Against the Odds: Urban Youth, Poverty and “Success”

The gap between poor and wealthy has reached new extremes in the U.S. With rising
rates of unemployment, underemployment, eviction and incarceration, retrenchment of
public assistance, and deteriorating neighborhoods, conditions have become even worse
for the urban poor. Given the widening income and wealth gap, chances of upward social
and economic mobility among poor inner city residents are decidedly bleak. Drawing on
three years of intensive fieldwork among a group of sixteen young adults from a poor
community in the Northeastern U.S., this dissertation investigates their transition to
adulthood under dire conditions of poverty and examines how some young adults
overcome barriers in an environment of deprivation and inequality to achieve partial
mobility. Focusing on the transition to adulthood sheds a valuable light on the social
reproduction of class inequality, because adolescence is such a pivotal period of
development with lasting consequences on chances of mobility. The goal of the first part
of my dissertation is to richly describe the lives of young adults within various contextual
settings. Analyzing my observations and interviews, I delineate the different types of
skills, resources, knowledge and strategies that relationships, connections and networks
cultivated within various spheres of life, including family, school, romance, peers and
neighborhood organizations and institutions generate to influence reproduction of class.
Interweaving practices and social relations in different aspects of the lives of a group of
young adults come together in a pattern to explain varying chances of upward social mobility among them. The second part of my dissertation shows how these resources aid
in survival and/or partial upward mobility, but they act like incomprehensible pieces of a
puzzle, which the young adults must decipher to successfully transition from their current
position into college and ultimately into a stable and well paying job. In fact, I find that
fragmented availability of information and resources overwhelm the lives of young
adults, making the trajectory toward a better future incomprehensible at best and
constraining at worst. Poor urban youth rarely locate a stable support network of reliable
information and strategies. This dissertation explores questions around culture and
structure in understanding social reproduction of poverty.