ABSTRACT
The extract from sanitized fieldwork notes is a personalized glimpse of the day-to-day struggle for survival and for meaning by the people who stand behind the extraordinary statistics on inner city violent crime in the United States. These are the same Puerto Rican residents of Spanish Harlem, New York City, that Oscar Lewis in La Vida declared to be victims of a ‘culture of poverty’ enmired in a ‘self-per petuating cycle of poverty’. Despite the negative scholarly consensus on Lewis’s theory, the alternative discussions either tend towards economic reductionism or else ultimately minimize the reality of profound marginalization and destruction that envelop a disproportionate share of the inner city poor. The inner city residents described in the ethnographic vignette are the pariahs of urban industrial US society. They partake of ideologies and values and share symbols which form the basis of an ‘inner city street culture’ completely excluded from the mainstream economy and society but ultimately derived from it.
