Marginalized lives in the marginalized New York borough of the Bronx focuses on two girls of Puerto Rican ancestry, Jessica Martinez and Coco Rodriquez. As a non-fictional sociological analysis of a much broader contextual experience, the book does not relate a linear narrative leading to a climax. Episodic in nature and spanning several years in the lives of its main characters, Random Family is a particularly suitable title as the events and activities portrayed can seem randomly chosen out of a potentially much longer list of moments that could have become the central storyline elements.
Rather than a storyline, the book is concerned with events that contribute to the playing out of several themes. Since the main characters are two teenage girls when they are initially introduced, for example, much of the book details interaction between the sexes. Over the course of the book, all females are essentially presented as existing within a social circumstance that makes them worthy of attention by males almost solely on the basis of sexuality. As the families and friends of Jessica and Coco enter and exit the story it becomes clear that living conditions within the community almost guarantee sexual abuse, molestation, harassment, and exploitation. As a result, it is a foregone conclusion that Jessica will use the fact that she pretty to manipulate the attention of males in order to get what she desires. She will, like so many of her peers, go through a series of tangled and messy romantic relationships before giving birth to her daughter, Serena. Meanwhile, Coco falls for Jessica’s brother, Cesar. The romances serve to introduce a second persistent theme into the narrative.
Both girls are presented with extremely limited choices for mates who are not involved one way or another with criminal activity and the experience of imprisonment. Cesar’s criminal activities eventually wind up in the accidental death of his best friend for which he sent to prison. Jessica’s romantic life eventually leads her take up with a drug dealer who has appropriated the name Boy George. Although as young as Jessica, Boy George manages to build himself into a major player in the heroin trade, eventually becoming a millionaire and treating Jessica to the kind of lifestyle at odds with everything she’s ever known before. During this period, Jessica has twin girls fathered by another man. As a result of federal law enforcement surveillance, Boy George’s empire topples and he is sentenced to life in prison. As a co-conspirator, Jessica receives a ten-year sentence herself. By the time her ordeal is over and she is released, the only one of her children with whom she still has a tight bond is Serena
Coco’s parental experience is just as inconsistent as Jessica’s. After giving birth to two girls fathered by Cesar, she will then go on to have three more children with fathered by two different men. Unlike Jessica, Coco never experiences the whiplash of extreme highs of living followed by the lows of criminal prosecution. Instead, her struggles are primarily a portrait of the failure of the social service system to take care of those most in need. Two of children present how the health care system and the mental health system in America are both broken and incapable of handing pressing needs of those who cannot afford insurance or medical attention.
There is no resolution to the stories of Jessica and Coco. There is no shining knight in armor who appears to take them away from their situation. This lack of even any sort of hopeful promise that a happy ending lies in store is put into context by shifting perspective for a while to focus on Cesar’s experience in prison. He is there not because of premeditation or intent to kill his friend. The punishment he receives for this accidental action becomes a microcosm of his entire life in which he muses how the only thing the system designed to protect and service the community has ever done is punish him. His reflections upon how he wound up behind bars is the book’s ultimate condemnation of how certain lives are all but predetermined for them as a result of a never-ending cycle of poverty which leads to crime to which leads taking off the filters for aggressive behavior which leads to misogynistic violence with leads to broken families which leads right back to the cycle beginning all over again.
