Bourgois moves his family to East Harlem to research the underground economy and drug trade.

Bourgois accidentally exposes Ray's illiteracy by asking him to read a news article caption in public.

Primo warns Bourgois that publicly humiliating Ray is a serious and dangerous breach of street culture.

Ray tells Primo he dreamed Bourgois was an FBI agent, making the researcher fear for his safety.

Ray pressures Bourgois to help launder money after Bourgois assists with paperwork for Ray's club.

Bourgois is admitted to the Game Room crackhouse and becomes a regular presence among workers and customers.

Candy shoots Felix in the stomach after discovering his ongoing extramarital affairs.

Felix is imprisoned on an unrelated weapons charge, and Candy sells the Game Room to Ray.

Ray transforms the Game Room into a profitable business through cultural loyalty, kinship bonds, and fear.

Ray demotes Primo from manager to senior salesman and hires Tony, intensifying workplace conflict.

Multiple bundles of crack vanish over two nights, and Ray deducts the losses from both Primo and Tony.

Gato is exposed as the thief who built hidden false floorboards beneath the Game Room to steal crack undetected.

Primo fails to find legal work during an economic recession and spirals into deeper drug and alcohol abuse.

Ray's bodega venture collapses after a contractor steals all the merchandise, returning Primo and Caesar to selling crack.

Bourgois revisits El Barrio and finds Primo drug-free and working legally while Caesar remains violent and addicted.

This pool follows the most consequential events of the ethnography, from Bourgois's arrival in El Barrio through his rocky acceptance into Ray's drug network. His accidental disrespect of Ray nearly ends his research before it begins, forcing him to navigate street culture's unforgiving rules of respect. Once admitted into the Game Room, Bourgois witnesses Ray's skilled management, the workplace tensions that fracture his crew, and a theft that nearly destroys the operation. The struggle between legal and underground economies drives Primo further into addiction after the recession shuts him out, while Ray's own attempt to go legitimate collapses. By the time Bourgois revisits his subjects years later, the individuals he befriended have shifted in very different directions, illustrating the cycle of poverty he set out to document.

The core story of Bourgois's entry into East Harlem's crack world.

Puerto Rican jíbaro farmers are pushed off the land, migrate to New York, and their descendants end up selling crack.

Caesar voices virulent racist hatred of African Americans in a recorded conversation, despite being embedded in Black street culture.

Felix runs the original Game Room as a tool for extracting sexual favors from female crack addicts.

Primo recalls holding a man at knifepoint while high on crack, stealing his gold ring and abandoning the girl who helped him.

Felix breaks his foot jumping from a hotel window when Candy arrives to confront him about his infidelity.

Primo takes over managing the Game Room during Felix's recovery, improving sales and cutting back on his own crack use.

Ray asks Primo to be godfather to one of his sons, establishing a compadre bond built on cultural loyalty.

Benzie, a legal janitor who resents workplace disrespect, is hired as a Game Room lookout and limits his drug use to weekends.

Caesar cuts his teacher's tie with scissors and convinces his school principal he hears voices, earning a disability classification.

Caesar is removed from the lucrative Thursday night work shift as punishment for his ongoing clashes with Ray.

Primo secures a union hotel janitorial job but is laid off just two weeks before earning full tenure.

Primo attends a job training program organized by Bourgois but is the first to leave, ashamed of his street clothing.

Candy's twelve-year-old daughter Jackie is gang-raped after running away, and Caesar and Primo blame Jackie while praising the perpetrators.

Carmen becomes pregnant with Caesar's child while he is violently abusive toward her son from a prior relationship.

Caesar is jailed for abusing his daughter and sells birthday gifts Primo bought for their son to fund drug purchases.

This pool follows the lives and histories of El Barrio's residents beyond the Game Room's central operation, revealing how deeply the underground economy is rooted in generational displacement. It traces how Puerto Rican jíbaro farmers were uprooted across generations, eventually producing the crack dealers Bourgois befriends. Stories of Felix's mismanagement, Primo's crack-fueled robbery, and Caesar's school manipulation show how street culture is learned early and reinforced by the institutions meant to prevent it. The experiences of Benzie, Carmen, and the dynamics of the Thursday shift add texture to the Game Room's daily workings and internal hierarchies. In the pool's later events, the gang rape of twelve-year-old Jackie and Caesar's ongoing domestic violence reveal how gendered violence flows through the community's next generation.

The backstories and secondary lives that shaped El Barrio's drug world.

Bourgois concludes that drug abuse in East Harlem is a symptom of structural racism and marginalization, not its root cause.

Police interrogations of Bourgois as a suspicious white man in El Barrio accidentally help build his credibility on the street.

Caesar compares his crack addiction to eating potato chips, telling Bourgois that one is never enough.

Ray briefly opens a bar that is shut down for a fire code violation, ending another attempt to go legitimate.

Primo's mother sends him to Puerto Rico to reform him, but he feels equally rejected by both countries.

Caesar is institutionalized at a special education school on Ward's Island for three years following his school manipulation.

Primo's legal workplace boss calls him illiterate behind his back and bars him from answering phones because of his Puerto Rican accent.

Caesar admits he lost his legal job because he could not stop using crack while employed.

Caesar's cousin permanently escapes El Barrio by converting to the Jehovah's Witnesses and securing a stable white-collar insurance career.

Candy forgives Felix the moment he says he loves her after she shoots him, then hides the gun and calls an ambulance.

Candy begins selling crack and publicly flaunting multiple sexual partners after Felix is imprisoned, inverting the roles of male street culture.

Candy arrives at her court sentencing in a tight red jumpsuit, nearly earns a contempt charge, and is genuinely hurt by the judge's reaction.

Maria becomes pregnant with Primo's child and writes love poetry to him even as he awaits sentencing and demands she abort.

Bourgois watches a child's horrified face as his mother argues with a drug dealer at dawn, declaring he can no longer ignore suffering.

Ray is believed retired from drug dealing, reportedly collecting rent from tenements he bought and renovated with drug money.

This pool captures the key intellectual and emotional turning points that anchor Bourgois's argument about structural racism and underground survival. From his early recognition that drugs are a symptom rather than a cause, to the moments where individual characters collide with institutional barriers, these events form the book's analytical core. Primo, Caesar, and Candy each face stark moments of clarity about their circumstances — and find themselves unable to escape them despite that awareness. Candy's transformation from battered wife to independent crack dealer, Maria's romanticized pregnancy amid crisis, and Caesar's cousin's rare escape to the suburbs all illustrate the narrow and unequal paths available to El Barrio's residents. The pool closes with Bourgois's own moment of moral reckoning and Ray's rumored retirement, suggesting both continuity and exhaustion in the world he spent years documenting.

The revelations, decisions, and emotional turning points that define the book's argument.