When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers on and off the Streets

Abstract

When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On And Off The Streets. By Timothy Black. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009. 464 pages. $29.95 (hardcover). Sociologist Timothy Black's ethnography of three brothers from Puerto Rico uses their experiences, largely drawn from Springfield, Massachusetts, to argue that government and corporate policies along with insidious racism are the cause of a growing underclass. A professor of sociology, Black acknowledges that by definition ethnography must be vulnerable to the risks of subjectivity. This is the critical problem throughout the work. Given the nearly twenty years he invests in not only chronicling the lives of these youth as they grow into adulthood, but in trying to advocate for them, subjectivity is unavoidable. Black immerses himself in the culture of their world, spending innumerable nights on Springfield's drug-infested streets. What results is not only a powerful work of social criticism but an engaging challenge to the deeply ingrained image of the Springfield Renaissance of the 1980s. Black is not a historian, yet his work deftly details social, economic, and workforce history. The reader is taken into a dark world of exploitation, bureaucratic apathy, and racism. The Rivera brothers and extended family are victims of United States colonial policies against Puerto Rico. They are casualties of the de-industrialization of the American economy and its transition from high-waged manufacturing jobs to those that are servicebased, featuring minimum wages for those without education. Adequate education is denied them by the racism of segregated, underperforming schools in cities experiencing white flight. Lacking white privilege or an accommodating educational system, facing draconian waves of social service cuts and a difficult recession, all three turn to the only industry available, the illegal drug economy. Violence, crime, gang involvement, incarceration and addiction overtake or at least touch each of them. Black points the blame at former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. No longer the hero who saved the nation from the "Great Inflation," Volcker stands accused of serving as a corporate puppet, defending their interests against successful social movements and saturated world markets by sacrificing jobs, unions and the nation's industrial base in the interest of recovering corporate profitability. Joining Volcker is Ronald Reagan, taking advantage of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society to bring forth de-regulation, tax cuts, and the dismantling of the welfare state established through the New Deal and the programs of the liberal 1960s. These government policies, combined with expansion of the illegal drug industry and the war on drugs, with the resulting growth of the prison industrial complex, Black cites as the cause of the rampant poverty of inner city hubs such as Springfield and Worcester, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. The economic overview is an overly subjective polemic. Thoughtprovoking, if unconvincing, it challenges the prevailing assessments of current economists. The calls for a massive federal urban New Deal program and/or social revolution, however, ring as naive or archaic. The included historiography of modern urban poverty research is, however, invaluable. Black also considers the tight labor market of the late 1990s and its impact on Springfield's streets. The experience of eldest brother Julio provides strong perspective for the ensuing decade. Struggling to join the middle class and prosper in the de-regulated trucking industry, while maintaining a house in Springfield with a variable mortgage rate in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, his experience has an Everyman quality. Black also explores the world of addiction, treatment, recovery and conviction through the experience of middle brother Fausto. …