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Crack in Spanish Harlem Culture and economy in the inner city

PHILIPPE BOURGOIS

Philippe Bourgois is assistant pr-ofessor of anthropology at San Francisco State University, currently on study leave in New Yor-k City. He contributed an article 'The Miskitu of Nicaragua Polarized Ethnicity' to A.T., Apr il 1986.

A mugging in Spanish Harlem The heavy-set, white undercover policeman pushed me across the ice-cream counter, spreading my legs and poking me around the groin. As he came dangerously close to the bulge in my right pocket I hissed in his ear 'It's a tape recorder'. He snapped backwards, releasing his left hand's grip on my neck and whispering a barely audible 'Sorry'. Apparently, he thought he had clumsily intercepted an undercover from another department be- cause before I could get a close look at his face he had left the bodega grocery-store cum numbers-joint. Meanwhile, the marijuana sellers stationed in front of the bodega that Gato and I had just entered to buy 16- ounce cans of Private Stock (beer), observing that the undercover had been rough with me when he searched through my pants, suddenly felt safe and relieved- finally confident that I was a white drug addict rather than an undercover.

As we hurried to leave this embarrassing scene we were blocked by Bennie, an emaciated teenager high on angel dust who was barging through the door along with two friends to mug us. I ran to the back of the bodega but Gato had to stand firmly because this was the corner he worked, and those were his former partners. They dragged him onto the sidewalk sur- rounding him on all sides, shouting about the money he still owed, and began kicking and hitting him with a baseball bat. I found out later that Gato owed them for his share of the supply of marijuana confiscated in a drug bust last week . . . After we finished telling the story at the crack/botanical house where I had been spending most of my evening hours this summer, Chino, who was on duty selling that night with Julio (pronounced Jew-Lee-oh), jumped up excitedly calling out 'what street was that on? Come on, let's go, we can still catch them-How many were they?' I quickly stopped this mobilization for a revenge posse, explain- ing that it was not worth my time, and that we should just forget about it. Chino looked at me disgustedly sit- ting back down on the milk crate in front of the botanica's door and turned his face away from me, shrugging his shoulders. Julio, whom I knew better and had become quite close to for a number of weeks last year, jumped up in front of me raising his voice to berate me for being 'pussy'. He also sat back down shortly afterwards feigning exasperated incredulity with the comment 'Man you still think like a blanquito'. A half dozen spectators-some of them empty-pocketed ('thirsty!') crack addicts, but most of them sharply dressed teenage drug-free girls competing for Chino's and Julio's attentions-giggled and snickered at me.

Culture and material reality The above extract from sanitized fieldwork notes is merely a personalized glimpse of the day-to-day strug- gle for survival and for meaning by the people who stand behind the extraordinary statistics on inner city violent crime in the United States.2 These are the same Puerto Rican residents of Spanish Harlem, New York City, that Oscar Lewis in La Vida declared to be vic- tims of a 'culture of poverty' enmired in a 'self-per-

petuating cycle of poverty' (Lewis 1966: 5). The cul- ture of poverty concept has been severely criticized for its internal inconsistencies, its inadequate understanding of 'culture' and ethnicity, its ethnocentric/middle class bias, its blindness to structural forces, and its blame- the- victim implications (cf. Leacock ed. 1971, Valen- tine 1968, Waxman 1977, Stack 1974). Despite the negative scholarly consensus on Lewis's theory, the al- ternative discussions either tend towards economic reductionism (Ryan 1971, Steinberg 1981, Wilson 1978) or else ultimately minimize the reality of profound marginalization and destruction-some of it internalized-that envelop a disproportionate share of the inner city poor (cf. Stack 1974, Valentine 1978; see critiques by Maxwell 1988, Wilson 1988). More impor- tantly, the media, public policy-makers and a large proportion of inner city residents themselves continue to subscribe to a popularized blame-the-victim/culture of poverty concept that has not been adequately rebutted by scholars.

The inner city residents described in the ethnographic vignette above are the pariahs of urban industrial US society. They seek their income and subsequently their identity and the meaning in their life through what they perceive to be high-powered careers 'on the street'. They partake of ideologies and values and share sym- bols which form the basis of an 'inner city street culture' completely excluded from the mainstream economy and society but ultimately derived from it. Most of them have a few direct contacts with non- inner city residents, and when they do it is usually with people who are in a position of domination: teachers in school, bosses, police officers, and later parole or probation officers.

How can one understand the complicated ideological dynamic accompanying inner city poverty without fall- ing into a hopelessly idealistic culture of poverty and blame-the-victim interpretation? Structural, political economy reinterpretations of the inner city dynamic emphasize historical processes of labour migration in the context of institutionalized ethnic discrimination. They dissect the structural transformations in the inter- national economy which are destroying the manufactur- ing sector in the United States and are swelling the low wage, low prestige service sector (cf. Davis 1987; Sas- sen-Koob 1986; Steinberg 198 1; Tabb aiqd Sawers, eds., 1984; Wilson 1978, 1987). These analyses address the structural confines of the inner city dynamic but fall prey to a passive interpretation of human action and subscribe to a weakly dialectic interpretation of the relationship between ideological processes and material reality, or between culture and class.

Although ultimately traceable directly to being products of international labour migrations in a transna- tional world economy, street-level inner city residents are more than merely passive victims of historical economic transformations or of the institutionalized dis- crimination of a perverse political and economic sys- tem. They do not passively accept their fourth-class citizen fate. They are struggling determinedly-just as ruthlessly as the railroad and oil robber-barons of the

1. A botanica is a herbal pharmacy and santet-ia utility store.

2. This research was funded by the United States Bureau of the Census, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, two Washington University Junior Faculty Summer Research grants, and Lottery Funds and an Affirmative Action Grant from San Francisco State University. An expanded version of this article will be appearing in a special issue of Contempoat-y Drug Problems devoted to crack in the United States.

Pseudonyms have been used in order to disguise identities of persons referred to.

6 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 5 No 4, August 1989

Left: children playing in a city-owned vacant lot where tenements stood twelve years ago. Right: Passers-by posing in front of abandoned tenements whic h have been vacantfor over a dozen years. The City of New York is said to be the biggest landlord of 'crack houses' as dealers and users often establish themselves in abandoned structures whose ownership has reverted to the municipality. All photos by Philippe Bourgois.

previous century and the investment-banker 'yuppies' of today-to earn money, demand dignity and lead meaningful lives. Tragically, it is that very process of struggle against-yet within-the system which exacer- bates the trauma of their community and which destroys hundreds of thousands of lives on the in- dividual level.

In the day-to-day experience of the street-bound inner city resident, unemployment and personal anxiety over the inability to provide one's family with a mini- mal standard of living translates itself into intra-com- munity crime, intra-community drug abuse, intra-com- munity violence. The objective, structural desperation of a population without a viable economy, and facing systematic barriers of ethnic discrimination and ideological marginalization, becomes charged at the community level into self-destructive channels.

Most importantly, the 'personal failure' of those who survive on the street is articulated in the idiom of race. The racism imposed by the larger society becomes in- ternalized on a personal level. Once again, although the individuals in the ethnographic fragment at the begin- ning of this paper are the victims of long-term historical and structural transformations, they do not analyse their difficult situation from a political economy perspective. In their struggle to survive and even to be successful, they enforce on a day-to-day level the details of the trauma and cruelty of their lives on the excluded mar- gins of US urban society.

Cultural reproduction theory Theorists of education have developed a literature on processes of social and cultural reproduction which focus on the ideological domination of the poor and the working class in the school setting (cf. Giroux 1983). Although some of the social reproduction approaches tend towards an economic reductionism or a simple, mechanical functionalism (cf. Bowles and Gintis 1977), the more recent variants emphasize the complexity and contradictory nature of the dynamic of ideological domination (Willis 1983). There are several eth- nographies which document how the very process whereby students resist school, channels them into mar- ginal roles in the economy for the rest of their lives (cf. Willis 1977; Macleod 1987). Other ethnographically- based interpretations emphasize how success for inner city African-American students requires a rejection of their ethnic identity and cultural dignity (Fordham 1988).

There is no reason why these theories of cultural resistance and ideological domination have to be limited to the institutional school setting. Cultural reproduction theory has great potential for shedding light on the interaction between structurally induced cultural resistance and self-reinforced marginalization at the street-level in the inner city experience. The violence, crime and substance abuse plaguing the inner

city can be understood as the manifestations of a 'cul- ture of resistance' to mainstream, white racist, and economically exclusive society. This 'culture of resistance', however, results in greater oppression and self-destruction. More concretely, refusing to accept the outside society's racist role playing and refusing to ac- cept low wage, entry-level jobs, translates into high crime rates, high addiction rates and high intra-com- munity violence.

Most of the individuals in the above ethnographic description are proud that they are not being exploited by 'the White Man', 'but they feel 'like fucking assholes' for being poor. All of them have previously held numerous jobs in the legal economy in their lives. Most of them hit the street in their early teens working odd jobs as delivery boys and baggers in supermarkets and bodegas. Most of them have held the jobs that are recognized as among the least desirable in US society. Virtually all of these street participants have had deeply negative personal experiences in the minimum-wage labour market, owing to abusive, exploitative and often racist bosses or supervisors. They see the illegal, under- ground economy as not only offering superior wages, but also a more dignified work place. For example, Gato had formerly worked for the ASPCA, cleaning out the gas chambers where stray dogs and cats are killed. Bennie had been fired six months earlier from a night shift job as security guard on the violent ward for the criminally insane on Wards Island; Chino had been fired a year ago from a job installing high altitude storm windows on skyscrapers following an accident which temporarily blinded him in the right eye. Upon being disabled he discovered that his contractor had hired him illegally through an arrangement with a cor- rupt union official who had paid him half the union wage, pocketing the rest, and who had not taken health insurance for him. Chino also claimed that his foreman from Pennsylvania was a 'Ku Klux Klanner' and had been especially abusive to him as he was a black Puerto Rican. In the process of recovering from the accident, Chino had become addicted to crack and ended up in the hospital as a gunshot victim before landing a job at Papito's crack house. Julio's last legal job before sell- ing crack was as an off-the-books messenger for a magazine catering to New York yuppies. He had be- come addicted to crack, began selling possessions from out of his home and finally was thrown out by his wife who had just given birth to his son, who carried his name as Junior the IlIrd, on public assistance. Julio had quit his messenger job in favour of stealing car radios for a couple of hours at night in the very same neigh- bourhood where he had been delivering messages for ten hour days at just above minimum wage. Neverthe- less, after a close encounter with the police Julio begged his cousin for a job selling in his crack house. Significantly, the sense of responsibility, success and prestige that selling crack gave him enabled him to kick

Anderson, Elijah. 1976. A Place on the Corner. Chicago: U. of Chicago.

Bourgois, Philippe. 1986. The Miskitu of Nicaragua: Politicized Ethnicity. A.T. 2:2: 4-9.

- 1989. Ethnicitv at Work: Divided Labour on a Central American Banana Plantation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P.

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 1977. Schooling in Capitalist

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 5 No 4, August 1989 7

....... ....

Street scene w ith murals in the background. The mural reading 'We are the world' refers to a rock c onc ert organized to raise moneyforfamine victims in Ethiopia in about 1985.

his crack habit and replace it by a less expensive and destructive powder cocaine and alcohol habit.

The underground economy, consequently, is the ul- timate 'equal opportunity employer' for inner city youth (cf. Komblum and Williams 1985). As Davis (1987: 75) has noted for Los Angeles, the structural economic incentive to participate in the drug economy is overwhelming:

With 78,000 unemployed youth in the Watts-Willowbrook area, it is not surprising that there are now 145 branches of the rival Crips and Bloods gangs in South L.A., or that the jobless resort to the opportunities of the burgeoning 'Crack' economy.

The individuals 'successfully' pursuing careers in the 'crack economy' or any other facet of the underground economy are no longer 'exploitable' by legal society. They speak with anger at their former low wages and bad treatment. They make fun of friends and acquain- tances-many of whom come to buy drugs from them-who are still employed in factories, in service jobs, or in what they (and most other people) would call 'shitwork'. Of course, many others are less self- conscious about the reasons for their rejection of entry- level, mainstream employment. Instead, they think of themselves as lazy and irresponsible. They claim they quit their jobs in order to have a good time on the street. Many still pay lip service to the value of a steady, legal job. Still others cycle in and out of legal employment supplementing their bouts at entry-level

jobs through part-time crack sales in an almost perverse parody of the economic subsidy of the wage labour sec- tor by semi-subsistence peasants who cyclically engage in migratory wage labour in third world economies (cf. Meillassoux 1981; Wallerstein 1977).

The culture of terror in the underground economy The culture of resistance that has emerged in the under- ground street-level economy in opposition to demean- ing, underpaid employment in the mainstream economy engenders violence. In the South American context of extreme political repression and racism against Amerin- dians and Jews, anthropologist Michael Taussig has ar- gued that 'cultures of terror' emerge to become '... a high-powered tool for domination and a principal medium for political practice (1984: 492)'. Unlike Taussig's examples of the 1910s Putumayo massacres and the 1970s Argentine torture chambers, domination in the case of the inner city's culture of terror is self-ad- ministered even if the root cause is generated or even imposed externally. With the exception of occasional brutality by policemen or the bureaucratized repression of the social welfare and criminal justice institutions (cf. Davis 1988), the physical violence and terror of the inner city are largely carried out by inner city residents themselves.

Regular displays of violence are necessary for suc- cess in the underground economy-especially at the street-level drug dealing world. Violence is essential for maintaining credibility and for preventing rip-off by colleagues, customers and hold-up artists. Indeed, up- ward mobility in the underground economy requires a systematic and effective use of violence against one's colleagues, one's neighbours and, to a certain extent, against oneself. Behaviour that appears irrationally violent and self-destructive to the middle class (or the working class) outside observer, can be reinterpreted according to the logic of the underground economy, as a judicious case of public relations, advertising, rapport building and long-term investment in one's 'human capital development'.

The importance of one's reputation is well illustrated in the fieldwork fragment at the beginning of this paper. Gato and I were mugged because Gato had a reputation for being 'soft' or 'pussy' and because I was publicly unmasked as not being an undercover cop: hence safe to attack. Gato tried to minimize the damage to his future ability to sell on that corner by not turning and running. He had pranced sideways down the street, though being beaten with a baseball bat and kicked to the ground twice. Significantly, I found out later that it was the second time this had happened to Gato this year. Gato was not going to be upwardly mobile in the underground economy because of his 'pussy' reputation and he was further cementing his fate with an increas- ingly out of control addiction to crack.

Employers or new entrepreneurs in the underground economy are looking for people who can demonstrate their capacity for effective violence and terror. For ex- ample, in the eyes of Papito, the owner of the string of crack franchises I am currently researching, the ability of his employees to hold up under gunpoint is crucial as stick-ups of dealing dens are not infrequent. In fact, since my fieldwork began in 1986, the hotanica has been held up twice. Julio happened to be on duty both times. He admitted to me that he had been very nervous when they held the gun to his temple and had asked for money and crack. Nevertheless, not only did he with- hold some of the money and crack that was hidden be- hind the bogus hotanica merchandise, but he also later

America. New York: Basic Books.

Davis, Mike. 1987. Chinatown, Part Two? The 'Internationalization' of Downtown Los Angeles. New Left Review. 164: 65-86.

Davis, Mike, with Sue Ruddick. 1988. Los Angeles: Civil Liberties Between the Hammer and the rock. New Left Review 1970: 37-60.

Fordham, Signithia. 1988. Racelessness as a Factor in Black Students' School Success: Pragmatic Strategy or Pyrrhic Victory?' Harard

8 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 5 No 4, August 1989

One of Spanish Harlem's central business districts. The sidewalk str eet vendor in the baclkg-round is Senegalese, one oJ(a small wave of Senegalese street vendors who have immigrated to New York Citv since the mid-1980s.

. e,S .*, '.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~:X ,X , , 4fs 9 II_ ,s s v

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exaggerated to Papito the amount that had been stolen in order to pocket the difference.

On several occasions in the midst of long conversa- tions with active criminals (i.e. once with a dealing-den stick-up artist, several times with crack dealers, and once with a former bank robber) I asked them to ex- plain how they were able to trust their partners in crime sufficiently to ensure the longevity and effectiveness of their enterprise. To my surprise I was not given any righteous diatribes about blood-brotherhood trustworthi- ness or any adulations of boyhood loyalty. Instead, in each case, in slightly different language I was told somewhat aggressively: 'What do you mean how do I trust him? You should ask "How does he trust me?"'. Their ruthlessness is their security: 'My support net- work is me, myself and I'. They made these assertions with such vehemence as to appear threatened by the concept that their security and success might depend upon the trustworthiness of their partner or their employer. They were claiming-in one case angrily- that they were not dependent upon trust: because they were tough enough to command respect and enforce all contracts they entered into. The 'How can they trust me?' was said with smug pride, perhaps not unlike the way a stockbroker might brag about his access to inside information on an upcoming hostile takeover deal.

At the end of the summer Chino demonstrated clear- ly the how-can-I-be-trusted dynamic. His cocaine snort- ing habit had been degenerating into a crack addiction by the end of the summer, and finally one night he was

forced to flee out of state to a cousin's when he was unable to turn in the night's receipts to his boss Papito following a binge. Chino also owed Papito close to a thousand dollars for bail that Papito had posted when he was arrested for selling crack at the botanica a few months ago. Almost a year later when Papito heard that Chino had been arrested for jumping bail he arranged through another associate incarcerated in the same prison (Rikers Island) to have Chino beaten up before his trial date.

My failure to display a propensity for violence in several instances cost me the respect of the members of the crack scene that I frequented. This was very evident when I turned down Julio and Chino's offer to search for Bennie after he mugged Gato and me. Julio had despairingly exclaimed that I 'still [thought] like a blanquito', genuinely disappointed that I was not some- one with common sense and self-respect.

These concrete examples of the cultivation of violent public behaviour are the extreme cases of individuals relying on the underground economy for their income and dependent upon cultivating terror in order to sur- vive. Individuals involved in street activity cultivate the culture of terror in order to intimidate competitors, maintain credibility, develop new contacts, cement partnerships, and ultimately to have a good time. For the most part they are not conscious of this process. The culture of terror becomes a myth and a role model with rules and satisfactions all its own which ultimately has a traumatic impact on the majority of Spanish Har- lem residents-who are drug free and who work honestly at poorly remunerated legal jobs, 9 to 5 plus overtime.

Pursuing the American Dream It is important to understand that the underground economy and the violence emerging out of it are not propelled by an irrational cultural logic distinct from that of mainstream USA. On the contrary, street par- ticipants are frantically pursuing the 'American dream'. The assertions of the culture of poverty theorists that the poor have been badly socialized and do not share mainstream values is wrong. On the contrary, am- bitious, energetic, inner city youths are attracted into the underground economy in order to try frantically to get their piece of the pie as fast as possible. They often even follow the traditional US model for upward mobility to the letter by becoming aggressive private entrepreneurs. They are the ultimate rugged in- dividualists braving an unpredictable frontier where for- tune, fame and destruction are all just around the corner. Hence Indio, a particularly enterprising and am- bitious young crack dealer who was aggressively carv- ing out a new sales point, shot his brother in the spine and paralysed him for life while he was high on angel dust in a battle over sales rights. His brother now works for him selling on crutches. Meanwhile, the shooting has cemented Indio's reputation and his workers are awesomely disciplined: 'If he shot his brother he'll shoot anyone'. Indio reaffirms this symbolically by pe- riodically walking his turf with an oversized gold chain and name plate worth several thousand dollars hanging around his neck.

The underground economy and the culture of terror are experienced as the most realistic routes to upward mobility. Entry-level jobs are not seen as viable chan- nels to upward mobility by high school dropouts. Drug selling or other illegal activity appear as the most effec- tive and realistic options for getting rich within one's lifetime. Many of the street dealers claim to be strictly

ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 5 No 4, August 1989 9

Edh(cational Reiviw 58:1: 54-84.

Giroux, Henry. I983. Theories of Reproduction and Resistance in the New Sociology of Education: A Critical Analysis. Harrardr Educational Reiew, 53:3: 257-293.

Komblum, William and Terry Williams. 1985. Growing Up Poor. Lexington, MA.: Lexington Books.

Leacock. Eleanor Burke. ed. 1971. The Culture of Po ertv: a Critique. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Lewis, Oscar. 1966. The Culture of Poverty. In Anthropological Essays. pp 67-80. New York:

Mural, 'DDL in memory of Black', a memorial to a 17-year-old who was killed in a battle for control of drug turf. The. artist who painted the memorial has since had to flee the neighbourhood.

.l:> : :. .. . .

utilitarian in their involvement with crack and they snob their clients despite the fact that they usually have considerable alcohol and powder cocaine habits them- selves. Chino used to chant at his regular customers 'Come on, keep on killing yourself; bring me that money; smoke yourself to death; make me rich'.

Even though street sellers are employed by the owner of a sales point for whom they have to maintain regular hours, meet sales quotas and be subject to being fired, they have a great deal of autonomy and power in their daily (or nightly) routine. The boss only comes once or twice a shift to drop off drugs and pick up money. Fre- quently, it is a young messenger who is sent instead. Sellers are often surrounded by a bevy of 'thirsty' friends and hanger-oners-frequently young teenage women in the case of male sellers-willing to run er- rands, pay attention to conversations, lend support in arguments and fights and provide sexual favours for them on demand because of the relatively large amounts of money and drugs passing through their hands. In fact, even youths who do not use drugs will hang out and attempt to befriend respectfully the dealer just to be privy to the excitement of people coming and going, copping and hanging; money flowing, argu- ments, detectives, and stick-up artists-all around danger and excitement. Other non-users will hang out to be treated to an occasional round of beer, Bacardi or, an on off night, Thunderbird.

The channel into the underground economy is by no means strictly economic. Besides wanting to earn 'crazy money', people choose 'hoodlum' status in order to assert their dignity at refusing to 'sling a mop for the white man' (cf. Anderson 1976: 68). Employment or better yet self-employment-in the underground economy accords a sense of autonomy, self-dignity and an opportunity for extraordinary rapid short-term up- ward mobility that is only too obviously unavailable in entry-level jobs. Opulent survival without a 'visible means of support' is the ultimate expression of success

and it is a viable option. There is plenty of visible proof of this to everyone on the street as they watch teenage crack dealers drive by in convertible Suzuki Samurai jeeps with the stereo blaring, 'beem' by in impeccable BMWs, or-in the case of the middle-aged dealers- speed around in well waxed Lincoln Continentals. Anyone can aspire to be promoted to the level of a seller perched on a 20-speed mountain bike with a beeper by their side. In fact, many youths not par- ticularly active in the drug trade run around with beepers on their belts just pretending to be big-time. The impact of the sense of dignity and worth that can accompany selling crack is illustrated by Julio's ability to overcome his destructive addiction to crack only after getting a job selling it: 'I couldn't be messin' up the money. I couldn't be fucking up no more! Besides, I had to get respect'.

In New York City the insult of working for entry- level wages amidst extraordinary opulence is especially painfully perceived by Spanish Harlem youths who have grown in abject poverty only a few blocks from all-white neighbourhoods commanding some of the highest real estate values in the world. As messengers, security guards or xerox machine operators in the cor- porate headquarters of the Fortune 500 companies, they are brusquely ordered about by young white executives who sometimes make monthly salaries superior to their yearly wages and who do not even have the time to notice that they are being rude.

It could be argued that Manhattan sports a de facto apartheid labour hierarchy whereby differences in job category and prestige correlate with ethnicity and are often justified-consciously or unconsciously-through a racist logic. This humiliating confrontation with New York's ethnic/occupational hierarchy drives the street- bound cohort of inner city youths deeper into the con- fines of their segregated neighbourhood and the under- ground economy. They prefer to seek out meaning and upward mobility in a context that does not constantly

Random House. Macleod, Jay. 1987. Ain't

No Makin' It. Boulder, Colorado: Westview P.

Maxwell, Andrew. 1988. The Anthropology of Poverty in Black Communities: A Critique and Systems Alternative. Urban Anthropology 17:2&3: 171-191.

Meillassoux, Claude. 1981. Maidens, Meal and Money. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.

Ryan, William. 1986[19711. Blaming the Victim. In Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controv ersial Social Issues. pp 45-52. ed. Kurt Finsterbusch and George McKenna. Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing Group.

Sassen-Koob, Saskia. 1986. New York City: Economic Restructuring and Immigration. Desvelopment and Change. 17:1: 87-119.

10 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 5 No 4, August 1989

oblige them to come into contact with people of a dif- ferent, hostile ethnicity wielding arbitrary power over them. In the underground economy, especially in the world of substance abuse, they never have to ex- perience the silent subtle humiliations that the entry- level labour market-or even merely a daily subway ride downtown-invariably subjects them to.

In this context the crack high and the rituals and struggles around purchasing and using the drug are comparable to the millenarian religions that sweep colonized peoples attempting to resist oppression in the context of accelerated social trauma-whether it be the Ghost dance of the Great Plains Amerindians, the 'cargo cults' of Melanesia, the Mamachi movement of the Guaymi Amerindians in Panama, or even religions such as Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and the Jehovah's Witnesses in the heart of the inner city (cf. Bourgois 1986, 1989). Substance abuse in general, and crack in particular, offer the equivalent of a millenarian metamorphosis. Instantaneously users are transformed from being unemployed, depressed high school drop- outs, despised by the world-and secretly convinced that their failure is due to their own inherent stupidity, 'racial laziness' and disorganization-into being a mass of heart-palpitating pleasure, followed only minutes later by a jaw-gnashing crash and wideawake alertness that provides their life with concrete purpose: get more crack-fast!

One of the most dramatic illustrations within the dynamic of the crack economy of how a cultural dynamic of resistance to exploitation can lead con- tradictorily to greater oppression and ideological domination is the conspicuous presence of women in the growing cohort of crack addicts. In a series of ten random surveys undertaken at Papito's crack franchises, women and girls represented just under 50% of the cus- tomers. This contrasts dramatically to the estimates of female participation in heroin addiction in the late 1970s.

The painful spectacle of young, emaciated women milling in agitated angst around crack copping corners and selling their bodies for five dollars, or even merely for a puff on a crack stem, reflects the growing eman- cipation of women in all aspects of inner city life, cul- ture and economy. Women-especially the emerging generation which is most at risk for crack addiction- are no longer as obliged to stay at home and maintain the family. They no longer so readily sacrifice public life or forgo independent opportunities to generate per- sonally disposable income. This is documented by the frequent visits to the crack houses by pregnant women and by mothers accompanied by toddlers.

A more neutral illustration of the changed position of women in street culture outside the arena of substance abuse is the growing presence of young women on inner city basketball courts. Similarly, on the national level, there are conclusive statistics documenting in- creased female participation in the legal labour market-especially in the working class Puerto Rican community. By the same token, more women are also resisting exploitation in the entry-level job market and are pursuing careers in the underground economy and seeking self-definition and meaning through intensive participation in street culture.

Although women are using the drug and participating

intensively in street culture, traditional gender relations still largely govern income-generating strategies in the underground economy. Most notably, women are forced disproportionately to rely on prostitution to finance their habits. The relegation of women to the traditional street role of prostitution has led to a flood- ing of the market for sex, leading to a drop in the price of women's bodies and to an epidemic rise in venereal disease among women and newborn babies.

Contradictorily, therefore, the underlying process of emancipation which has enabled women to demand equal participation in street culture and to carve out an expanded niche for themselves in the underground economy has led to a greater depreciation of women as ridiculed sex objects. Addicted women will tolerate a tremendous amount of verbal and physical abuse in their pursuit of a vial of crack, allowing lecherous men to humiliate and ridicule them in public. Chino, who is married and is the father of nine children, refers to the women who regularly service him with oral sex as 'my moufs' [mouths]. He enjoys calling out to these ad- dicted women from across the street, 'Yo, there goes my mouf! Come on over here.'. Such a public degrada- tion of a cohort of women who are conspicuously present on the street cannot be neutral. It ultimately reinforces the ideological domination of women in general.

De-legitimizing domination How can one discuss and analyse the phenomenon of street-level inner city culture and violence without reproducing and confirming the very ideological relationships that are its basis? In his discussion of the culture of terror, Taussig notes that it is precisely the narratives about the torture and violence of the repres- sive societies which '... are in themselves evidence of the process whereby a culture of terror was created and sustained (1984: 279)'. The superhuman power that the media has accorded to crack serves a similar mythical function. The New York Times has run articles and in- terviews with scientists that portray crack as if it were a miraculous substance beyond the power of human beings to control (cf. 25 June, 1988: 1). They 'prove' this by documenting how quickly rats will ecstatically kill themselves when provided with cocaine upon demand. Catheterized rats push the cocaine lever to the exclusion of the nutrient level until they collapse ex- hausted to die of thirst.

The alleged omnipotence of crack coupled with even the driest recounting of the overpowering statistics on violence ultimately allows US society to absolve itself of any real responsibility for the inner city phenomena. The mythical dimensions of the culture of terror push economics and politics out of the picture and enable the US to maintain in some of its larger cities a level of ethnic segregation and economic marginalization that are unacceptable to any of the other wealthy, industrial- ized nations of the world, with the obvious exception of South Africa. Worse yet, on the level of theory, be- cause of the continued domination-ven in their nega- tion-of the North America-centred culture of poverty theories, this discussion of the ideological implications of the underground economy may take readers full circle back to a blame-the-victim interpretation of inner city oppression.

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