ABSTRACT
Youth scrambling for upward mobility in the open air narcotics markets that dominate the poorest section of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican deindustrialized inner city are engulfed in a maelstrom of deadly violence. Taking a close, ethnographic view of the emotional, charismatic momentum for interpersonal violence at three crucial interfaces—police raids, open air drug corners and jails/prisons—we set this micro-neighborhood in the larger political economy of the US punitive version of neoliberalism and the global narcotics industry. We demonstrate the intimate brutal effects of long-term structural institutional violence on everyday sociality among ambitious, unemployed youth beset by: (1) racist, zero-tolerance law enforcement practices; (2) carceral mismanagement of unemployment and poverty; (3) dysfunctional gun control laws; and (4) narcotics profits artificially inflated by illegality. The immediate stakes are elevated on infrastructurally decimated street corners by intense competition for scarce resources in the context of plentiful firearms, powerful psychoactive drugs and untraceable cash at hyper-profitable retail endpoints of the global narcotics industry.
