El Barrio Fuel Adolescent Violence Analysis

The Educational Experience of the youth in El Barrio fuel adolescent violence and alienation. I shall illustrate this point by using Primo’s experience with the educational system followed by Caesars experience. For Primo his mother came to America as a former plantation worker to a new immigrant inner-city sweatshop employee. Her functional illiteracy and her inability to communicate in proper English condemned Primo to appear slow-witted and uncooperative in class activities. Growing up with little to no prior knowledge of how the English language is structured let alone how to adapt to an English school system left Primo unable to preform in class without fear of rejection from his teachers, or the mistake of trying to please them – and

(Bourgois, 1970: 176) When you are a child, the first few years of your life cement the following years to come, for Primo, this lead to truancy, substance abuse and petty crimes as he reached puberty due to the neglect and alienation he felt as a child. Primo’s upbringing from stealing car radios from upstate to wanting to ultimately provide for himself lead to incarceration and years of “Getting around the wrong crowd” We see throughout chapter 5 that Primo did understand the meaning of right from wrong, he was aware of his actions furthermore adapting older male youths as his masculine role models he was taught how to steal instead of essential components of a child’s life, from an age as early as ten. Another example of how they learned to be better criminals during their schooling days is Caesar, Primo’s second hand man in the inner-city street drug culture. Not only was Caesars up bringing bad from the start (his mother addicted to heroin, committed murder and eventually ended up in jail). Caesar never felt what it was like to belong, being moved from place to place, school to school eventually using violence as an entry way into each school winding him up in a “Ward’s Island for Special Education”, A place Caesar phrased as “where they kept all the lunatics” (Caesar 1970: 190) after Caesar had violently attacked his teachers. This quotation alone paints an illustration of how Caesar viewed himself as an individual that has gone through the system alone, frustrated, unguided and angry. Ultimately this all lead to Caesar growing up frustrated misunderstood and angry, this allowed for him to react with violence and aggression towards peers and adults. As a final point, we see that due to the harsh realities of life for