Hard Times on 125th Street: Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare Reform

Author(s): Katherine S. Newman

Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 762-778
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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KATHERINE S. NEWMAN
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Urban Studies
Kennedy
School of Government
Harvard
University
Cambridge,
MA 02138
Hard Times on 125th Street:
Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare Reform
Drawing
on fieldwork in Harlem at the onset of welfare
reform,
I
argue
in this article for both a social structural and a cultural
ap-
proach
to the
study
of
poor
families
facing
the
consequences
of this historic
policy change. Ethnographic understanding
of house-
hold
organization, kinship networks, reciprocal dependencies, intergenerational relations, migration,
and
gender
must be
brought
to bear if we are to chart the
responses
of the
poor
to welfare reform.
Meaning
and
perceived
intentions must be central if we are to
grasp
how the
targets
of
policy change
understand the new economic and bureaucratic circumstances of their lives. These themes
are illustrated
by drawing
on accounts of several households in Harlem-African American and Latino-in order to
explore
how
both structural and cultural forces
may shape responses
to welfare reform.
[welfare reform, poverty,
household
organization,
work-
ing poor]
As
most
anthropologists readily recognize,
welfare
reform arrived as
yet
one more
difficulty
in the
steady
stream of burdens and dilemmas that consti-
tute
the
daily
lives of the
poor.
To be
sure,
the loss of all
forms of
public
assistance is a more
profound challenge
than
many
others encountered
by impoverished
families in
inner-city enclaves,
rural
communities,
and even
pockets
of suburban
poverty.
But it would be
wrong
at the outset to
assume that welfare reform is understood
by
its
targets
as a
unique
event. As
many
researchers have shown
(Edin
and
Lein
1997;
Rank
1995), recipients
of
public
assistance are
constantly
faced with
inexplicable
terminations of their
benefits,
the shutdown of
utilities,
demands for
paperwork
from
1,000 directions,
unexpected
evictions,
and intrusive
surveillance of their behavior in the
job
market or as
par-
ents.
Scrambling, arguing, contesting,
and
being
confused
by
and
acquiescing
to the
changing
demands of the welfare
bureaucracy
was a fact of life for families on Aid to Fami-
lies with
Dependent
Children
(AFDC).
Among
families reliant on
public assistance,
AFDC-
and its
successor,
Transitional Assistance for
Needy
Fami-
lies
(TANF)-is
but one resource
among many
that add
up
to a
complex
survival
strategy.
The term
welfare depend-
ent never
captured
the
intricacy
of these
systems
of suste-
nance,
for the rest of the
package was,
and remains to this
day,
invisible to state authorities or
survey
researchers. As
Carol Stack's
(1974)
classic All Our Kin showed
so
long
ago,
welfare
payments
entered a
highly variegated
social
structure that
strung family
and friends into a web of
recip-
rocal ties. A well-oiled
sharing system
of the kind she de-
scribes reacts on a
daily
basis to the
appearance
and
disap-
pearance
of
funds,
demands from
significant
others,
and
in-kind
trades,
managing
funds that
may
be infused or
withdrawn as the
vagaries
of life dictate.
One
might
be
tempted
to conclude that the end of the
AFDC
system
has therefore made little difference. The so-
cial networks that
provision
the
poor simply
shook welfare
out of their
systems
and moved on. For those extended
families and fictive kin who were fortunate
enough
to have
other resources to shift
toward,
this
may
well have been the
case.
However,
for others who
participate
in a
carefully
calibrated set of
reciprocal exchanges
and have little else to
inject
in the
place
of
TANF,
more calamitous outcomes
may
befall both the intended
targets
of welfare reform and
a host of innocent
bystanders. Indeed,
millions of Ameri-
cans who were active
participants
in the
low-wage
labor
market all
along
or who were in school
trying
to
compile
credentials that would facilitate an
escape
from
working
poverty may
find themselves unable to
"play by
the rules"
as a result of
legislative
edicts that were never aimed at
them.
This article draws on a
two-year study
of
low-wage
workers and
job
seekers in the fast food
industry
in Har-
lem. Conducted between 1993 and
1995,
this fieldwork in-
volved a
variety
of methods
developed
and
implemented
by
a multiracial and multiethnic research team. We
began
with face-to-face interviews of 200 workers
employed
in
four restaurants in central and western Harlem. In
1995,
we
added an additional set of
ethnographic
interviews with 93
people
who had
applied
to and been
rejected
for the same
American
Anthropologist 103(3):762-778. Copyright
?
2001, American
Anthropological
Association
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 763
jobs
that our
sample
of 200 now held. For both sets of in-
formants,
the initial interview collected basic
demographic
data on the households in which these workers
resided, as
well as extensive information on
skills,
employment expe-
rience,
educational
history, migration profile, wage
his-
tory,
and
experience
with the welfare
system.
From these
interviews,
we learned about how
many jobs
these workers
had
applied
for,
how far their
job
search had taken them
from the
neighborhoods
where
they lived,
and what their
parents
and
siblings
did for a
living.
From the
population
of
workers,
we selected on a ran-
dom basis 60
persons
for
longer,
life
history
interviews.
These
tape-recorded
interviews took between three and
five hours to
complete
and dwelled at
length
on
family
his-
tory; changes
in the
neighborhoods
where these informants
had
grown up;
and their
perceptions
of the labor
market,
of
the role of race in the distribution of
opportunity
in the
work
world,
of the welfare
system
as it existed at the
time,
and of the survival
strategies
of their own households and
extended
family
members. Ten
people
were selected from
among
the 60 who were in this life
history group
for
"shadowing,"
a form of fieldwork that
placed
each of them
at the center of a concentric circle of
family members,
friends, teachers, ministers, employers,
and
neighborhood
residents,
who
participated
in this
project
over a
year-long
period.
The cases discussed at
length
in this article are
drawn from
among
these "shadowees."'
Our fieldwork focused on the
working poor
and was not
intended to dwell on welfare
recipients
at all.
Nonetheless,
the two domains-the
working poor
and
recipients
of
AFDC-proved
to be
sufficiently
intertwined so that even
a
study explicitly
focused on
low-wage
workers took into
its
purview many
families that were
receiving
welfare and
wages. Indeed,
about 25
percent
of the fast food workers
we
surveyed
in Harlem were
living
in households where
someone, usually
their
mothers,
was
receiving public
aid
(Newman 1999;
Newman and Ellis
1999).
An examination
of the
complexities
of households
in
which both
employ-
ment and
public
assistance
play
a vital role in
sustaining
poor
families
provides
some
appreciation
for the
potential,
unanticipated consequences
of welfare reform.
Toward this
end,
I detail the
ethnographic
context sur-
rounding
several Harlem
families-African American,
Puerto Rican, and Dominican-for which both welfare
and
earnings (legitimate
and
underground)
were central to
survival.
My purpose
here is first to
explore
the
complex
intertwining
of work, welfare, and further education and to
suggest
some of the
ways
in which the
dismantling
of the
AFDC
system may drag
the
working poor
down
along
with the "welfare
dependent";
and second to
suggest
the
domains within which
anthropological scholarship might
add to a national
understanding
of the
impact
of this his-
toric
change
in the
safety
net.
Since the data collected for this article
predate
the onset
of time-limited welfare-a
process rolling
out
gradually
in
most states in 1999 and
beyond--definitive
accounts of the
impact
of welfare reform cannot be
provided.
Even where
time limits have
begun
to take
hold,
the
persistence
of ex-
traordinarily tight
labor markets
through
the end of the
1990s and the record decline in welfare
rolls, spurred
not
by
cutoffs but
by
increased bureaucratic hurdles to
entry
into the
TANF
system,
have made it difficult for
any
re-
searcher to know what the
real, long-term consequences
of
this historic
change
in federal
policy
will mean for
poor
families. If and when this remarkable
period
of economic
growth
slows to
something
closer to the norms of the
past
20
years,
we will be able to see more
clearly
what the
change
in the
system
has meant to
poor
families. What this
article contributes for
now, however,
is a
conceptual
un-
derstanding
drawn from
pre-reform
fieldwork of what we
might expect
the
long-term consequences
of the end of
AFDC to be.
Kyesha's
Dilemma
Kyesha Smith,
a
21-year-old
African American
living
in
a Harlem
housing project,
lies at the center of a
complex
family
tree
composed
of members
receiving welfare,
workers in a wide
variety
of
occupations,
retired men and
women,
members of the
military,
children of various
ages,
and foster care
dependents. Kyesha
had worked in the
same fast food restaurant in Harlem for five
years by
the
time we
met,
but she was
earning only
$5 an hour
despite
the skills she had built
up
over that
period
of time and the
high
school
diploma
she had earned. As the
kinship
chart
(Figure 1) shows, Kyesha
is the oldest child
living
in the
household headed
by
her
mother, Dana,
a
41-year-old
black woman with five other children still
living
at home
and a number of others out on their own.
Dana has been a continuous AFDC
recipient
since she
had her first
child, Kyesha's
oldest
brother, Reggie,
at the
age
of 15.
During
the course of
my research,
Dana
gave
birth to her seventh
child,
who was several
years younger
than Dana's
youngest grandchild.
Dana did not
graduate
from
high
school. Her
experience
with formal
employment
was of
very
brief duration and a
very long
time
ago.
She
has
been,
for all
practical purposes,
a career
recipient
of
public
assistance. Hence, Dana is
precisely
the kind of
per-
son that architects of welfare
legislation
had in mind as the
target
of their reform efforts. Indeed, during
the two
years
I
studied this
family,
welfare authorities had come after
Dana in an effort to enroll her in a workfare
program,
which she deflected on the
grounds
that her
youngest
child
was too
young (and then too ill). Pressure was
clearly
building
for Dana to enter the labor force.
Had she done so, problems
would
immediately
have
cropped up
for
Kyesha.
For this
young
worker had a child
of her own, Anthony,
then two
years old, whose full-time
764 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
*
VOL. 103, No. 3
*
SEPTEMBER 2001
child care consisted of
Dana,
period.
Dana took care of her
own
young
children and added
Kyesha's
son to the mix. In
exchange, Kyesha
deeded over some of her
earnings
to
Dana. Given
Kyesha's
low
earnings,
she would have been
hard
pressed
to
pay
for commercial or even subsidized
public
child
care,
no matter how
inexpensive
or available it
might
have been-and in New York
City day
care was nei-
ther. Dana's
availability
made it
possible
for
Kyesha
to re-
main in the labor market.
Indeed,
in the summer
(thanks
to
Dana's
connections), Kyesha picked up
a second
job doing
cleaning
and maintenance around the
housing project
where
they
lived.
Kyesha's
intensive level of
participation
in the formal
labor market was made
possible by
the fact that her mother
was,
in
truth,
a state-funded child care worker. Dana's wel-
fare check was a kind of
wage
for the labor she
provided
to
Kyesha,
who kicked in
part
of her own
salary
to
support
the household in which
they
both lived. The
arrangement
was
hardly unique:
Most of the "welfare mothers" who en-
tered this
study through
the side door-as relatives of
workers or
job
seekers-were
doing
child care for extra
money.
None of their "clients" could
pay
the
prevailing
wage
for this
work; hence,
the welfare
system
was
provid-
ing
a
hefty subsidy
for the labor these mothers were
pro-
viding
to their own
daughters
and
neighbors
for the care of
their children.
Dana was not the
only
welfare
recipient (or
state-funded
child care
worker, depending
on how one looks at her real
position)
whose status affected
young Anthony. Through
the
kinship
ties of his
father,
Juan
(a
fellow worker in the
fast food
trade),
the little
boy
had access to another
grand-
mother. Juan's mother, Graciela, born in Puerto Rico but a
long-time
resident of the South
Bronx,
took her
grandson
in on weekends. This
permitted
Dana to take a bit of a
break and
gave
Juan a chance to
spend
time with his son.
Like
Dana,
Graciela had been a
longtime
welfare
recipient.
Unlike
Dana, however,
she
stopped having
children
long
ago,
so that when the authorities came
looking
for her to
join
the workfare
program and, eventually,
to
push
her off
of AFDC
altogether,
she had no shelter from their de-
mands. Gone was the weekend child care for little An-
thony. Juan,
like his
ex-girlfriend Kyesha,
was in demand
as a weekend shift
worker,
and since he faced
persistent
re-
quests
for
support
from
Kyesha
and from his own
mother,
Juan was not available for child care
responsibilities
either.
He was on the
shop
floor.
It bears notice that the other members of
Kyesha's
ex-
tended
family,
her
step siblings by
a common-law father
who comes and
goes
from their lives in a rather
irregular
pattern,
were neither old
enough
to
provide
child care nor
old
enough
to be
fully
on their own. Indeed, Irene
(age 11),
Juney (7), Jimona (6), and their foster sister, Sandra (5), re-
quired
adult
supervision
after school and in the
evening
hours. This need would most
likely go
unmet if Dana were
unavailable.
Looking closely
at
Kyesha's family tree, however,
it is
clear that there are resources to be
tapped
in her extended
family
network. We
commonly
assume that
poor
residents
of
inner-city neighborhoods
are
"persistently," intergen-
erationally poor.
Yet a close read of this
family's occupa-
tional
history
shows that
among
the oldest
living genera-
tion one sees a fair number of
people
who have had solid
careers.
Evie,
Dana's
mother,
has worked for the
postal
service for her entire adult life. Her husband had a
job
parking
cars in a commercial
garage.
On the
strength
of
their
income, they
were able to move out of the
city
to a
segregated
suburb on
Long
Island. Some of their children
(Dana's siblings)
have done
quite
well also: One
daughter
(Mary)
is a medical
secretary,
Beth is a corrections
officer,
and Nell married a truck driver. Yet others have no formal
employment.
Kyesha represents
a
downwardly
mobile
generation,
which has come
through
a much harder economic
period
than her
grandmother's generation, beneficiary
of the ex-
pansive
1960s.
Although government jobs (and military
opportunities)
were
relatively plentiful
for Evie's
genera-
tion and even for Dana's
siblings, they
have become much
harder to find
among Kyesha's age-mates.
Kyesha's father,
who died some
years ago,
was a Greek
immigrant
who had
many
children
by
another wife. Some
of these
step siblings
on
Kyesha's
father's side have done
well for themselves as well. Several have become
postal
workers;
others have
gone
into the
military.
Yet it is no-
ticeable
among
her
step siblings,
on all
sides,
that those
men who did not find their
way
into the
military
have
found themselves in
jail.
Three of
Kyesha's stepbrothers
have been or are
presently
in
jail
for
drug
convictions. One
of them continues to deal at a
high
level and makes a
great
deal of
money by Kyesha's standards, though Kyesha
and
Dana both consider these
ill-gotten gains "dirty money"
and not welcome in their home. Some of her sisters make a
living braiding
hair or
baby-sitting, underground jobs
that
keep
them on the
right
side of the law. The variation in the
occupational
outcomes of
Kyesha's siblings
is noticeable
but not remarkable. Most of the
poor
families I have stud-
ied over time show the same kind of variation in
sibling
sets,
with success stories mixed in with sad cases in a
pat-
tern
that
challenges explanations emphasizing
environ-
mental context.
Standing
back from the
ethnographic
detail of
Kyesha's
kinship chart, it seems clear that on the eve of welfare re-
form her own household was
"holding
it
together"
on the
basis of a stable, but delicate, balance. The combination of
Kyesha's low-wage work, Dana's welfare, and subsidized
public housing
was
working reasonably
well but
only
be-
cause all these
pieces
were in
place.
That said, there were
reasons to be
concerned
about the
long-term viability
of the
arrangements
even without the threat of welfare reform.
Kyesha's
son and her
siblings
were safe and fed but not ex-
actly prospering.
Dana's
preferred
mode of
baby-sitting-
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 765
plunking
the kids in front of a TV tuned to
daytime soap
operas-was
not
likely
to
ready
them for school with the
kinds of social skills and
understanding
of letters and num-
bers that more
advantaged
children
might
have.
While
Kyesha,
at
21,
was
reasonably
content with her
situation most of the
time,
tempers
were
rising
in her
household as she and her mother vied for
authority
over
her
son, sparring
over the
question
of "who is
really
in
charge
here."
Moreover,
as Dana wanted a
larger
contribu-
tion to the central
coffers,
Kyesha
wanted to
squirrel away
as much as
possible, particularly
of her tax refunds. The si-
lent,
and
not-so-silent, tug-of-war
over finances did not en-
courage
Dana to extend her child care
responsibilities
be-
yond
the minimum. Once
Graciela,
little
Anthony's
other
grandmother,
was out of the
picture,
Dana was
especially
unwilling
to do weekend
baby-sitting,
which meant
Kyesha
could no
longer
work so
many
hours. Her take-
home income declined as a result.
Reynaldo's
Dilemmas
Reynaldo
Linaro,
whose mother is Puerto Rican and
whose father is from
Ecuador,
is a
jack-of-all-trades
who
worked for a brief time in a fast food restaurant in Harlem
in between various hustles as a nonunion
electrician,
car
repairman, carpenter,
and cellular
phone
dealer for fellow
Latinos in his
Washington Heights neighborhood.
A
tall,
stocky young
man with a love of
baggy pants
and
gold
chains, Rey
is a classic
entrepreneur.
He mixes and
matches his
job opportunities-picking up anything
he can
get
on the side. For a time he had a
job stocking
shelves in
a
drug store,
but
during
his off-hours he made
money
fix-
ing up
broken-down cars for
neighbors
and
rewiring
the
electrical
system
in a vacant
apartment
for his landlord.
Rey
works all the hours that are not consumed
by school,
his
girlfriend,
and
hanging
out with his
younger
brother.
No doubt he is influenced in his own brand of "worka-
holism"
by
the
example
of his
dad,
who
taught
him much
of what he knows about electronics and machine
repair.2
Ernie Linaro never met a mechanical device he could not
tear down to the foundation and rebuild
just
like new. Out-
side on the street curb sit the broken-down
Fords,
Dodge
four-doors,
and GM cars that await his attention. His auto
repair shop
is
just
the sidewalk in front of their
apartment
building,
but
everyone
in the
neighborhood
knows that this
is a business venue.
Emrnie
is forever
walking
around with a
cloth in his hands, wiping away
the
grease
and oil from the
pistons
of an old car he has torn
apart
and made whole
again.
The shelves of the
family's
back room are crammed
with blowtorches, pliers, hammers, wrenches, reels of
plastic-coated wiring-all
the tools of the trade needed to
fix the
long
line of radios and TV sets that friends and
friends of friends have left behind for
repair.
As if he was not
busy enough,
Ernie has a
lively
sideline
as an off-the-books contractor, renovating apartments
des-
tined for
immigrant
families
just
like his own. Old
apart-
ment
buildings
in his
neighborhood
are forever
flooding
from broken-down
pipes,
their
plaster weeping
off the
walls,
mosaic tiles
missing, caulking
cracked and
flaking,
windows shattered and
taped.
Landlords claim to have lit-
tle
money
for
keeping apartments up
to code and in
any
case
prefer
to use local workers and avoid union labor.
Their
preferences keep Emie
in work as the
apartments
turn
over. In
turn,
Ernie has
kept Rey
at his side and
taught
him
everything
he knows so he can
turn
over some of the
work he has no time
for, maintaining
the
opportunity
"in
the
family."
Rey's mother, Magdalena,
is a mature student
working
toward an A.A.
degree
that
will,
she
hopes,
make it
possi-
ble for her to work in
computer
administration
someday.
The cost of her
schooling
has been subsidized
by public
as-
sistance,
which
during
the
period
of our fieldwork
permit-
ted women on welfare to
go
to
college.
After
many years
of
working
in a bra
factory,
she had come to understand the
importance
of
higher
education and was determined to ac-
cumulate credentials that would
permit
her to
graduate
from
low-wage jobs
to those with better
pay.
While
Magdalena
has worked
in
factories for
many
years,
she stakes her future on the
prospect
of
finding
a bet-
ter
job
when she has some credentials to show for herself.
Meanwhile,
it is the
entrepreneurial spirit
of the men in the
household and the
support
of the AFDC
system
that has
kept
the
family going.
Between
them,
father and sons
earn
enough
in the
(nontaxed) underground economy
and the
formal
(wage-labor) system
to
keep
the
family
at a lower-
working-class
standard of
living
as
long
as
Magdalena's
income is added to the mix.
They
have
nothing
to
spare,
they
cannot do without
any
of these sources of
income,
but
they
are not
starving. They
can even
hope
that the
youngest
child will be able to
get through high
school and make it
into a
public college, something
that will
require heavy
doses of financial
aid,
but it is not an unthinkable
goal.
It
might
be
tempting
for
pundits
to look at the Linaro
family
as an
inner-city exception,
an icon of middle-class
virtue. The
two-parent family,
the
loving
brothers,
and the
entrepreneurial energy
all add
up
to an admirable
portrait
of a
stable,
supportive
circle of kin
pulling together.
And
there is much truth to the view. Yet
Rey's parents
are offi-
cially
divorced.
They
"broke
up" years ago
in order to
qualify
the household for welfare.
Emie
maintains an offi-
cial address elsewhere, though
he continues to live with his
family,
as he
always
has.
If we were to look at an official
government
census of
Rey's household, we would find the adults within classi-
fied as out of the labor force. Indeed, it would be deemed a
single-parent
household
supported by
the welfare
system.
Harlem is
populated by thousands of families whose offi-
cial
profiles
look
just
like this. Yet there is a
steady
income
stream
coming
into the Linaro home because most of the
766 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
*
VOL. 103,
No. 3
*
SEPTEMBER 2001
*
All of Dana's sisters and her mother, Evie, live in the same
town
on Long
Island, but
they
all
grew up
in the
project
where
Dana now lives. Dana, Cara, Mary, and Nell were born in Virginia.
A
=O
*
Evie and
Harry formerly
owned a home on
Long
Island.
They
sold it to Beth for $ioo,ooo
and moved to an
apartment complex.
Evie kicked out all of her children but
Therese,
her
youngest
daughter,
because
they
were too much to handle. Nell and her
family
have since moved back in.
*
Harry
was like a father to most of Evie's kids.
Corey
Douglass I MELVA Niko Harry EVIE WILLIAM
(dec.)
I
Works in (dec.) 1 (65) (57+)
SMITH
a
nursing
(Greek)
I
Parked cars Mail
I
(Lives in
home in same carrier Virginia)
I Lives in Manhattan
Kyesha's
I
garage
for
building years
A A=
I
A
,
Th
(25)
-
Servedat
Stuart
I
Edith
I
Adam Colette Victor
Ilene
No
job
Ft.
Bragg
m
In
the 'Drug
In the
*No job
*
Basket- I Vice Once
-
Training to
military problem military
ball
president, I worked with drive truck bal Ip Iworked with drive truck
player I major I
I retarded with Jordan
I
inmid- I bankin people
west I NYC
p
l
Kirk Nyla : Adam,Jr.
Sheena
L
-...J
L- - - - Attends Penn State
L__
ael
oy
r0----------------------
Kashina
I LARRY I DANA Jim
(dec.) (deceased) (41) Bus
*
Worked in a
garage
Public driver
*
Owned a
candy I assis-
I
store at one time tance I
(Unkn) Drug problem
Trile
/,
0I0/I
0
(Unkn)
Brian Pete Lima Matt Dean Juan KYESHA Irene Louise Jimona Jimmy
(38) (21) Public
'
(28) (24) Marvin *Cook (22) (n) (Infant) (6) (3)
i
Drug
assis- I Was in Postal
(3os)
in Crew-
dealer tance the worker
*
Drug same
trainer
military
dealer restau-
r
in fast
rant as I food
B" O O
Kyesha
o
restau-
rant
(Unkn) Janine Mark Dora
Doris!
Diana Jeanie Kendra Alfred Sandra
(4) (36) (31) (31)
I
(31) (27) (22) (19) (13)
Hasan Wasin
?
Has 1
Hs Has 3
l
Has 1 Does Housing Drug
?
Foster child
office the
son kids
i daughter hair cop dealer since 9/94
job
in
military Postal
*
Public
*
Works Attends
?
Now in
Anthony
NYC worker assis- at World John Jay work
(2)
tance I Trade Law release
I
L---- I-
Center School program L- - - -
?Married
upstate
to an
accountant
Figure
1.
Kyesha's family tree, 1995.
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 767
KEY:
Married
couple
Divorced couple
Consensual
couple
-
Formerly
consensual
couple
?
Either consensual or married
(not sure)
r Household unit
0
0
Kathy Sonny Courtney
(lives
in
(dec.)
Preacher
Virginia)
-
Was in the
military
Frankie
I Left money to Evie
and
Sonny, Jr.
roble
Sonny, Jr.
r
-
f------------------r------------------
9II
I
=A
I-
= A A
Mary Andy
Caras
Darryl1
Beth Jordan Ray I
Nell Jack iMartin Jill Bill
(43)
-Veteran
(40) (35)
Truck I
(38)
Truckde Drug (34)
Con-
Emmett *Medical
*
Cor- driver No
job
driver dealer
*
Braids tractoA
-Drug secretary rections
hair
problem officer
I I I I I I
g
--------
-------I
I I I I I
Alex Diane I
Reggie
Tina Walter Nina Terrence Nat
Jackie Jeremy
Melvia Anna
(25) (25) (26) Public I In (21) (dec.)
*
Cleans Works
Drug assis- college
*Public
trains for I dealer tance i
Plays assis-
for music Is
i
foot- tance I
LIRR distrib- I ball
utor
II L -- -- -- - - ----- L-----------------.4 L -- -- -- ----------J
I I
!,I
I I
II
II
II I
II I I
L.--------J L -------- J JL-----------
768 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 3
*
SEPTEMBER 2001
adults are indeed
working,
often in the
mostly unregulated
economy
of small-scale services and
self-employment,
in-
cluding
home-based
seamstresses,
food
vendors,
gypsy
cab
drivers,
and
carpenters.3 Most
of this income never
sees the tax man.
This
underground
world has been described
primarily
as
the
province
of
drug
dealers and other assorted
shady
char-
acters
(Bourgois 1996).
Yet for thousands of
poor people
in New York who cannot afford a unionized
plumber
or
electrician,
unlicensed
craftspeople
and informal service
workers
(who provide
child care or
personal services)
are
more
important exemplars
of the shadow
economy.
Men
like
Rey
and his father
provide reasonably priced
services
and
products, making
it
possible
for
people
who would
otherwise have to do without to
get
their cars
fixed,
their
leaking
roofs
patched,
or their children looked after. Immi-
grants
who lack
legal papers
find
employment
in this
shadow
world,
and those who are
legal
take second
jobs
in
the
underground economy.
Whether we look at
employment
or
"family structure,"
the Linaro household
departs
from the normative model of
the nuclear
family.
The statistical observer or census taker
might lump
this
family together
with other families that
have dissolved or have been out of the labor force for
many
years,
but
anyone
who is
paying
closer attention will see
that this makes no sense.
Kinship
means
everything
to the
Linaros. Their values
place
work and
family
at the center
of their own culture in a form that would be embraced even
by
conservative forces in American
society.
Men are at
least as committed to these norms as women in this Latino
family.
Yet it is also the case that the
long-term
fortunes of
Magdalena depend
on the welfare
system
as a
way
of fund-
ing
her education. Now that
recipients
are
required
to work
rather than
go
to
school,
and tuition is
rising sharply,
she
may
have no choice but to abandon Plan A.
Rey's
mom
may
not face the
hardship
that will
probably
land on
Kyesha's
household in the wake of welfare reform because
there are no
longer very young
children in the Linaro home
and because there are more earners to whom
responsibility
could be
spread
when
public
assistance terminates. How-
ever,
the
long-range
future
may
find the
family
closer to
working poverty
than to
working-class
status if the end of
welfare means the end of
higher
education for
Magdalena.
She
may
be faced with the
prospect
of
returning
to the low-
skilled
jobs
she is
trying
to leave behind.
Beyond that, the
increased need for
earnings (to replace
the lost
welfare)
will
obligate
her children to continue
contributing
to their
parents'
coffers in order to
keep
the whole
family
afloat.
As in so
many
other
immigrant families, the
requirements
of
daily
survival
may compel young people
who would
like to start households of their own or head off to
higher
education to
forego these
opportunities
in favor of the natal
family (Newman 1999). While these are
manageable
bur-
dens in the teens and
early twenties, they develop
into
sources of tension and frustration when
first-generation
Americans like
Rey
crest into their midtwenties
only
to dis-
cover that
they
cannot cut the
apron strings.
Enter Welfare Reform
How
likely
is it that
Kyesha's mother, Dana,
would be
able to find a
job given
her
profile:
a
long-time
welfare re-
cipient, high
school
dropout,
with no recent work
experi-
ence
(see
Newman and Lennon
1995)?
What are the
chances
Kyesha
could
replace
Dana's child care services
given
her low
wages?
What will
happen
to the Linaro fam-
ily
over the
long
run if
Magdalena
is unable to
push
be-
yond
the
low-wage
labor market? The
consequences
of
welfare reform differ
dramatically depending
on the an-
swers to these
questions,
answers that
vary considerably
based on labor market conditions and child care availabil-
ity,
which differ from one
poverty
area to another.
In New York
City,
the
picture
is not
encouraging.
Al-
though
the
city's economy
is
doing
much better than it was
ten
years ago,
it is fair to
say
that it has never
fully
recov-
ered from the recession of the
early
1990s.
Unemployment
remains
quite high:
a
city average
of 7
percent
as of 1999.
In this New York differs
dramatically
from communities
like Milwaukee or
Boston,
where labor markets have
tight-
ened
markedly.
Yet the
inner-city neighborhoods,
even of these boom-
towns,
still
sport high
levels of
unemployment,
even as
conditions around them have
improved. During
the
period
when these
ethnographic
data were
collected,
official un-
employment
in central Harlem
topped
18
percent, nearly
double the
citywide average,
a reflection of racial
segrega-
tion,
low levels of educational
attainment,
and the erosion
of the
job
base. In this Harlem reflects a
larger
national
problem:
74 central cities in the United States face contin-
ued
high
levels of
unemployment
and
persistent poverty,
even in an era of
general prosperity (U.S. Department
of
Housing
and Urban
Development 1999:5). Couple
these
conditions with the nationwide
collapse
in demand for
low-skilled
workers,
and we find that even minimum-
wage jobs
are
highly sought
after. The central Harlem la-
bor market was
showing
all the
signs
of
saturation,
long
before welfare reform was on the table. The ratio of
job
seekers to successful
job recipients
for fast food
employ-
ment in central Harlem was 14 to
1.4 Employers
could be
picky
under these circumstances, and the incumbents of
these
entry-level jobs reflected this
advantage. High
school
graduates
and older workers were favored over
high
school
dropouts like Dana.
Very young
workers (like Kyesha's
younger siblings)
were
losing
out to more
experienced
and
stable
applicants
in their midtwenties. Over one-half of this
minimum-wage
labor force was over 25
years of
age.
Wages were
dragged
down
by
this
oversupply. Kyesha
had worked for one fast food restaurant for five
years
and
was
only earning
25 cents above the minimum
wage
even
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 769
though
she was
regarded
as an
indispensable
worker. The
only pressure
to increase her income
developed
because of
the federal increase in the minimum
wage.
Absent
this,
neither
Kyesha
nor
any
of her friends in the fast food in-
dustry
would have seen an
improvement
in their
earnings.
There are
simply
too
many people standing
outside the
door, ready
to take her
place,
and too few better
places
willing
to take a chance on her.
Ironically,
the
very
same
job
on
Long
Island was
paying
$3
per
hour more than
Kyesha
earned.' In an all-too-famil-
iar
pattern
of
mismatch, job growth
has been dramatic in
the suburban communities
surrounding
New York.
Tight
labor markets in
Connecticut,
New
Jersey, Long Island,
and Westchester
County
have sent
employers scrambling
to find workers. Innovative
busing programs
are
bringing
workers from
inner-city
Hartford into Connecticut sub-
urbs. Westchester businesses are
recruiting
from southern
Connecticut towns.
Yet it is unclear how much of this
good
news is
chang-
ing
the labor market conditions in
Harlem,
the South
Bronx,
or
Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Richard Freeman's
(1999)
work
points
out that in
neighborhoods
with
high poverty
rates where
unemployment
has been low in the last four
years,
labor market conditions for minorities are
improv-
ing.
The trends are beneficial
particularly
for
young
black
men who are
traditionally
the hardest hit
by
lack of
job op-
portunities
and low levels of skill.
Yet,
as Freeman
shows,
workers from these
neighborhoods
are still at the bottom of
the
queue
and
minority unemployment
remains more than
double the rate for whites.
Employers
look on
immigrants
with
greater
favor than native-born
minorities, especially
African Americans
(Newman 1999:234).
Despite
these
troubling conditions,
New York has seen a
dramatic
drop
in the welfare rolls.
Figure
2 shows that be-
tween 1995 and
1998,
the
population
on AFDC
dropped
from
approximately
1.2 million to
810,000 (more
than
one-half of whom are
children).
Even before the
imposi-
tion of time
limits,
bureaucratic hurdles to access AFDC
were increased.6 Workfare became the order of the
day,
with
recipients
forced to work in menial
jobs
lest
they
lose
their benefits. These forces
(combined,
to be
sure,
with in-
creasing employment opportunities
for the more
skilled)
pushed
the welfare rolls down.
If those decreases reflected
improving
life chances for
recipients leaving
the rolls, that would be
genuine
cause for
celebration. However, the evidence on
post-welfare
em-
ployment
is mixed. Nationwide, it
appears
that a
high pro-
portion
of former welfare
recipients
has found work: be-
tween 61 and 71
percent according
to a recent General
Accounting
Office
survey (Havemann 1999). However, in
depressed neighborhoods,
the situation
may
be more
prob-
lematic.
Among
the adults who came off the welfare rolls
in New York
City
between
July
1996 and March 1997,
only
29
percent
found full-time or
part-time jobs (defined
as
earning
$100 or more within three months of
leaving
the
rolls) (Hernandez 1998).'
The difference
suggests,
as we
might imagine,
that the
prospects
for welfare
recipients
liv-
ing
in
large
urban
ghettos
are less favorable than
they
might
be for those in smaller
towns, suburbs,
or rural areas.
For
people
like
Dana, however,
the news is not
comforting.
She is not in a
very competitive position
to find work.
Should she be fortunate
enough
to land
something,
it is not
likely
to
pay enough
to make
up
for the increased costs she
would incur in
going
to work
(child care, transportation,
clothing, etc.).8
It is
quite likely, given
these
conditions,
that it will take
many years
of sustained
tight
labor markets
(including
se-
vere restrictions on low-skilled
immigration)
before the
employment picture
for
people
like Dana will
improve.
She is much more
likely
to be
among
the two-thirds of the
city's
former AFDC
recipients
who do not find work at all.
Yet,
even if Dana
escapes
this
unhappy
fate and finds
work,
her situation is
likely
to have
important
conse-
quences
for the
people
in her
family who,
at
present,
de-
pend
on her to be home.
For the Linaro
family,
these
figures
will have a
slightly
different
meaning. Magdalena
has had more education and
work
experience
than
Dana,
and she does not have
very
young
children to
support.
There is no one in
Magdalena's
immediate kin network who
depends
on her child care
services,
no one who will be knocked out of the labor mar-
ket if she cannot
help
out.
However,
the
consequence
of in-
creasing unemployment
in Harlem that will almost
surely
come about as welfare
recipients
are
pushed
into a satu-
rated labor market is
likely
to be
depressed wages,
even for
those with some
experience.
If
Magdalena
has to
drop
out
of school to find
work,
she will face a saturated market
with
sluggish wages.
Should her
neighborhood
suffer a
capital outflow,
as welfare time limits drain resources from
households in
poor neighborhoods,
the off-the-books in-
come of her husband and son
may
suffer as well.
As this brief account
suggests,
local conditions make a
great
deal of difference in
understanding
the
pathways
through
which time-limited welfare
might impact
the
daily
lives of
recipients.
If Dana and
Magdalena
lived in Mil-
waukee or
Boston,
where
tight
labor markets of historic
proportions
are
boosting employment
and
wages,
even for
low-skilled workers,
they
would
undoubtedly
face
very
different futures than those
likely
to unfold in Harlem.
What the Future Holds
This account of welfare reform and its
consequences
is
necessarily speculative.
As of the end of our fieldwork
pe-
riod (in 1997) both Dana and
Magdalena
had
yet
to feel the
full brunt of welfare reform. Moreover, the
personal
and
network-based resources of
poor
families will stretch for
varying lengths
of time even
though TANF
is the
rule
of the
770 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
*
VOL.
103, No. 3
*
SEPTEMBER 2001
1.2
1
ics
?
0.6-
"
0.4-
0.2
0
1938 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Year
Figure
2.
Declining
welfare caseloads in New York
City.
Sources: Human Resources
Administration, New York
City;
Finder 1998:
Al;
Lombardi 1999:8.
day. Hence, any fully developed ethnographic understanding
of its
meaning
must await the
passage
of time. Yet it would
be worthwhile to consider what issues
qualitative
researchers
should be
paying
close attention to over the next few
years
as we seek to make sense of this shift in the
policy
context.
From a substantive
perspective,
there are at least two
domains that warrant
ethnographic
attention.
First,
there
are
questions
we
might loosely
label "social structural":
How has welfare reform affected the internal
dynamics
of
households and families as
they
confront economic
change?
A second substantive
domain,
and one for which anthro-
pology
has become better known since it took a
"symbolic
turn,"
raises
questions
of
meaning,
of the
ways
that ordi-
nary people
make sense out of their lives.
The
Ecology
of Structural
Adjustment
The
interdependencies in households like
Kyesha's
are
brittle. The whole
"system"
works when all the
pieces
are
in
place: Kyesha's wages
are central to the survival of the
family,
her mother's AFDC and subsidized
housing
make
it
possible
for the
three-generation family
to have a roof
over its head
despite very
low
income,
and Dana's "free"
labor makes it
possible
for
Kyesha
to remain in the labor
force while her son
(and
Dana's own
preschool-aged
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 771
children)
are cared for. What will
happen
to this household
if and when Dana re-enters the labor market?
It is
unlikely
that Dana will find work that
pays
above
the minimum
wage.
Like the
majority
of
long-term recipi-
ents,
she has few skills and even fewer credentials
(New-
man and Lennon
1995;
Pavetti
1999). Moreover, given
the
saturated labor market in her
area,
Dana will be in
compe-
tition with
people
who have more education and recent
work
experience.
The literature we have on the
long-term
prospects
of
poorly
educated welfare
recipients suggests
that her
wages
will not
improve measurably
with time or
work
experience (Connolly
and
Gottschalk n.d.;
Pavetti
and Acs
1996).
The
consequences
of
prolonged unemployment
with no
real
safety
net would be
quite catastrophic
for Dana and
her household.
They
would be forced to
leverage
resources
from
ancillary
members of the household or
family
and
friends who have
yet
to show an
abiding
interest in their
economic
well-being.
Yet the outcomes for her household
if she did find work are not that much more
appetizing.
Im-
mediately,
Dana would face child care dilemmas for her
own children.
Moreover, Kyesha,
now
securely
ensconced
in a
job
she
values, might
have to
quit
in favor of a stint on
TANF if she cannot find affordable child
care,
a commod-
ity
in short
supply
in New York
City. Indeed,
recent re-
ports
from the
city's
Human Resources
Department
show
that there is a
shortage
of
nearly 30,000
child care slots for
children of welfare mothers who are
required
to enroll in
workfare
programs (Swarns 1998).
The
city
has a
powerful
incentive to
respond
to this
crisis;
it has no
particular
in-
centive to
step up
efforts to create child care for someone
like
Kyesha,
who will be
struggling
to
stay
in the labor
market.
Given these
constraints, Kyesha
would most
likely
at-
tempt
to
patch together
an
arrangement
for her son-but
probably
one that is less reliable and
steady
than the child
care Dana has been able to
provide. Undependable
child
care would have ramifications for
Kyesha'
s own
reliability
on the
job.
She has had a track record as a reliable
worker,
but if that were to
change,
her own
job security
and future
mobility
would be in
question.
The tale of Dana and
Kyesha
illustrates the need to de-
velop
a research
agenda
that focuses not on individuals but
on the
ecological
relations between them, on the
dynamics
of households, kin
groups,
and transnational networks of
friends and
family,
in order to understand how the
policy
changes
aimed at one
part
of this
system may unhinge (or
possibly boost) the
prospects
of the others. This in turn re-
quires
a data collection
strategy
that
emphasizes (at a mini-
mum) household
groups
and the
exchange networks in
which
they
are embedded. Other social sciences are un-
likely to
approach welfare reform this
way, particularly
when the fate of individuals in the labor market is the
pri-
mary policy
focus.
An
anthropological approach
should lead to a better un-
derstanding
of the
carrying capacity
of social networks. In
ecological analyses,
the term refers to the limits of
popula-
tion
density
that can be sustained in an
ecosystem. Exceed-
ing
these limits
usually implies
sustained
damage.
What is
the
carrying capacity
of a social network? How do we
measure the
buffering capabilities
of an extended
kinship
system,
the
ability
of the social
system
to absorb or
protect
its
economically
vulnerable members? The mere existence
of a resource does not
guarantee
its
availability
to those
who
might
be in need. Research on class relations in inner-
city
communities
(Anderson 1990; Newman
1995, 1999)
suggests
that a social
gap
can
open up
between the success
stories and the "failures" in extended families with
many
poor
members. Families that have been on welfare for a
long
time are often defined as losers
by
their more success-
ful kin, a stain on the
family
honor.
Moreover, successful
families often move out of the
ghetto
and are
geographi-
cally separated
from their
poor
relatives. This
may
mean
that their social contact over the
years
is more limited than
the
kinship
tie
might suggest.
This does not mean that more affluent
family
members
refuse all
responsibility
for the
well-being
of their
strug-
gling
kin. While some
may
turn a blind
eye
on moral
grounds
or a sense of social
superiority,
others
open
the
gates.
Most
part
the door a
bit, only
to discover time and
again
that the demands on their resources are relentless. If
they
offered
help
to
everyone among
their kin who needs
it, they
would
quickly
be overwhelmed.9
Kyesha's family
is a case in
point. Evie, Kyesha's
grandmother,
has a stable
job
with the
post
office and until
relatively recently
owned a three-bedroom house in a
seg-
regated,
African American suburb of
Long
Island. Most of
Evie's children are
doing well,
and few are on AFDC.
Still,
several of her
children,
grandchildren, nieces,
and
nephews
have fallen on hard times:
they
have lost
jobs,
fallen out
with
spouses,
or
developed drug problems.
For a number
of
years,
Evie took them
in,
one
by one,
and sheltered them
so that
they
could
regain
their balance. The burden was
overwhelming.
After
all,
while Evie has a
good job by
her
family's standards,
she is not a
wealthy
woman. She
finally
gave up
her
house,
sold it off to one of her more successful
daughters,
and moved into a small
apartment,
for the ex-
press purpose
of
being
able to
"say
no" when
everyone
in
trouble came
calling
for her
help.
Even so, Evie has one of
her
grown daughters
and her children
living
with her.
From one
perspective, then, a
"carrying
capacity" ap-
proach would tell us that there are resources to which
Kyesha and Dana could turn if welfare reform destabilized
their household and
pushed
them
deeper into
poverty.
What an
ethnographic approach adds, however, are the nu-
ances and details that
help
us understand when a
potential
resource becomes actual and when it remains out of reach.
The mobilization of ties-the
relationship between who
772 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
*
VOL. 103, No. 3 * SEPTEMBER 2001
you
know
and who
you
can count on-is a
topic
that other
social sciences are
likely
to
neglect,
but it is
ripe
for anthro-
pological
examination.
Mobilization of
bureaucratically
controlled resources
will also be critical to
understanding
the successes and fail-
ures of families
moving
off AFDC.
Gaining
access to new
programs
that
provide
medical insurance for children in
poor
households, job training
for
adults,
and subsidized
child care for new entrants to the labor market
require
in-
itiative and
energy.
We
already
know that millions fewer
families enroll in children's health insurance
programs
than those that
qualify.
What we do not know much about
are the sources of
skepticism,
resistance,
or bureaucratic
barriers
that are
producing
this low
"take-up
rate."
Quality
control is a serious
problem among
low-cost
day
care
providers. Working poor
mothers
worry
that their children
are at risk in the
only places
where
they
can afford to leave
them
(Heymann
and Earle
1997),
a fear that influences la-
bor market
participation.
We do not know whether the
threshold of reluctance
changes depending
on the richness
of
private supports: grandmothers
like
Dana, teenaged
children who can be
pressed
into
taking
care of their
young
siblings.
The
relationship
between
public
or
private pro-
grams
and kin-based
support
structures needs to be exam-
ined from
every possible angle.
Stalled Adulthood
In most middle-class
families, young
women and men
like
Kyesha
or
Rey
would be
looking
forward to an inde-
pendent
adulthood in short order. A
working girl
with five
years
of
experience
under her belt should be
positioned
to
make the transition out of her mother's households in the
near future. A resourceful
young
man who has skills in
everything
from electrical
wiring,
to
carpentry,
to fast food
would also look forward to his
independence.
In a better
economy,
one that
paid
a
living wage
to someone like
Kyesha,
this is
probably
what would
transpire.
Yet,
be-
tween the
wage depression
that has afflicted the low-
skilled labor market and the forces of welfare
reform,
which cannot
help
but
intensify
the downward
wage
trends
in
inner-city
communities
(Bernstein 1997),
millions of
young
adults are
likely
to find that
they
cannot
"graduate"
to adult status. In
1998,
approximately
11
percent
of the
nation's adult children 25-34
years
of
age
lived with a
par-
ent.
Among
the Harlem workers and
job
seekers we stud-
ied in the same
age group,
over 30
percent
were
living
at
home.
Kyesha
can
only
dream of the
day
she will have her
own
apartment
and full control over her own life. Even if
she did not have a
young
child whom she must
struggle
to
support,
her
meager earnings
would make it hard to move
out of Dana's house and move
along
the
pathway
that leads
to
full-fledged
adulthood in this
society.
It
might
be
argued
that it has
always
been hard for low-
wage
workers to
graduate
to adult
independence.
In earlier
generations,
the
problem might
have been solved
by early
marriage. Kyesha's
bond to her natal household is
only
partly
a function of limited economic
opportunity.
It re-
flects as well
changing
norms
regarding marriage
that
make it less
likely, among
whites and
blacks,
that low-
wage
workers will
pool
their resources and make a
go
of it
on their own. The burdens
may
be
particularly high
in ex-
pensive
cities like New
York,
where the costs of inde-
pendence
are
especially daunting.
With a combined
pretax
income of $9 an
hour,
Kyesha
and her
baby's
father would
not have been able to afford an
independent
household
even in Harlem."'
The tether that
keeps Kyesha by
her mother's side and
Rey
in his
family
home is
only partly tightened by
the low
wages they
earn.
Equally important
is the need their fami-
lies have for their
earnings.
The
experience
of
working
poor youths today
echoes much of what we know about the
1930s. It was often
young
adults, women,
and
young
chil-
dren who could find work in the
depression-adult
males
were often the first let
go
and the last to be rehired when
the
economy began
to revive. Pressures built
up
in these
households to
garnish
the
wages
of all the earners
present
and
prevent any
of them from
leaving
the
family
fold.
Carol Stack's All Our Kin
(1974) reports
a similar
phe-
nomenon in a
poor
black
community
of the Midwest some
30
years ago:
much as
marriage
was valued in
general,
partners
were often torn
by
the insistent demands of their
natal kin for their
earnings.
A mother who wanted a son's
income to remain "in house" would circulate
gossip
about
his intended
bride, hoping
to undermine the
marriage pros-
pect.
If the end of AFDC means
sharp
declines in house-
hold
incomes,
we
might
forecast
increasing pressure
to
hold
young
adults at home and
prevent
them from
forming
independent
households.
What will this mean for
Kyesha
or
Rey?
If
they
never
have the chance to be on their
own,
set their own
rules, par-
ent their children without
grandmotherly
interference,
in
short do all the
things
"normal" adults do as a matter of
course,
how will this affect their
psychological well-being?
If such a situation
produces
increased conflict within
Dana's
household,
what will this mean for
Kyesha'
s son as
he
grows up?
Developmental psychologists
should have a lot to
say
about these
dynamics. Anthropology
can add to our under-
standing by focusing
on the cultural
process
of recalibra-
tion that
periodically
redraws the boundaries of adoles-
cence. In the more affluent
period
of the 1970s, the social
acceptability
of
remaining
a
"dependent" beyond
the
age
of 20 was far less than it
may
be now that economic
oppor-
tunities have constricted for
youth (Newman 1993). When
cultural
change
of this kind is in the
offing, however, it is
far from a seamless
process. Kyesha
is
chafing
at the limi-
tations of her situation because her own
generational
culture
leads her to
expect
that
by
this
age
she should be free of
them. We
may, however, be
observing
a new
developmental
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 773
pattern
of
very prolonged
adolescence that
Kyesha's gen-
eration
may
be forced to contend with. We would do well
to
explore
this issue
through age-stratified
interview sam-
ples
that would
help
to establish
expectations,
economic
realities,
and the conflict between them
(Newman 1993).
Going West, Going
Home
Kyesha
and her extended
family
are descendants of the
Great
Migration
that
brought
millions
of
African
Ameri-
cans out of the rural South to the
industrializing
North.
Kyesha
and her
family
are now rooted in the
city
and show
no
signs
of
looking
elsewhere for
opportunities.
Indeed,
given
the elaborate
support
structure that
underpins
Kyesha's life,
she is not even in a
position
to move to her
own
apartment
in
Harlem,
much less to another
part
of the
country.
Economists tell us that labor market
opportunity
stimulates
migration
as workers seek their
greatest
advan-
tage.
Yet
ethnography
tells us that there are
multiple
"brakes"
slowing
the outflow of
poor
families,
even when
they
know
opportunities
are
opening up
in other states. We
know that
single
adults are most
responsive
to these
oppor-
tunities,
for
they
are least burdened
by
the demands of fam-
ily
needs. But the internal
migration patterns
of
poor
fami-
lies are less well
understood-yet they
are critical to a full
explication
of welfare reform's
consequences.
Carmen,
a Dominican fast food worker who
participated
in our fieldwork in
1993-94,
lived in
Washington Heights,
a Dominican enclave on the
northernmost
tip
of Manhat-
tan.
Born
and raised in the Dominican
Republic,
Carmen
came to New York when she was a
teenager
and finished
high
school
there,
all the while
working
for minimum
wage.
She is
part
of a
large
extended
family, comprising
some seven or
eight
households in
all,
that lived in a
single
apartment building
in the
neighborhood.
All had arrived in
a chain
migration
fashion
and,
working
as an extended
unit,
had fostered one another into
jobs
while
spreading
re-
sponsibility
for child care and basic
expenses (food
and
rent) among
the 30-40
people
who constitute this
family
network.
By 1998, very
few of Carmen's clan were still in Wash-
ington Heights.
A
year before,
one of her aunts left New
York for Grand
Rapids, Michigan,
where factories have
been
reviving
at a
rapid pace.
The aunt called her sisters
and brothers
weekly
once she arrived to tell them about the
$17-per-hour jobs
that were
going begging. Slowly
but
surely, virtually
all of them
decamped,
children in tow, for
the Midwest. The network has now almost
entirely
recon-
stituted itself in
Michigan,
where
family
members earn a
king's
ransom
by
Dominican standards.
What makes the differences between Carmen's
family
and
Kyesha's? Why
do some
poor
families
pull up
stakes
and head for the
gold country,
while others remain to face a
saturated labor market and limited
prospects
for the future?
Is it
just
a matter of information?
(Kyesha
knew
nothing
about the Midwest auto factories and their
hiring prac-
tices.)
What role does the
availability
of an extensive
sup-
port
network
play?
One
might
hazard a
guess
that the
wages
Carmen's aunt secured were
high enough
for her to
take the risk that she
might
have to survive without the
help
of her
large family
and that
only
a
gap
of this
magnitude
would
spur
such a
migratory pattern.
Part of the answer
must lie
along
these economic lines. Yet
ethnographic
work would
probably provide
a different set of
hypotheses
ranging
from fear of
moving away
from an elaborate
sup-
port
network to racial differences that
might
make an Afri-
can American like
Kyesha
hesitate to move out of
Harlem,
while a Dominican like Carmen's aunt
might
feel more
comfortable.
Time limits will thrust to the fore
questions
about the ca-
pacity
of the
low-wage
labor market to absorb a
large
number of unskilled
job
seekers
lacking
recent work
expe-
rience. Central Harlem is not a
good place
to look for work
because it cannot absorb the
large
number of
job
seekers
who were
pounding
the
pavement
before welfare reform.
Clearly, anything
that would facilitate the
capacity
of
poor
workers to move to
job-rich
or
wage-rich
areas would
make a
big
difference.
Ethnographic
work could
help pol-
icy
makers understand better what the
barriers
to
moving
might
be. What role does information
play?
How
big
a
wage
differential is needed before families can afford to
risk the loss of
support
networks? Is the
problem wage
rates,
job stability,
or both? How
deep
are the cultural at-
tachments to
inner-city neighborhoods
where the
job
mar-
ket is the worst?
Remittances sent
by family
members from the United
States to
family
members in their countries of
origin
amounted to some $70 billion earlier in this decade. While
much,
if not
most,
of this
money
is
earned
through
hard la-
bor, presumably
the welfare
system played
some role. If
welfare reform cuts the income in households that used to
send
money abroad,
how will this
impact migration
flows?
What will the
consequences
of a
sharp drop
in income be
for the economic
viability
of households in the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Cuba,
and a host of other coun-
tries that
depend
on remittances? For
Carmen,
who went
on welfare for a short time to access health benefits
during
a
problematic pregnancy,
the loss of these resources would
have had an immediate
impact
on her extended
family:
the
remittances she sends
every
week to her mother in the Do-
minican
Republic
would have dried
up.
Families with overseas ties that find themselves in dire
straits in cities like New York
may
send their children
"home" to be raised. We know this
happens
even now
among parents
who cannot afford to live in safe
neighbor-
hoods and those who are
suspicious
of American culture
and want their kids raised in more traditional
settings
(Stack 1996; Waters 2001). Welfare reform
may
cause an
increase in
migratory
children.
Ethnographers working
774 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL. 103, No. 3
*
SEPTEMBER 2001
with
immigrant populations
need to bear these
possibilities
in mind if we are to understand how welfare reform inter-
sects
migration.
The Fate
of
Men
While welfare reform
obviously targeted mainly
moth-
ers,
men were the
subject
of the child
support
enforcement
provisions.
These efforts to enforce fiscal
responsibility
have
caught
the attention of
many governors
who see de-
linquent
fathers as a revenue source that can stem the out-
flow of tax dollars for
dependent
children. Yet we know
that there is a real limit to what we can
expect (extract?)
from
poor fathers,
who are most often the absent
parents
of
children in
poverty-level single-parent
families
(Garfinkle
et al.
1998;
Johnson et al.
1999).
What, then, might
we
expect
to see
happen
to
men,
if
anything,
as a
consequence
of welfare reform?
Men-es-
pecially young
black men-have
borne
a
special
burden as
a result of
declining
demand for low-skilled workers
(Os-
terman
1980). They
tend to have less education than
women; employers
take a dim view of them as
potential
workers
(Wilson 1997). My
fieldwork
suggests
that even
in the
underground economy,
the
legal
means of
earning
a
living
tend to be
predominantly
in the hands of women
(hair braiding, baby-sitting, etc.)
while unskilled men are
often deeded over to the
high-risk illegal occupations
(principally
the
drug
trade
[Bourgois 1996])."
The wide
divergence
of outcomes
among siblings points
to the diffi-
culties men face:
Among Kyesha's siblings
and
step
sibs,
a
few men have made it into the
military.
Most have ended
up
on the
wrong
side of the law
and, partly
as a
result,
are
estranged
from their natal
family.
Her
sisters,
on the other
hand,
have
largely
found
employment
in the formal econ-
omy
or are
doing typical
under-the-counter women's
work.
As William Hawkeswood's
(1997) ethnographic
work
shows,
black
gay
men often do
step
into the
gap
and work
hard to
help
their sisters and aunts take care of children.
They
are often a
mainstay
in Harlem households.
Straight
men like
Rey
and his
father-steady
earners in both the
above- and
below-ground economy-are
also central
sup-
ports
in
working poor
families. But
among
those men who
cannot
provide
a
steady
contribution to the collective
pot
(legal
or
illegal),
we will no doubt find
many
who are re-
jected outright by
the
"sharing
networks" that
poor
fami-
lies
depend
on for
day-to-day
survival (Edin n.d.; Newman
1999). With welfare out of the
picture,
it
may
become too
costly
to maintain a
dependent
male
population.
What will
they
do instead? Very little of the current re-
search on welfare reform is
focusing
on men, with the ex-
ception
of
projects looking
to understand the
employment
behavior of noncustodial fathers (who, by definition, are
not in the
target households). There are other
important
questions
to be asked about
poor
men and the households
in which
they
live. What is
happening
to the older
sons,
brothers,
and
unemployed
or
underemployed
fathers in
families that once received welfare? In cities with
tight
la-
bor
markets,
there is evidence to show that
they
are
being
absorbed into the labor market at levels not seen for 30
years (Freeman 1999), though unemployment
continues to
be far
higher
for black men than for whites or Latinos at all
levels of educational attainment.
Among
those who find
work,
we
may
see
greater
resolve to stick with it if the
safety
net below them and their children wears too thin.
Men
(and women) may
dedicate themselves to
building up
more human
capital. (Indeed,
we
already
see
increasing
rates of
high
school
graduation
in cities like New
York.)
It
is also
possible, gender
norms
notwithstanding,
that we
will find more men involved in child care-either of their
own children or of the kids in their extended families-as
women are
pressed
into the labor market. There is some
evidence for an
increasing
trend toward male involvement
in child
rearing among
middle-class families
(Barnett
1996;
Lewin
1998).
Most of
all,
we need to
pay
attention to
increasing
ten-
sion between the financial needs of common-law
partners
and those of the natal families from which noncustodial fa-
thers come. Juan and
Kyesha
are a case in
point.
On the
strength
of his
minimum-wage job,
Juan has been able to
make
fairly consistent,
albeit
very limited,
contributions to
the
support
of their son. He also contributes to the
support
of his own mother's household. What will
happen
when
his mother hits her time limits and
Kyesha's
mother does
the same? Juan will be torn even more than he was before
between the increased need of his
(own)
mother's house-
hold and that of his child's.
Welfare Reform and the Culture of Poor Communities
If financial burdens were the motive force behind
policy
change,
welfare reform would
surely
have been low on the
list of
priorities.
Less than 5
percent
of total
government
expenditures
went to the
poor
with
cash, food,
and
housing
assistance rolled
together,
with the bulk of this
expenditure
lodged
in
Supplemental Security
Income and
housing,
rather than TANF
(Congressional Budget
Office
2000).
Middle-class entitlements like Social
Security
and Medi-
care are a far more serious source of
budget
strain. But this
is
clearly
not what was
driving
the welfare reform debate.
In an era when millions of middle- and
working-class
mothers of
young
children have
joined
the labor force, it
has become
politically
awkward to
provide
state
support
so
that the
nonworking poor
can
stay
at home. This, plus
the
ever
present
American distaste for
public support
of the
"undeserving poor," provided
the
political
muscle behind
reform. The convictions of liberal reformers that the wel-
fare
system
had broken down into an
eligibility
and check-
writing operation
and needed to be resurrected as a
job-
training
and
placement operation
added to the mix. As
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 775
David
Ellwood (1996)
has
explained,
liberal reformers
were
caught
in the
oncoming headlights
of a conservative
Congress
in
1994,
which
stripped
most of the
training
and
public
service
employment
carrots while
preserving
the
stick of time limits.
At the end of the
day,
the
message
that
emerged
was one
that
emphasized
the traditional American
preoccupation
with work as a moral
obligation.
The cultural
question
we
need to answer now is how that
message
was received.
What did the
poor
families
on welfare understand
by
this
new
regime?
And how does their
interpretation
of the
pol-
icy
mission
change
their
behavior,
if at all?
Do
they accept
the conservative view that "we" are
try-
ing
to
"help
them
get
out of
poverty"?
Do
they
embrace the
liberal view that we are
"making
war on the
poor"?
Is wel-
fare
sufficiently stigmatized
for
recipients
to want to do al-
most
anything
to
get
off of it
anyway?
Or does that
stigma
lack the bite it once
had, appeal only
to a
few,
or make no
difference because the labor market does not offer a mean-
ingful
alternative? Mark Rank's
(1995) study
of welfare
offices and
recipients suggests
that welfare
recipients
al-
ready
detest the whole
enterprise
and
prefer
to work. A
goodly
number of them suffer
physical
disabilities that
make work
difficult,
have children with chronic illnesses
that
require
attention,
or face
wages
that are too low to
make a
go
of it. But his research was conducted in the con-
text of an AFDC
system
that is no
longer
with us. We need
to
go
back to this
drawing
board to see whether the
per-
sonal calculus has
changed.
Our Harlem fieldwork
suggests
a
significant penetration
of social science models and
concepts
into the
ordinary
vo-
cabulary
and "folk
analysis" poor people
offer in conversa-
tion about their own lives. Ideas about role
models,
about
deprivation
and its
consequences,
and about values are all
common
parlance
on 125th Street now. This
language
is
often invoked
by
the
poor
to
explain
the twists of fate that
have
brought
them to where
they
are.
Ethnographic
work
to date
suggests
that welfare
recipients
share with the rest
of the
country
a cultural orientation that
emphasizes
the
dignity
of work and the
"flip
side" of the Protestant
ethic,
the
denigration
of the
"dependent" (de
Parle
1999;
Edin
and Lein
1997;
Rank
1995). Certainly
their close
cousins,
the
already working poor,
have
bought
into a
highly
con-
demnatory language
of blame that focuses on the moral
weakness of welfare
recipients (including
members of
their own families) (Newman 1999). Whether these orien-
tations
persist
in the face of welfare reform-which termi-
nates benefits even when there are
dependent
children in
the balance or
parents
who are unable to find work-is an
open question.
There is
clearly
more to be discovered
about whether or to what extent the
message being
sent
by
the
government, by
the comfortable
citizenry,
is the mes-
sage being
received.
Marriage
and
Childbearing
Behavior
There is
very
little evidence to date to
suggest
that mar-
riage
or
childbearing
behavior shifts as a
consequence
of
policy changes.
David Ellwood's
(1988:60-61) influential
book,
Poor
Support,
showed
long ago
that AFDC had no
influence
on the
growth
of
single-parent
families
and that
the
highest percentages
of children
in
female-headed fami-
lies were in the states with the lowest benefits. He
argued
quite convincingly
then that
changes
in
family
structure
were
largely
unrelated to the social
policies
that underlie
welfare. The
ethnographic
evidence
supports
his
perspec-
tive. From Eli Anderson's
(1990)
work on
"baby clubs,""2
to Bell
Kaplan's (1997)
work on
teenaged
mothers,13
to
Stack's
(1974) findings
on
childbearing,14
there is a moun-
tain of evidence
pointing away
from economic incentives
and toward emotional satisfaction as an
explanation
for
out-of-wedlock birth.
While all of this work refutes the notion that welfare
plays
much of a role in the motivations for
having
a
child,
it must be said that this research was all done under one set
of economic conditions: welfare enabled
young,
unskilled
mothers a
way
to
manage (albeit
at a
very meager level).
Noncustodial fathers were
virtually
absent from the
policy
landscape,
save efforts to increase child
support (which
is
unlikely
to have an enormous
impact
on men who are al-
ready poor). Nonetheless,
while welfare was not a motive
force,
it would be fair to
say
it was
certainly
an
important
contextual feature that made it
feasible, though
not com-
fortable,
to
satisfy
the desire for
parenthood
without
facing
the worst
consequences
of homelessness and total
depriva-
tion.
Will the
converse,
the end of
welfare,
create disincen-
tives that are
powerful enough
to dissuade
single
women
from
becoming pregnant (especially
if their own mothers
have to work as well and are therefore not available for
child
care)? Perhaps
no
single goal
was more
powerful
among
conservative welfare reformers than this. Were
they
correct in
assuming
that the incentives could be
shifted so
sharply
that a
major change
in
childbearing
be-
havior would follow? We do not know.
Recognizing
that
welfare is not a carrot that induces out-of-wedlock birth
does not tell us what
happens
when the "sticks" are this
significant.
Past evidence does not lead one to
imagine
that
the differences will be
profound,
but it is
possible
that the
negative
incentives were not
powerful enough
to
yield
that
outcome.
Conclusion
There is
clearly
much to be learned about the intersec-
tion of welfare reform and the
daily
lives of both those who
are the direct
targets
of
policy
intervention and those who
are
bystanders.
As the case studies of
Kyesha's
and
Rey's
extended families
suggest,
welfare
recipients,
the
working
776 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST * VOL.
103, No. 3
*
SEPTEMBER 2001
poor,
their more
advantaged kin,
and the
many
institutions
they participate
in-from schools to bureaucratic
agen-
cies-are
caught
in the
changing
tide. There is no reason to
expect
that the outcomes will be uniform. Some families
that have been hit
by
time limits will
prosper,
some will
fall
apart,
and the vast
majority
will
probably
trade a life of
poverty
on welfare for what
may
be a harder life of work-
ing poverty.
It would be
wrong
to
begin
with the
assumption
that
per-
sonal characteristics will
explain
who does well and who
does not. While not
discounting
the
impact
of
personal
his-
tory
and
experience, anthropological
wisdom teaches that
social structures will be at
least,
if not
more,
important.
We
must launch studies that will
help
to
explain why
outcomes
vary by
race and
ethnicity,
how states that have been
gen-
erous with child care and medical care differ from "mean"
states,
what
impact
labor market conditions have on the
prospects
of low-skilled
parents
to find and
keep work,
and
the
buffering
role of
multigenerational
and transnational
ties for families
undergoing
financial distress.
And all of this has to be studied over time. It will take a
year
or two
beyond
the time limits for the resources of
most families and their networks to run
aground.
We will
not know how
they
have
adapted
in
any
final
way
for some
time.
And,
of
course,
the
consequences
for children can
take
many years
to take their
toll, positive
or
negative.
What we do know for sure is that the
story
of welfare re-
form cannot end with the
recognition
that the rolls are
dropping dramatically.
Until we know what has become of
families like those described
here,
we will not understand
what the
consequences
of welfare reform have been.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Support
for this research was
gener-
ously provided by
the Russell
Sage, Rockefeller, Ford,
Spencer,
William T.
Grant, MacArthur,
and National Science
Foundations,
as well as the Foundation for Child
Develop-
ment. Comments from
Greg Duncan, Lindsay
Chase-
Lansdale,
and
Christopher
Jencks
greatly improved
this work.
1. The field research team worked on the
shop
floor of the
four restaurants for over four
months,
learning
the
jobs
and
observing
the workers who were
among
the "shadowees"
while at work.
Managers
and business owners entered the
fieldwork at close
range during
this
part
of the
project.
2. Studies have shown that
rapid
informalization has oc-
curred
in a number of New York
City industries,
including
construction
(where
an estimated 90
percent
of the internal
work is done without
permits)
and the
furniture, footwear,
and
garment
industries
(Portes
and Sassen-Koob
1986;
Sassen-
Koob
1988).
3. The severe local decline in the formal
manufacturing
sector has
spurred opportunities
for small-scale
immigrant
en-
trepreneurs, especially
in
low-wage apparel subcontracting
(see Waldinger 1986).
4. This is but a distal measure of labor market saturation.
To measure this more
accurately,
one would need to know the
total number of
job
seekers and the total number of
jobs they
were after.
Among
the 14
people applying
for
every
one of
these fast food
jobs,
most were
applying
for
multiple jobs,
and
their search
patterns ranged
well
beyond
Harlem's borders.
See Newman 1999 for more detail.
5. It is not clear that fast food workers
living
on
Long
Is-
land were therefore better off. There is no
public housing
in
these suburban communities, and
private
rents exceed those in
subsidized
city housing.
The
private housing
markets are
probably comparable; indeed, city rents,
even in
ghetto neigh-
borhoods, are
probably higher
than
many
suburban rentals.
6. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward
(1971) describe
this kind of bureaucratic
tightening
evidence for the "restric-
tive
cycle"
of welfare, which, they argue,
tends to
develop
when
unemployment
falls.
They suggest
that the state's role in
the stabilization of
capitalism
favors market
discipline,
which
is aided
by making
welfare harder to access.
7. This
study
does not track flow into
underground
econ-
omy,
those who left the state, or those
working
for
employers
who
delay
in
reporting
their new
payroll entrants; hence,
it
may
understate
job finding.
Yet it defines
"working"
as
any-
one who earned $100 in the three months
following
exit from
the rolls. This threshold is so low that it
probably exaggerates
employment.
8. Indeed, this is the
point
made so well
by
Edin and Lein
(1997). Many
of the welfare mothers
they
interviewed had
dropped
out of the
low-wage
labor market because
they
were
poorer
while at work than
they
were on AFDC.
Making
such
an alternative
impossible
is
clearly
one of the
goals
of welfare
reform,
which is another
way
of
imposing
the market disci-
pline
Fox Piven and Cloward
(1971)
discuss.
9. Carol Stack's classic
work,
All Our Kin
(1974),
illus-
trates this
point.
One of her main characters inherits a modest
sum of
money
and is
instantly besieged by requests
for assis-
tance from her
many
less fortunate friends and
family
mem-
bers. Not
wishing
to disconnect herself from the
sharing
net-
works on which she
depends,
she
begins
to
respond
to their
requests,
and within a short
period
the
money
has
evaporated.
10. I am not aware of recent studies that concentrate on the
impact
of economic constraints on maturation in the late
1910s and
early
1920s. This was an
important topic
of investi-
gation during
the Great
Depression,
when severe
unemploy-
ment forced
many young
adults back into the arms of their
families. Some of the
sociological
classics of that era-The
Unemployed
Man and His
Family (Komarovsky 1940), Mari-
enthal
(Jahoda
et al.
1933)-explore
at
length
the
increasing
frustration in
working-class
households as the
expectations
of
whole
generations were
exploded by economic constraints.
11. This fate did not befall
Rey because his father was able
to teach him some valuable craft skills.
12. Anderson (1990) argues that
young women are drawn
to
childbearing for the status it gives them with
respect
to fe-
male peers. They create "baby clubs" so that they can admire
the
clothing of their infants as a
group.
13. Bell
Kaplan (1997) suggests that
young girls have ba-
bies because
they feel
estranged
from men, isolated from their
mothers, and
generally emotionally abandoned. They are
looking for someone to "love me back" and have babies to
find that anchor.
NEWMAN / HARD TIMES ON 125TH STREET 777
14. Stack
(1974) suggests
that
very young girls
are
looking
to
improve
their status in their
households,
to move
up
out of
childhood to a rank that carries its own
bedroom,
for
example.
Children from those
early years
are most
likely
to be raised
by
their
grandmothers
and to think of their
biological
mothers as
something
like sisters. She
argues
that in later
years, young
women look much like their middle-class
counterparts: they
have children inside
marriage
and
adopt
the usual
mothering
role.
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