Candy Character Analysis

Wife to Felix and mother of Junior and Jackie, Candy is the only woman Bourgois truly befriends during his time in El Barrio and becomes his main source for his writings on gender and family. She lives in fear and horror for many years, at the hands of her father and then her husband, who both beat her severely and frequently. In fact, Felix and a group of his friends gang-rape her in their teens (which is not unusual in East Harlem) and later Felix gets her pregnant and marries her. She never saw Felix’s years of abuse as wrong, given that she grew up expecting the same from her father. However, when she finally gets fed up with Felix’s infidelity and shoots him—on top of all his abuse, he has slept with her sister twice—those around Candy interpret her behavior as an “ataque de nervios.” Felix soon goes to prison and, after some suicide attempts and stints in psychiatric hospitals, Candy undergoes a complete transformation: needing money for her children and finally free of Felix’s threats, she becomes one of East Harlem’s most respected crack dealers, helps other women (like Wanda) cope with their abusive partners, and starts sleeping with multiple men, including Primo. In a sense, she inverts the gender roles that always confined her, performing masculinity “better” than her husband ever could. However, Bourgois notes that she remains stuck under patriarchy, both because she continues to blame women when their husbands mistreat them and because she “follow[s] in [Felix’s] footsteps: selling drugs, neglecting her children, and flaunting her sexual conquests.” Instead of freeing herself from patriarchy’s script of masculinity, she simply adopts it. This in turn leads those around her to criticize her for being an irresponsible mother (even though she is selling drugs for her children’s sake, and Felix was always a far worse parent). She eventually gets arrested, but Ray bails her out and the charges get dropped. When Felix gets out of jail, they repair their relationship and Candy takes on legal work, although she continues getting welfare under a different social security number.