Philippe BourgoisBesprekingen
Auteur van In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
Besprekingen
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This was a courageous and thoughtful attempt to gain insight into the question of structure versus agency in causing inner-city blight. The author moved to Spanish Harlem in the mid-90s and befriended a gang of crack dealers. The book is worth finding for chapter 4 alone, on the dealers' rancorous attempts to hold onto legal office work. Chapter 5 on their failed schooling and, shockingly, on the prevalence of gang-rape is also pretty essential, appalling reading.
The author shows how migration of large numbers of poor Puerto Ricans to New York City during a period of deindustrialization, combined with the rise of crack cocaine and the persistence of racial and cultural barriers, produced a generation of people shut out of dependable avenues for supporting themselves legally. In place of employment and self-respect, came dealing, aggression, poverty, sexual violence and a desperate yearning of the young men to make it big somehow.
The figures in the book could not overcome the structure they were born into, but we get little sense of how typical they were of the community as a whole. It would have been good to have heard from some people who did make it out: how did they overcome the barriers?