In Search of Respect Summary

Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois’s In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is a five-year ethnographic study of Nuyorican crack dealers, drug users, and local residents in New York’s East Harlem (or “El Barrio”). From 1985 to 1990, during the earliest years of the crack epidemic, Bourgois lived in El Barrio, hung out in crackhouses, and befriended people involved the underground economy. He learns about the interconnected social and economic factors that drive El Barrio’s youth into the drug trade: the neighborhood’s residents lack opportunities in the legal economy, face a long and enduring legacy of colonialism and racism, and seek to articulate their identities and win respect through an antiestablishment street culture. Mainstream American society then uses their struggles against them as evidence that they are unable to assimilate and do not deserve support or recognition from the public.

The book’s 2003 preface notes the changes in El Barrio since the first edition’s publication in 1995. Next, in the introduction, Bourgois explains how he ended up studying “the multibillion-dollar crack cyclone” that descended on New York in 1985 after realizing that the drug epidemic was an important symptom of El Barrio’s poverty and New York’s inequality. Because much of East Harlem’s economic activity (including the drug trade) and many of its residents never show up on official surveys, Bourgois explains that the only adequate way to study this area is through qualitative observation. But qualitative research also poses significant challenges, like avoiding anthropology’s “profoundly elitist tendencies” to ignore the concrete suffering of those they study and ensuring that the audience does not “misread [the stories in his book] as negative stereotypes.” Bourgois wants to show how both structural factors and individual decisions contribute to the fate of the people he studies, and to develop “an alternative, critical understanding of the U.S. inner city” rather than simply offer a sensationalistic pornography of violence.

Bourgois begins Chapter 1 by explaining how his friendship with Ray, the leader of El Barrio’s drug network, allowed him to safely access and perform research in crackhouse environments that would typically never welcome an upper-class white professor who did not use drugs. Indeed, everyone initially assumes that Bourgois is an undercover police officer. Bourgois’s entire project nearly collapses when he accidentally reveals Ray’s illiteracy to all of his friends and employees. Ray reacts strongly but later forgives Bourgois, which is an example of how he metes out “violence, power, and generosity” to control his business and reputation. But despite this expertise in controlling his image, Ray is completely unable to function in mainstream society because the underground and legal economies require different kinds of cultural capital. The drug trade clearly dominates in El Barrio, leading local residents, law enforcement, and wary outsiders to buy into a “culture of terror.”

In Chapter 2, Bourgois looks at the neighborhood and colonial histories that intersect in the experiences of the people he studies. After Puerto Rico became a U.S. territory, a generation of its citizens migrated to New York City. The gradual decline of New York’s manufacturing sector forced these immigrants’ children (Bourgois’s subjects) into menial or underground jobs. The concept of the rural jíbaro (who refuses to work for the state but is then forced to do so) comes to represent contemporary Puerto Ricans’ sense of unjust displacement and antagonism towards the government and mainstream society. East Harlem has long been a poor immigrant neighborhood where each generation turns against the next; Bourgois witnesses conflict between Italians and Puerto Ricans switch to tension between Puerto Ricans and Mexican newcomers. Scholarly and popular literature about East Harlem has emphasized its poverty, violence, and rampant drug economy, which the Italian American Mafia did its best to promote in the first half of the 20th century. The government also perpetuated these problems in the neighborhood by demolishing huge swaths of it to build public housing projects and ramping up drug trafficking enforcement, which led smugglers to switch from trafficking marijuana to the less conspicuous cocaine.

In Chapter 3, Bourgois looks at the history and business model of Ray’s extraordinarily profitable crackhouse, the Game Room. Bourgois’s friends Primo and Caesar, who work at the Game Room, only make slightly more than minimum wage and remain dependent on their mothers and girlfriends, admitting that they would gladly take legal work if they could get it. Labor conflicts (such as when Ray cuts Primo’s wages and hours to hire Tony, another dealer) make selling crack even less glamorous.

In Chapter 4, Bourgois looks at what happens when each of his friends joins the legal economy. They are confined to “the least desirable [jobs] in U.S. society,” from which they frequently get fired. His friends both resent and accept the perception that they are too lazy for high-quality jobs. When working at a mailroom, Primo considers his boss Gloria a threat to his masculinity and autonomy, even though she is actually trying to help him succeed in life. The contrast between street culture and the service industry also makes it very difficult for El Barrio residents to succeed in the workplace without feeling like they are betraying their communities and trying to “be white.”

In Chapter 5, Bourgois shows how the school system, which encourages El Barrio residents to assimilate to mainstream society, only further alienates them. Primo and Caesar act out at school because of “violent personal disruptions” in their childhoods. Primo’s mother is illiterate and does not speak English, so he feels that his school is trying to usurp her authority. Caesar’s mother is a heroin addict who spends decades in prison for murder, so he takes out his anger through violence toward other students. Primo and Caesar’s behavior causes the school system to treat them as criminals, which leads them to act out even more.

In Chapter 6, Bourgois further demonstrates how El Barrio’s dangerous environment encourages violent street culture and a toxic dynamic between men and women. Candy, Bourgois’s closest female friend in El Barrio, shows how male-on-female abuse is normalized in the neighborhood. She is beaten by her father throughout her childhood and gang-raped by her boyfriend Felix and his friends. Soon after, Felix gets Candy pregnant and convinces her to marry him. For the next two decades, he brutally beats her almost daily, causing her to miscarry five times. But Candy does not see this as unusual—she blames herself up until she catches Felix sleeping with her sister and shoots him in outrage. When Felix goes to jail, he leaves Candy alone with five children and no money, so she begins selling drugs. By taking on this masculine persona, she in turn becomes one of the most respected figures on East Harlem’s streets.

In Chapter 7, Bourgois turns to El Barrio’s children, who are inevitably exposed to drugs and violence from a young age. Bourgois watches many of his young neighbors grow up to be drug dealers. Fathers are seen as having a “right to abandon” their families. This puts single mothers in a double-bind: they are seen as neglecting their children when they work, but freeloaders when they do not. And, in the public eye, they are associated with the crack epidemic far more than men, due to the perception that their working lifestyle means that they are neglecting and corrupting their children. Observing how the drug epidemic splinters families and damages young children, Bourgois convinces Primo to stop selling crack to pregnant women.

In Chapter 8, Bourgois delves deeper in how fathers in El Barrio justify their neglect. He argues that these men actually do more harm to their families when they are present than when they are absent, since most of them are violent. Caesar and Primo often take pride in ignoring their children, beating their girlfriends, and having sex with as many women as possible, though they hate their own fathers for the same behavior. At other times, they idolize nuclear families and wish they could be role models for their children. Yet Caesar and Primo inevitably cycle through short-lived, abusive relationships and end up abandoning their partners and children. This toxic cycle ensures that women in El Barrio learn never to trust or rely upon men.

In the book’s conclusion, Bourgois considers what measures could be taken to address the social problems he encountered during his research. He views the drug trade as a mere symptom of American economic and racial apartheid, since the drug epidemic ultimately becomes mainstream white society’s justification for declaring the urban poor and minorities as “undeserving” of dignified work and a middle-class life. State policies also make the problem an economic one, since people incur higher taxes and reduced eligibility for government assistance when they enter the legal workforce. Bourgois argues that drug decriminalization, improved working conditions, and livable wages would give inner-city residents the incentive to transition out of the underground economy.

In Search of Respect closes with two epilogues that trace Bourgois’s friends’ lives up to 1995 and 2003. Many of them remain involved with drugs and some end up in jail; others manage to transition into sobriety and conventional work, with a select few even moving out of East Harlem. Most notably, by 1995, Primo gets sober and transitions into the legal market, but still has to deal with unfair treatment at work and struggles in his personal life. By 2003, Primo “occasionally sniff[s] heroin,” but is in the process of securing stable, respectable work as a self-employed contractor. Bourgois notes that the government has become harsher about everything—he himself gets ticketed for public intoxication and sees the overloaded and hopelessly inefficient court system firsthand when he flies back to New York to pay his $10 fine. The book ends on an ambivalent note—though Primo has come a long way, Bourgois’s frustration with the legal system suggests that he is still pessimistic about the systemic barriers that stand in the way of people improving their lives.