In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Bourgois turns his attention to public schools next. Public schools work as institutions that, early on, socialize individuals like Caesar and Primo into modes of engaging street society. Because of the failures of public schooling, street culture often offers an "alternative" to early education: "[T]he proto-criminal youth crew—gang—which effectively fills the formal institutional vacuum created by truancy" (174).Bourgois uses Primo’s experiences with early education as an example. Many elementary school teachers claim that students are bent on impressing their teachers, at least until the second grade. Both Primo and Caesar had negative experiences, however, and neither liked school nor their teachers. Primo dealt with not only disliking his homework, but also "institutional alienation" (175) from learning due to his immigrant status. His mother didn’t speak English, which caused confusion during early class meetings with his teacher. Bourgois says that Primo might have also adopted his mother’s distrust of her previous plantation worker in Puerto Rico as well as of her boss at the sweatshop in the United States. These triggers might have caused Primo to form the same relationship of distrust with his teacher, a distrust that hinged on not wanting to try and appease his teacher only to end up failing.

Bourgois brings up "cultural production theory" (176) to underscore Primo’s issues in class. Cultural production theory states that teachers process "[t]angible markers" (176) subconsciously when they assess children. These markers can include dress, play styles, eye contact, and cultural markers like accents and are placed into a hierarchy by white, middle-class teachers. An example of this is when Primo sat in class as a child and did not participate. He often graffitied his desk. He was seen as deficient, yet when standardized tests came around, he always passed them. Bourgois also defines the “exclusionary power of cultural capital” (176) by citing Ray’s success as a manager with his crackhouses against his inability to even get a driver’s license. School is where social parameters are often established, so people like Ray and Primo learned from an early stage what they could expect from mainstream society: "[W]hen Primo achieved minimal literacy and an understanding of grade school conventions, he was able to manipulate the system against his mother and betray her" (177). This in turn resulted in violence at home as his mother subjected him to beatings out of anger. Primo began acting out in school, leading to drug and alcohol abuse at an early age. His mother sent him to Puerto Rico in an attempt to help him, yet Primo found himself at odds even while on the same plantation his mother had left. He was a classic example of someone who had abandoned his country to others. He felt as if he was in two separate worlds and that both worlds were "reject[ing] him" (178).

In “Violence: Family and Institutional,” Bourgois turns to Caesar’s backstory with school. Unlike Primo’s mother, Caesar’s mother was literate. She immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager and had a history of drug abuse, sexual partners, and anger that culminated into murder and incarceration. Bourgois shows how Caesar, the oldest child, was literate and did well at school but was violent. His parents had him when his mother was only 16 and his father 20. She was a heroin addict and slept around, and then murdered a doctor she was sleeping with. Caesar was raised by his grandmother and moved from one extended family member to the next. His violent actions as an adult can be traced to the violence and instability he encountered as a child. Caesar even admits picking fights all the time, even if he knew he couldn’t win. He was also sent to a reform school. He was routinely beat up by the counselors and other students, thus admitting vulnerability, but said he had to fight and be violent to survive. He also admits to never being hit by his mother or grandmother, and that his mother actually scared him because she too would get in fights with people.

In the next section, Bourgois shows how adept Caesar was at learning street skills while in school. He was known as an disturbed child in middle school, and this is where his present-day dependence on social welfare comes from; he was deemed as "mentally and emotionally disabled" (190). He was placed in a special education class, and when his teacher confronted him one day, he cut his teacher’s tie with a pair of scissors. He then told his principal that he heard voices. Based on all this, he was placed on medication and sent to a special education school on Ward’s Island for three years.

Bourgois next turns to peer pressure in early education. Most of the individuals he’s profiling blame their peer groups for causing their reliance on the street and the underground economy. Instead of learning in school, these individuals hung out in the streets and learned street culture: "Car thieving was a memorable rite of passage into teenagehood for an enterprising youngster" (195). This also served to vent anger at the middle-class world that was encroaching onto the borders of El Barrio.

The last section, “Adolescent Gang Rape,” was one of the most troubling for Bourgois. He heard many stories from Primo and Caesar about their involvement in gang rape and "was tempted to omit this discussion, fearing that readers would become too disgusted and angry with the crack dealers and deny them a human face" (207). He learned that Ray would host these gang rapes in the same building where the Social Club was, and that one involved a 17-year-old girl who was raped by at least five different men. Bourgois admits that he was worried about “the politics of representation” (207) that might play out in his retelling of these narratives. Bourgois’s concern was that others would see their actions as representative of Puerto Ricans in general and view these stories as public humiliation. To counteract this, Bourgois "tape-recorded several accounts by survivors to obtain alternative perspectives" (207). However, he was only able to develop a deeper context with those he had "long-term relationships" (207) with, like Primo and Caesar.