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The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Harvard University Press
August 2006
On Sale: August 4, 2006
448 pages
ISBN: 0674023552
EAN: 9780674023550
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into
Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's
Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and
remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there
an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed
work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in
the ghetto. From women who clean houses and prepare lunches
for the local hospital to small-scale entrepreneurs like the
mechanic who works in an alley; from the preacher who
provides mediation services to the salon owner who rents her
store out for gambling parties; and from street vendors
hawking socks and incense to the drug dealing and extortion
of the local gang, we come to see how these activities form
the backbone of the ghetto economy. What emerges are the innumerable ways that these men and
women, immersed in their shadowy economic pursuits, are
connected to and reliant upon one another. The underground
economy, as Venkatesh's subtle storytelling reveals,
functions as an intricate web, and in the strength of its
strands lie the fates of many Maquis Park residents. The
result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a
rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the
efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for
themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a
devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so
often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground
economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling
isolation from the rest of the country.
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