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Summary Of The Pathos Of Inner City

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He chose to focus on drug dealing world because it ultimately manifested as the pathos of the US inner city, an articulated response to poverty and segregation. The pathos of the inner city was embodied by the dealers and the addicts that Bourgois chose to focus on, thus enabling him to gain insight into processes that lay at the heart of East Harlem’s street culture. (11) Bourgois has essentially presented an alternative critical understanding of the U.S inner city by formulating an argument that focuses on the lives and conversations of crack dealers in order to expose and emphasise the interaction between structural oppression and individual action. He achieved this by considering cultural and structural forces, both within the manstream …show more content…

(17) An individual response towards the marginalisation of mainstream society resulted in the development of an “inner city street culture”: a complex web of beliefs, symbols, modes of interaction, value and ideologes .( 8) The street culture of resistance is a spontaneous set of rebellious practices, which oppose mainstream society and offers an alternative forum for autonomous personal dignity. Street culture of resistance is perpetuated in East Harlem in a way that it has become an inherent characterstic of the community and the indviduals who live there. The underground economy however, involves its participants in lifestyles of violence, substance abuse, and internalised rage. It’s participants further perpetuate these aspects by assimilating violence, substance abuse and rage into every day aspects of their …show more content…

Effectively acknowledging the hostile race relations and structural economic disruption that Puerto Rican populatons have previously faced. The term jibaro which translates as “hllbllies”, despite being fundamentally pejorative ,has emerged as a “symbol of Puerto Rican cultural integrty and self respect in the face of foreign influence, domination and diaspora.” (50) The repeated reinventions and redefinitions of the term “jibaro” serves to emphasise the ambiguity not only in reference to the term within East Harlem The history of the Puerto Rican Soceity, from economic dislocation, to political domination, cultural oppression, to large-scale migration, can explain the foundations of street culture and its self-destructive nature. However as Bourgois’ reveals, “a poltical economy explanation for cause and effect is not so evident”. Meaning that even though Puerto Rican history reflects a reoccurring trend of oppression and marginalisation, it does not justify the degree of volence, self destructive tendences and parasitical actions that indivduals like Ray Caesar and Primo display. (53-54) However, these tendencies are blamed on personal psychological or moral failings and are rarely blamed on society. (54) Primo stresses this by saying how “if [he] has a problem it’s because [he] has bought it upon [him]self” .This highlights a major

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