Abstract
Nikhil Goyal’s Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty follows the lives of three adolescent Latino boys growing into young adulthood in underserved neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The book also investigates the lives of their immediate families, peers, and romantic partners, and the schools, criminal justice institutions, and neighborhoods in which they grow up. The book is based on lengthy and rigorous fieldwork and interviews by the author. It is engaging, smart, and thoughtful, and provides valuable insight into the lives of a segment of urban and poor young men. The author is a fine writer, and he vividly connects these boys’ lives to social forces beyond the individual. Beyond urban poverty, the book contributes to the fields of education, neighborhood effects, the transition to adulthood, criminal justice, immigration, the family, sexuality, politics, intergenerational stratification, and others. The book would work well in a wide variety of undergraduate sociology classes. Although I have read a lot of books on urban poverty, I certainly gained new insight and benefited from reading the book.
The book follows the lives of Ryan, Corem, and Giancarlos from adolescence into young adulthood. It is written in narrative form and gives the reader the opportunity to walk in the shoes of and see the world through the eyes of these boys. In heartbreaking fashion, we see how a few small and unfortunate incidents can spiral and derail these socially excluded and marginalized boys into disadvantaged life courses—in a way that would easily be offset if the boys were white and middle class in affluent communities. For instance, under peer pressure, Ryan acts just like most adolescent boys routinely act and foolishly sets some paper on fire (no one was hurt, and it doesn’t appear there was real damage). From this incident, which Ryan surely regrets, he is pulled into the criminal justice system, pushed out of schools, and has his whole future constrained (e.g., being unable to become a police officer as an adult).
The book also compellingly reveals the inner emotions of these boys. For instance, we learn about gender-nonconforming Corem, whose family doesn’t accept him being not heterosexual and who has to endure deplorable living conditions. The book also shows us their defiance. For instance, Giancarlos is recurringly engaging in dissensus-oriented political agitation over a variety of injustices at school and in his community.
In this review, I cannot summarize even the major events of these boys’ lives. But Goyal accounts for many key life events while centering the boys’ voices. Throughout, the reader learns in painstaking detail how the United States counterproductively squanders the human capital of boys like these. We also see clearly how incredibly costly and inefficient it is to underinvest in schools, health care, and communities only to eventually pay far more in criminal justice and other social harms.
There are a lot of ethnographies of urban, poor, disadvantaged adolescent boys. My sense is this book has several unique values relative to this crowded field. First, I found the book does far more than most to emphasize the political agency of this group. The book especially shows Giancarlos mobilizing and rallying other disadvantaged youth to become political actors who resist institutional injustices (see, e.g., Chapter 16). Giancarlos often “makes good trouble” and develops a political consciousness that any sociologist would be proud to have cultivated.
Second, the book effectively traces institutional and policy changes like budget austerity, hackneyed neoliberalism, and the dizzying maze of charter and alternative schools that undermine underserved and poor adolescents’ lives (see, e.g., Chapter 7). I recommend chapters Three or Eleven as compelling stand-alones for how educational policy and institutional change are actually experienced on the ground. Third, Goyal effectively uses counterfactuals to illustrate how the 2021 expanded child tax credit (or child benefits that exist in almost every other rich democracy) could have dramatically benefited these boys’ well-being and trajectories. For instance, he writes, “Had Emmanuel and Ivette lived in a European nation . . . the government would have sent the family the equivalent of hundreds of dollars each month in the form of a child allowance to help defray the costs of raising a child and sustain them above the line of immiseration” (p. 62). Throughout the book, I admire how the author connects the personal to the institutional and reminds readers that these boys’ “choices” and behaviors are subject to institutional constraints and politics beyond their control. The author stresses how the United States is making political choices to deny boys like these feasible and realistic social policies that would substantially improve their lives and the communities they inhabit. Closely related to this, the book dodges the unfortunately common tendency in this kind of study to slide into weak cultural pathology arguments. And it contextualizes the boys’ neighborhoods (in, e.g., Chapter 5) amid social changes like deindustrialization.
Of course, there are some debatable issues. As a scholar imagining teaching the book, I wish, unsurprisingly, there were more and deeper discussion of scholarship, theories, and concepts. Like a lot of sociology, the book may actually over-center criminal justice and the criminal behavior of these boys. The entire book more or less contradicts the seemingly glib summary of Ryan: “Drugs were all he knew growing up” (p. 181). Indeed, criminal justice is often salient in the lives of adolescent, minoritized, poor boys in America. However, by narrating the boys’ lives so much around the key criminal justice events, it crowds out understanding of poverty away from the dramatically larger and even more consequential state policies like Medicaid, for instance. And the simple reality is that the overwhelming majority of poor people—even poor boys—do not sell drugs.
In a related concern, I am afraid I worry about how ethnographies like this play up an unrepresentative, exotified portrayal of the poor to our students as readers. The overwhelming majority of poor people in America are not adolescent, minoritized boys in underserved inner-city neighborhoods (Brady 2023). I never understand why seemingly irrelevant descriptions of the physical features of the respondents are mentioned (for example, that Corem’s mother was nearly 400 pounds) and worry what impressions readers—especially our younger students with little prior knowledge of poverty—will form of the poor. Also, the book probably overemphasizes eviction, which is surely overrated as a “cause” of poverty. To be clear, saying this does not contradict the importance of housing insecurity and living conditions.
These concerns aside, this is an indisputably fine book that is valuable to teach and worthwhile to read. The author has established himself as a serious thinker and scholar in the field. Moreover, the respondents and their communities are justly given voice to demonstrate the deep problems of poverty and social exclusion in America.