In search of respect Book

A very important book because it successfully demonstrates how the crack-cocaine-heroine epidemic of the late 80's/early 90's was brought on in part by the collapse of the urban job market. In other words, the factory jobs that Puerto Rican immigrants relied on for maintaining traditional family structures and reinforcing patriarchal cultural norms were shipped overseas, thus catalyzing the rise of an underground street economy that not only paid its workers better than entry level minimum wage jobs but also validated new generations of Puerto Rican men by allowing them to develop an alternative mode for fulfilling their culture's masculine gender roles. The men profiled in this ethnography are unlikable anti-heroes (cocaine sniffing, gang-raping deadbeats, for the most part), but many of their flaws seem to be the product of their social conditioning, the result of larger structural violence that only allows its victims to perform gender and cultural roles in the most superficial and self-destructive ways.