In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

Bourgois turns his attention to public schools next. Public schools work as institutions that, early on, socialize individuals like Caesar and Primo into modes of engaging street society. Because of the failures of public schooling, street culture often offers an "alternative" to early education: "[T]he proto-criminal youth crew—gang—which effectively fills the formal institutional vacuum created by truancy" (174).Bourgois uses Primo’s experiences with early education as an example. Many elementary school teachers claim that students are bent on impressing their teachers, at least until the second grade. Both Primo and Caesar had negative experiences, however, and neither liked school nor their teachers. Primo dealt with not only disliking his homework, but also "institutional alienation" (175) from learning due to his immigrant status. His mother didn’t speak English, which caused confusion during early class meetings with his teacher. Bourgois says that Primo might have also adopted his mother’s distrust of her previous plantation worker in Puerto Rico as well as of her boss at the sweatshop in the United States. These triggers might have caused Primo to form the same relationship of distrust with his teacher, a distrust that hinged on not wanting to try and appease his teacher only to end up failing.