Review by Choice Review
Wojcicka Sharff's study of a Latino neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side consists largely of many interconnected narratives in loose chronological order. Recurring themes in the stories include the salience of real and fictive kinship in sustaining life; the mutating of household organization, e.g., from nuclear to extended to matrifocal to nuclear in response to economic impacts; the expanded roles women perform given the dearth of adult males; the constant violence--of officialdom against the poor and of the poor against one another. The author includes her own activities, feelings, and relations with residents in her descriptive chapters. She notes that her research period--1974 to 1990--coincided with the end of the "war on poverty," its replacement with the "war on drugs," and the "war on crime." She argues that the ending of the first and launching of the latter had disastrous effects on the poor and their communities. The book's introductory chapter serves as theoretical, historical, and sociopolitical context for which the remaining 18 or so chapters--written with passion and anger--provide dramatic empirical documentation. All levels. E. Wellin University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
