In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is a critically-acclaimed work of nonfiction by Philippe Bourgois, first published in 1995. It won the 1996 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1997 Margaret Mead Award. A second edition, with a prologue and an additional epilogue, was released in 2003. The book explores themes of respect, independence, autocracy, self-worth, racism, and social marginalization. Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has also authored Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation, which includes extensive fieldwork he conducted in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest. Bourgois published a book with photographer Jeffrey Schonberg in 2009 about homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco.

As an ethnographic study, In Search of Respect details the effects of racism and social marginalization on people involved in the underground economy in East Harlem. Bourgois wanted to research the underground economy and drug use, so he moved his family to El Barrio, the East Harlem neighborhood that takes center stage in his narrative. Through extensive research, and after first successfully entering the world of

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