Live to See the Day
Coming of Age in American Poverty
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An indelible portrait of three children struggling to survive in the poorest neighborhood of the poorest large city in America
Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized families in the United States. This is the story of their coming-of-age, which is beset by violence—the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the drug trade. In Kensington, eighteenth birthdays are not rites of passage but statistical miracles.
One mistake drives Ryan out of middle school and into the juvenile justice pipeline. For Emmanuel, his queerness means his mother’s rejection and sleeping in shelters. School closures and budget cuts inspire Giancarlos to lead walkouts, which get him kicked out of the system. Although all three are high school dropouts, they are on a quest to defy their fate and their neighborhood and get high school diplomas.
In a triumph of empathy and drawing on nearly a decade of reporting, sociologist and policymaker Nikhil Goyal follows Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel on their mission, plunging deep into their lives as they strive to resist their designated place in the social hierarchy. In the process, Live to See the Day confronts a new age of American poverty, after the end of “welfare as we know it,” after “zero tolerance” in schools criminalized a generation of students, after the odds of making it out are ever slighter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sociologist Goyal (Schools on Trial) delivers a nuanced and intimate portrayal of three Puerto Rican teens growing up in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, drawing on a decade of research in the community to demonstrate how poverty is a barely surmountable obstacle for disadvantaged young people. Ryan Rivera, Giancarlos Rodriguez, and Emmanuel Coreano are students at El Centro de Estudiantes, an alternative school and "last chance" for the trio to avoid becoming high school dropouts. Goyal also profiles the boys' mothers, painting a generational picture of poverty's effects. (Ivette, Emmanuel's disabled single mother, receives only $10,000 a year in public assistance.) The need for money drives Ryan and Giancarlos to drug-dealing, while Emmanuel contends with unstable and unsafe housing. Their harrowing stories are enriched by closely observed details that will linger in the reader's mind, like Emmanuel's struggle to store his few prized items of clothing somewhere clean. While Goyal points to deindustrialization and a lack of good jobs, the war on drugs that unfairly targets people of color, and other causes of his subjects' poverty, he makes the case that direct government financial support is the best method to help impoverished young people, and laments the recent expiration of the pandemic-era child tax credit, of which the author was an architect. It's an enthralling and often maddening read.
