Philippe Bourgois's In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio has shown a great deal of commitment to the work that was involved in completing his research on poverty and marginalization. The field of study on poverty and marginalization by Philippe Bourgois was only twenty blocks from the area in Manhattan's Upper East Side known as East Harlem. However, those twenty blocks between the Upper East Side and the Puerto Rican population of East Harlem represent a social and an economic gap extending from mainstream to marginal.
There are two dominant themes that play an important role in the book. The first theme is the structural conditions that impact and marginalize these women and men on a daily basis. The second theme is the search for respect and the reclaiming of dignity by these men and women. Through these themes Bourgois (2002:17) portrays that the people living in El Barrio are known to blame the victim for their misfortune of being the underclass of the United States population and "living in the inferno" due to their inability to compete with the classes above them who are more able of succeeding since they have greater opportunities to do so. This competition has led the minorities living in such bad neighborhoods, such as the streets of Spanish Harlem, to search for respect and dignity while the American Society is doing the opposite, segregating and separating them from the rest of the society causing ghettoization to take place.
Even during the 1930s East Harlem was known as a neighborhood where criminals, thieves, and law-breakers lived. As stated by a Catholic priest in the 1930s, "all kinds of law-breakers; there are nests of the narcotics, thieving, stealing, cheating and every conceivable kind of law breaking" (Bourgois, 48). Population of the so-called "Spanish Harlem" is mostly Hispanic, specifically Puerto Ricans who have emigrated from Puerto Rico throughout the 1900s.