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The Underground Economy
The distinct “beliefs, symbols, modes of interaction, values, and ideologies” of inner-city residents that emerge in opposition to, and as an alternative to, the mainstream culture that excludes people like Nuyoricans in East Harlem. Based in concepts of masculine power over women, public displays of ability and prowess, entrepreneurship, and social hierarchy, street culture often stresses individual success and responsibility. However, it also often takes an explicit political stance against the dominant culture that uses these same concepts to exclude inner-city residents from the formal economy and leads people to act in ways that actually undermine their autonomy. This is Bourgois’s fundamental insight about street culture: by embracing it, the people he meets fracture their families through involvement with drugs and violence, sacrifice the ability to succeed in the “upper-middle-class white world” and way of thinking that run the contemporary American economy, and lose respect from the public.
Street Culture Quotes in In Search of Respect
The In Search of Respect quotes below are all either spoken by Street Culture or refer to Street Culture. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Introduction
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“Man, I don’t blame where I’m at right now on nobody else but myself.”
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The street culture of resistance is predicated on the destruction of its participants and the community harboring them. In other words, although street culture emerges out of a personal search for dignity and a rejection of racism and subjugation, it ultimately becomes an active agent in personal degradation and community ruin.
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Chapter 2
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“Everybody is doing it. It is almost impossible to make friends who are not addicts. If you don’t want to buy the stuff, somebody is always there who is ready to give it to you. It is almost impossible to keep away from it because it is practically thrown at you. I f they were to arrest people for taking the stuff, they would have to arrest practically everybody.”
Chapter 4
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It almost appears as if Caesar, Primo, and Willie were caught in a time warp during their teenage years. Their macho-proletarian dream of working an eight-hour shift plus overtime throughout their adult lives at a rugged slot in a unionized shop has been replaced by the nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office-support service work. The stable factory-worker incomes that might have allowed Caesar and Primo to support families have largely disappeared from the inner city. Perhaps if their social network had not been confined to the weakest sector of manufacturing in a period of rapid job loss, their teenage working-class dreams might have stabilized them for long enough to enable them to adapt to the restructuring of the local economy. Instead, they find themselves propelled headlong into an explosive confrontation between their sense of cultural dignity versus the humiliating interpersonal subordination of service work.
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Chapter 7
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Candy went back to defining her life around the needs of her children. The irony of the institution of the single, female-headed household is that, like the former conjugal rural family, it is predicated on submission to patriarchy. Street culture takes for granted a father’s right to abandon his children while he searches for ecstasy and meaning in the underground economy. There is little that is triumphantly matriarchal or matrifocal about this arrangement. It simply represents greater exploitation of women, who are obliged to devote themselves unconditionally to the children for whom their men refuse to share responsibility.
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Get the entire In Search of Respect LitChart as a printable PDF.
Street Culture Term Timeline in In Search of Respect
The timeline below shows where the term Street Culture appears in In Search of Respect. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
In his second subheading, “ Street Culture : Resistance and Self-Destruction,” Bourgois argues that the cultural exclusion youth in El Barrio feel...
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...in their own history.” It is important to see both agency and structure, like how street culture “shape[s] the oppression that larger forces impose” on the people who live it. While Bourgois...
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Chapter 1: Violating Apartheid In the United States
...to kill black people, “because it was a black man who killed my sister.” Nevertheless, street culture nearly uniformly comes from African Americans, and Caesar is the first to admit that he...
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Chapter 2: A Street History of El Barrio
...on Spanish plantations and “lived outside the jurisdiction of the urban-based state.” This parallels “ street culture ’s resistance to exploitation and marginalization by U.S. society,” and in fact Primo sometimes calls...
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...and blame themselves for their poverty. But there is also an “almost political” form of street culture that indicts the limits of mainstream America. Caesar defends this view in an argument with...
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Chapter 4: "Goin Legit": Disrespect and Resistance at Work
...cultural confrontation with the upper-middle-class white world,” the values of which are opposite those of street culture .
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...evidence of “the different ‘cultural capitals’ needed” in each context. Ray is a master of street culture but looks like “an incompetent, gruff, illiterate, urban jíbaro” when trying to run a legal...
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...nightmare of poorly paid, highly feminized, office-support service work.” Factory work meshes better with hypermasculine street culture , unlike “the humble, obedient modes of subservient social interaction” that define ununionized office work....
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...offended by having to answer to female bosses like Gloria, because of “the machismo of street culture .” They understand the corporate hierarchy—when he works in the mailroom, Primo holds the executives’...
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Chapter 5: School Days: Learning to be a Better Criminal
...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.
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Chapter 6: Redrawing the Gender Line on the Street
...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...
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...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...
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Chapter 7: Families and Children in Pain
...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...
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Under the heading “ Street Culture 's Children,” Bourgois notes that fears about the moral degradation of the youth have been...
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...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...
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...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...
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Chapter 9: Conclusion
...sought “dignity and fulfillment” through their work, and not only money. There is a complex street culture around respectability, status, and gender that policies must take into account, particularly by “prioritz[ing] the...
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