When Tim Black first met Fausto Rivera in 1990, the odds were stacked dramatically against the 15-year-old Rivera.
A sophomore at Springfield's Commerce High, he could neither read nor write. He was already a father, with a daughter who had severe medical problems; the girl's mother was a family friend in her late thirties. His family was poor, with income provided sporadically by his father, who was also illiterate and who drew disability payments for a workplace injury, fixed cars without a mechanic's license and sometimes sold drugs.
Drug dealing and violence were commonplace in the North End neighborhood where the Riveras lived, and Fausto's younger brother, Sammy, was already deeply immersed in the street scene there.
Black and Rivera met in a dropout prevention program at Commerce, which Black, now a sociologist at the University of Hartford, was evaluating for a research project.
At the time, the dropout rate for Puerto Rican students in Springfield was a staggering 50 percent, making Rivera one of many young men with a foot already out the school door. Of the eight students in the Commerce program, all were boys, and all were African-American or Hispanic.
If this were a screenplay, Black's and Rivera's initial meeting would lead to dramatic changes in the younger man's life: Rivera, under Black's tutelage, would conquer his academic shortcomings, turn his back on the lure of the streets, find a sense of purpose, maybe even head off to college with ambitions to come back some day and improve conditions for the kids in his old neighborhood. Fade out on a shot of a triumphant Rivera in cap and gown, embracing a beaming Black.
But Rivera isn't a movie character, and his story doesn't follow a linear path to a satisfyingly happy ending. Over the 20 years since Black first met him, Rivera—who did, indeed, drop out of school—has served time in prison and struggled with drug addiction. He's bounced in and out of relationships and rehab programs, and lost his young daughter, who died while he was serving a seven-year prison sentence for robbery.
In his 2009 book, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets (Pantheon Books), Black chronicles those years of Rivera's life and the lives of his brothers, friends and neighbors. It might not be a happy story, but it's a compelling one, affectingly and thoughtfully told by Black, and by the voices of the Rivera brothers and others who opened their lives to the author.
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When a Heart Turns Rock Solid is a work of what Black calls "sociological storytelling," examining the personal stories of individuals within the many contexts that shape their lives. It starts with the most immediate structures of daily life—schools, family, neighborhood—but expands to include the larger forces that might be harder to see but have a potent effect nonetheless.
"The challenge of sociological storytelling is to see the social-historical currents that are running throughout individuals' lives," Black writes. "As individuals, most of us are too busy navigating the currents to see the larger social forces that are generating them. The sociologist's craft is to move from the concrete events that characterize individual lives to the abstract social forces that shape them, and subsequently to offer a more socially textured understanding of individual behavior and experience."
Black's project began as a study of a group of "at-risk" young urban men but over time expanded into a wide-ranging look at the powerful forces that have put the Rivera brothers (a false name; Black changed the names of most of the people in his book), and so many others, at risk.
When a Heart Turns Rock Solid takes on multiple complex topics—each worthy of a book of its own—starting with the history of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico. The Rivera family moved back and forth between Puerto Rico and the mainland several times before finally settling in Springfield; ironically, the parents settled in the city to escape the dangerous street life near their previous home in Yonkers.
The Rivera boys changed schools multiple times during the early years of their education, disruptions from which they never recovered. The oldest brother, Julio, did manage to graduate from Commerce High—an achievement Black attributes to his enrollment in a bilingual program that administrators refused to let Fausto participate in, his position in the family as the role-model big brother, and the positive sense of self he found as a school athlete.
Sammy, the youngest brother, fared much worse. Struggling in school, he began acting out—skipping classes, doing lines of cocaine in his sixth-grade classroom. With white and middle-class families abandoning the city and its schools, the Puerto Rican population, Black writes, "was seen through race-tinted lenses as undisciplined and unruly intruders threatening the quality of education in the public schools. And students like Sammy reinforced these fears and stereotypes. He and his friends, disruptive and unrepentant, lived up to their reputations."
What Sammy was doing, Black suggests, was finding a way to deal with the shame he felt over his poor school performance. "Sammy, like many from his neighborhood in Brightwood, responded to the meritocractic version of school failure by adopting an identity that was repugnant to school authorities," he writes. "His oppositional identity provided him with a sense of self-respect and alleviated the humiliation of his 'place' within the school."
Sammy was the first of the brothers to leave school, quickly becoming part of a well-established North End drug network. For a time, he belonged to the La Familia street gang. And, like Fausto, he would go on to serve time in prison and spend years struggling with a heroin addiction.
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Out of school, the prospects for the Riveras and their friends were dim. As Black puts it, men like them have been rendered "superfluous" by economic policies that helped lead to the loss of well-paid working class jobs in cities like Springfield—deregulation; the decline of (and assault on) labor unions; trade agreements like NAFTA that have hurt American workers. Those economic changes, Black writes, "altered the nature of work at the bottom of the labor force by destabilizing industrial cities, decreasing wages, increasing underemployment and off-the-books jobs, and decreasing the safety net for the unemployed."
While opportunities were drying up in the job market, an alternative economy was emerging: the drug trade. As in many poor communities, drug dealing became a way for men like the Riveras to make a living—or, in some cases, to supplement the income they earned, either in off-the-books jobs or legal but low-paying work. While Black's research provided him with a close view of a major drug ring, it also revealed the small-scale, occasional drug dealing some in the neighborhood engaged in to make ends meet.
The drug trade also provided something else: for boys who'd failed in school, street life offered an alternate means to success, a place where they'd be valued for their toughness, their loyalty, their business smarts. When Fausto fell in with a local drug dealer named Manny, Black writes, he "was traveling a well-trod pathway. He could hardly read or write, was a high school dropout, a racial minority, smart, and desperately seeking a place for himself in the world. The forces shaping his life were pushing him into social spaces where he would be valued, and one of those places was organized by Manny."
With the growth of the drug trade came the governmental "war on drugs" with its focus on strict sentencing and imprisonment. Between 1980 and 2001, Black reports, the percentage of people in state prisons rose from 130 per 100,000 residents to 422 per 100,000. Forty-five percent of that increase was attributable to drug arrests.
"[A]s drug dealing filled the abandoned economic spaces in urban areas, the use of concrete walls and barbed wire to incarcerate and subdue growing numbers of black and brown young men, displaced from the labor force, was expanded," Black writes.
Both Fausto and Sammy Rivera spent time in state prison, a fate their older brother, Julio, avoided only through good luck. Indeed, Julio was the "success story" of the family: unlike his brothers, he graduated high school, found his way into a well-paying career (truck driving), even achieved the holy grail of middle-class accomplishment, buying a home.
But it was not a smooth path by any means. Julio became a father while a teenager (his then-girlfriend, now wife, was 14 at the time) and spent time both as a drug dealer and a member of La Familia. And, like many Americans, he's struggled to hold on to his home during the mortgage crisis.
Black explains Julio's seemingly contrasting identities—respected high school athlete and reliable family breadwinner versus gang member and occasional drug dealer—as yet another example of the struggle for a sense of self. Julio joined La Familia after losing a decent-paying warehouse job because of a fight with a co-worker. "Julio's identity had been organized around working-class male respectability and the family wage ideology while he was working at the factory—he was the provider for his extended family, the head of the household, the man his father had wanted him to become," Black writes.
When Julio lost his job, he lost that identity, and sought to shape a new one on the streets. "'One-Punch Julio' began to compete with 'working provider Julio' as a dominant part of his identity," Black writes. "Joining La Familia, ostensibly to keep an eye on Sammy, and assuming a leadership role in the gang, Julio validated his toughness, his discipline, and his valor. Julio's life was in transition—as social conditions change, individual identities and personal routines often get reorganized."
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Black was able to tell the Riveras' story so vividly because of the remarkable level of access he was granted to the family and their community. He attended family parties, joined the brothers and their friends for evenings at the bars, hung out with them at the neighborhood center for street life, known as "the block," visited them in prison.
Having a white, 30-something (and, eventually, as the project progressed, 40-something) professor tag along with them was not always ideal for the Rivera brothers, Black writes. At times they felt they needed to protect him, from the rougher elements of the street scene or from police who assumed he was a drug customer. Some of their acquaintances viewed him with suspicion, questioning whether he was an undercover cop himself. Other times, he writes, he was simply a social liability to a group of young men hitting the bars to meet women.
So why were the Riveras and many of their friends willing to allow Black such deep access to their lives? "The maxim that 'people like to talk about themselves' is probably true," he writes. But beyond that, even for all their outward rejection of the white, middle-class world he represented, for many of the men, Black's middle-class whiteness nonetheless had an allure.
"The mere fact that a white college professor displayed interest in the lives of these young men was enough for some of them to engage me," Black writes. "[W]hen a member of the dominant group demonstrates an interest in the lives of the subordinate group, their need to be validated can be powerful due to internalized status hierarchies defined by race, ethnicity, and social class."
The men who bonded with him the most, Black notes, "were men less attached to the streets. & And when men moved in and out of the street economy, their interest in me would vary accordingly—usually seeking affirmation from me when they were working or going to school, indicating that they saw me as emblematic of that world."
In the case of the middle Rivera brother, with whom he established perhaps his closest relationship, Black writes, "My age, race, and education gave me influence; after all, not many white guys were praising Fausto for his intellect.
"Of course, my white skin and my education were overvalued by Fausto," he continues. "He held me in high esteem for reasons that had less to do with me and more to do with his internalized frames of reference, stemming from being a person of color in a white-dominated world."
While Black's interest in the lives of these men sometimes provided a form of validation, at other times, it served as a reminder of their failures. For all their outward shows of bravado, their explicit rejections of white-dominated society and its conventions, Black writes, many of them felt a deep self-loathing for what they considered personal failures. Black saw this clearly when he offered an off-the-cuff compliment to a drug dealer named Jorge.
"I mean, look at you, you got money, you got nice clothes, you got a lot of respect, you party every night," he told Jorge. "I mean, it looks to me like you got it made."
Black was surprised by Jorge's response. "You think I like living like this?" the other man answered. "I live like this because I'm a fuckup. I fucked my life up. I dropped out of school, I got no education, I do this shit because I can't do anything else. I fucked up and I'm not proud of it. I ain't got shit. I'd give this up in a second to have what you got."
Black writes, "Respect, Jorge reminded me, is socially bounded. … My presence reminded Jorge more of who he was not than of who he was."
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Aside from the complicated issue of validation, there were other, concrete things the Riveras gained from their relationship with Black, things that underscore the personal nature of the connections they'd developed. Black served as an academic tutor, helped the brothers or their friends find jobs, loaned them money.
When they got into legal trouble, Black, at various times, posted their bail, helped them find attorneys, testified on their behalf in court. When Julio and his wife Clara began house-hunting, Black offered them the experienced guidance they couldn't find from their family and friends, none of whom had ever bought a house. When Fausto, newly released from a lengthy prison sentence and struggling to reacclimate after so many years behind bars, slipped back to using heroin, Black organized an intervention with Julio and Sammy and then spent countless hours navigating the various bureaucracies to find him a space in a rehab program.
Black describes the help he offered the Riveras as a way to address the exploitative nature of this kind of sociological work, to somehow compensate them for the access they allowed him so he could conduct his research. And, he freely acknowledges, he also has come to care deeply for the family over the many years he's known them.
"Some may argue that I have become too close and that I will err on the side of presenting them in a more positive light that may be warranted. Perhaps," Black writes. "But I believe that it is vitally important that we see how social forces generally, and poverty and racism particularly, affect lives, and it is my closeness to the men and women in this book that has allowed me to gain an intimate understanding of their lives and to see the world that they encounter on a regular basis from their locations within it."
The fact that Black's relationship with the Riveras is not objective or detached is not a failing in his work, but a strength; without Black's willingness to engage with the family on a personal level, would the family have been willing to open their lives to him so fully?
The reader, of course, benefits from that openness, too—especially those who come from the same white, middle-class background he does—with Black serving as a conduit into a culture they may never experience, or experience in any significant way. Readers who might otherwise see someone like Fausto as just another nameless young man on the street, or in a police report, get to see the more complex character Black sees—an undereducated but bright and funny young man with complicated relationships, vulnerabilities, self-doubts and dreams.
When a Heart Turns Rock Solid will, no doubt, be dismissed by some as the work of a bleeding heart that attempts to excuse the anti-social, dangerous behavior that's been a major motif in the Riveras' lives. But Black doesn't offer excuses; he offers explanations that, hard as they may be to acknowledge, are even harder to deny. In the process, he challenges readers to reconsider what they think they know about the world from which the Riveras come.
"I have not attempted to hide the less flattering and sometimes ugly sides of their lives—the violence, crime and self-destructive practices that Fausto and others participate in," Black writes. "It would be unwise to do so, for those behaviors and routines are an integral part of their lives and inseparable from the structural violence associated with life on the economic and social margins.
"Still, my analysis will no doubt reveal the passion and anger that I have emphatically acquired from the deep friendships I have developed and from the suffering these men and women endure because of social inequality and social injustice."
It's Black's relationship with Fausto that perhaps most clearly reveals his dual roles as author and friend. And it's the details of Fausto's story that best illustrate how an individual is shaped, for good or bad, by complex social forces over which he has no control. "Fausto's life carves out a unique pathway; after all, it is his life, based upon a series of events, choices, and contingencies," Black writes. "Yet, despite the particulars of Fausto's story, many others have taken similar paths—their lives exist within the social grooves that are created and reproduced through public policy, economic opportunities, social institutions, and cultural practices."
Tim Black will speak about When a Heart Turns Rock Solid at an event held by the MassMentoring Partnership on Feb. 10 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Big Y Corporate Conference Center, 2145 Roosevelt Ave., Springfield.
