Substance Abuse, Ethnicity, and the Underground Economy:

Bourgois, Philippe

Abstract

This research project will analyze substance abuse in the inner-city by taking a holistic, anthropological approach to income generating strategies among Puerto Rican residents of Spanish Harlem. The research will focus on two crucial variables in inner-city substance abuse: relationship to the underground economy and ethnic experience. The researcher will undertake participant-observation fieldwork among young men and women who """"""""hang out"""""""" in front of a """"""""crack house"""""""" located on the same block where the researcher will be living with his wife and child. Once sufficient trust has been established (after three to six months of initial participant-observation ethnography) the researcher will select eight to twelve representative individuals, both male and female, for detailed life history interviews. With the permission of the informant these life histories will be tape recorded in informal, conversational settings over the next six to nine months. Family members, friends, and other significant associates of the interviewees will also be interviewed in detail for additional corroborating information. The goal of this project is to analyze the relationship of substance abuse to two dimensions of the inner-city experience of marginalization: economic and ideological. On the one hand substance abuse will be understood in the context of an individual's striving for upward economic mobility given alternatives for income generation in the underground and the mainstream economies. On the other hand substance abuse will be examined in its complex relationship to contradictory ideologies of ethnic identity and personal expression--from assertions of dignity and resistance to marginalization, to actions of frustrated self-destruction. Detailed data will be collected on employment and work history (both legal and illegal) as well as on all other means of earning income. The many expressions of the interviewees' ethnic identify will also be documented systematically i.e., her/his relationship to Puerto Rico, whether (s)he speaks Spanish, whether (s)he is considered black or white by mainstream society, and her/his concrete experiences of racial discrimination in the larger world.