In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences) by Philippe Bourgois

Author:Philippe Bourgois [Bourgois, Philippe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-12-23T05:00:00+00:00

Automatic gunfire rang out from the project’s courtyard just as we were about to cut diagonally through it to reach a grocery store to buy more beer. We abruptly stopped and turned around to walk the long way around the projects along the avenue. Three teenage girls came running past us giggling, “These niggas be crazy.”

Caesar’s stories of being initiated into the common sense of crime in his early teens were suffused with a more violent rage. They lacked the obvious instrumentality and the extensive, almost ritualistic, peer group solidarity of Primo’s burglaries and car break-ins. This expressed itself symbolically in their different opinions on mugging, which Primo roundly condemned, even though he admitted to having mugged several people in his lifetime. Whenever the subject came up, Caesar would ridicule Primo’s righteous censure of the practice by relating it with irony to the kinds of deeper sociological tensions that I often steered our conversations toward. He enjoyed contradicting my structural and antiracist analyses by emphasizing instead his own heartless psychopathology and by sarcastically conjuring up a racialized notion of “evil Puerto Rican-ness":

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