Street Community: Informal Care During the Morning Shift at the Park

• In Event: Race/Ethnicity, Immigration, Illicit Markets, and Crime

Abstract

How do men in structurally marginalized locales create community? What is the cultural texture of said community? What effect does this community have on street-oriented men’s criminality? Criminological ethnographies of “the street” have long suggested street-oriented communities move their members toward criminality; that street communities have a cultural orientation indexed to crime. Three years of ethnographic research have uncovered a more complicated reality. This paper demonstrates how the informal care practices among members of an early morning exercise community dissuade street-oriented men from risky, and often criminal, behavior. This paper, and the broader ethnographic project to which it is a part, brings light to the ways in which street communities offer a cultural space where its members develop personhoods that are rarely recognized by criminological research.

Author

• Albert Lobo de la Tierra, The Graduate Center, John Jay College / CUNY