Introduction

This book documents the societal violence against poor people, especially children, living in one community in the United States during a particularly critical juncture in time: the mid-1970s. The last major phase of deindustrialization was occurring in New York City, and the modest economic prospects of the working poor were deteriorating as a result of the loss of the manufacturing jobs on which their income depended (Gordon 1996). My focus on the lives of residents in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan parallels stories from other urban areas in the United States where changes in corporate investment policy and priorities produced massive economic and social misery among Black, white, and Latino working people. By contextualizing certain behaviors of the poor that have been labeled as "deviant," my aim is to reveal them as survival strategies in a situation of great economic distress. ¹