barrio’s pervasive misogyny spreads into the mainstream when crack becomes specifically associated with women. Even though men in El Barrio are far more irresponsible and the women are not at fault for exposing their children to crack, for the public (as for El Barrio men like Primo and Caesar), women are the obvious target if only because they are the easiest one.
Themes
Bourgois is still heartbroken at what he sees and tries his best to get pregnant women to avoid crack (and Primo and Ray not to sell it to them). Benzie recalls a customer once giving birth in the Game Room—an ambulance comes, there is chaos, and two days later the woman is back smoking crack there, with her baby in the hospital. Bourgois is particularly distraught at this time because his infant son has just been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and “crack babies” supposedly have similar symptoms. He manages to convince most of the dealers he meets not to sell to pregnant women “at least in front of [him],” but Ray insists he “don’t care” and even Candy strangely argues that “the [baby’s] body doesn’t belong to [the mother].”
Although he cannot interfere with the vast majority the self-destructive behavior he encounters on a day-to-day basis in El Barrio, Bourgois confronts a serious ethical conflict when it comes to pregnant women and young mothers using crack. He chooses to interfere in the field he is researching when he realizes that he can concretely make a difference and help his friends think about the consequences of the drugs they are selling. Notably, much of the science about “crack babies” has been debunked since the 1990s, but scientific consensus is still that crack has mild but measurable negative effects on babies and developing children.
Themes
Bourgois begins investigating the issue with an African American female colleague, who can much more easily get through to the minority women most at risk. Many of these women were uncertain about becoming mothers, and others even argued that crack was good for their babies. They “criticized the hypocrisy of the street culture” but never “the society that refused to fund treatment centers and support services.” The shortage of programs is so severe that Bourgois and his colleague cannot get a single person into treatment.
Again, Bourgois’s identity as a white upper-class researcher gets in the way of his ability to connect with his subjects. When he and his co-investigator manage to do so, they realize that crack-using mothers are more aware of their community’s hypocrisy than the government’s failure to provide for them—indeed, this helps explain why they have turned to crack in the first place.
Themes
Later, Bourgois realizes that these women are “desperately seeking meaning in their lives and refusing to sacrifice themselves to the impossible task of raising healthy children in the inner city.” An important study on Brazil showed that women sometimes allowed their children to die when they knew they could not take care of them. This is a similar situation, except that kids in El Barrio tend to suffer and die in their teenage years. Harlem is more dangerous than the World War II battlefield. By “poisoning their fetuses,” crack-addicted pregnant women “accelerate the destruction of already doomed progeny” and “escape the long-term agony” associated with raising children in El Barrio, without resources and tightly bound to “a patriarchal definition of ‘family’” that has not caught up with women’s changing roles.
Although crack is certainly a counterproductive way to “seek meaning,” Bourgois’s explanation again shows that crack is the symptom and not the problem. Because the mothers in El Barrio can see few prospects for their family’s future, rather than continue fighting a rigged game (as American common sense might expect them to do), they consciously reject the terms on which they are expected to live and refuse to give themselves and their children false hope for the future. Women’s response to the crack epidemic, in addition to the drug itself, is shown to be a cause of El Barrio’s destitution.
Themes
