Book Reviews

Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio.

By Mario Luis Small. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp.
226.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Columbia University

Contemporary urban ethnographic studies in sociology fall into two gen-

eral types. Classically oriented studies, such as community studies and
in-depth analysis of small groups, offer us another person’s worldview—
for example, the government bureaucrat, the gang member, or the housing
project dweller. Along the way, they proffer grounded categorizations of
persons (e.g., “decent” vs. “street”) and explanations of social outcomes.
A second and more recent line of ethnographic research is driven by a
question or a problematic. The object under study—a place or social
group—is fodder for the overall question. For example, a community’s
churches may be utilized to explain the role of religion in neighborhood
gentrification, but the study may not provide a portrait of the community’s
churches.
Villa Victoria is in the second tradition. Mario Luis Small writes that
the book is “not a community study. . . . By contrast, this book is focused
exclusively on the relationship between concentrated poverty and social
capital” (p. xvii). It participates in debates about the role of neighborhoods
in determining individual outcomes—debates that have been waged most
forcefully since the publication of William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Dis-
advantaged [University of Chicago Press, 1990]. Villa Victoria injects wis-
dom and clarity in a field that continues to struggle with the basic question:
How is poverty reproduced in urban America? Small’s self-designated
“conditional” approach employs middle-level theoretical precepts to offer
a “comprehensive account of the particular condition” (p. 186), namely,
how social capital develops in poor communities over time.
The book’s strengths and weaknesses may all be traced to its self-
positioning in this sphere of urban poverty research. In the 1990s, social
scientists who were intent on documenting the differences between poor
and middle-class persons dominated poverty research. To define a “poor
community,” they deployed arbitrary criteria such as 30% or 40% poverty
levels and indefensible conflations of “neighborhood” with census tracts.
In doing so, researchers isolated comparable pockets of poverty in U.S.
cities. But they fell victim to their own fetishization. They believed that
tracts were neighborhoods and that one poor community was as good as
another. Villa Victoria echoes earlier criticisms that such approaches

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 American Journal of Sociology

tended to ignore the experiences of the majority of residents—who were

not in fact poor—and never really displayed much interest in the ties of
poor people across social classes and urban spaces. Small argues that this
folk sociology perpetuated a monolithic view of the urban poor and did
not take into account a neighborhood’s unique history.
Small focuses on the ties of poor residents outside of their communities
and to other social classes. He builds an argument for how poor people
develop (or do not develop) social capital, and why they may participate
(or not participate) in community affairs. The ability to cross ecological
barriers that separate their subsidized housing complex from the wider
South End region, one’s differing community attachment that can result
from status attributes such as time of migration to the city, and the use
of “critical” resources like schools and centers of employment in or outside
the community all play a part in determining individual capacities to
build social capital effectively. One of the most useful discussions is his
employment of narrative frames to illuminate differences in how people
become attached to place and, therein, how likely they are to participate
locally.
In this sense, the book is clearly ethnographic. But in other ways, one
is hard-pressed to locate ethnographic sensibilities in Small’s work. He
says Villa Victoria is a “historically informed” ethnography. But it is so
driven by the need to realign the perspective of those working in the
quantitatively dominant field of “neighborhood effects” research that the
book is really more of a set of discrete, often reflective essays. Of course,
one could argue that his use of qualitative material to answer thorny
questions is consummately ethnographic. This is a matter of taste. Surely,
not all ethnographers need to write community studies.
But at times, the lack of a traditional ethnographic interest impedes
his argument. For example, Villa Victoria is a public housing complex. It
is a product of local, state, and federal government, and private invest-
ment via the financial markets. Small narrates this history in which many
institutions interacted to sustain the community physically and socially.
Yet many of these actors drop out in the ensuing analysis. The picture is
of a world made primarily by the residents themselves. Police, government
officials, philanthropists, volunteers, and a host of other so-called “main-
stream” actors that interact with residents do not receive much attention.
Small follows a project dweller outside the community, and we expect to
see the informant’s engagement with the wider world. But Small retreats
to a debate in the neighborhood-effects literature or introduces an un-
derappreciated analytic tool (e.g., cultural framing theory). Small ends up
missing ripe opportunities to make his points about social ties and inter-
connected spaces ethnographically, that is, via the lives of the people he
studies.
Indeed, one can read entire stretches of this book without meeting his
informants. It sometimes feels like Small is giving us a tour of sociology
rather than the community. Again, this works when the point is to criticize

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 Book Reviews

current social scientific fashions, but we do not really see how human
agents in particular contexts aspire, make decisions, negotiate conflicts,
and otherwise act human. An example is Small’s discussion of the dif-
ference between “critical resources” like grocery stores that “serve suste-
nance needs” (p. 134), and “noncritical resources” like parks that “serve
nonessential ends.” Residents who do not leave Villa Victoria to utilize
critical resources end up more isolated because they do not form main-
stream ties so easily. But there is no theory to back up the critical/non-
critical dichotomy—there is no real attempt to build off of residents’ own
distinction. This is consequential because a sidewalk or a park is also a
place of economic exchange for poor people who do not have an office.
Hence, it is “critical” and “noncritical.” Its semantic flexibility may be
important to recognize if claims are to be made about residents’ attach-
ment to their neighborhood and their desire to use a resource elsewhere.
Small’s framework also makes it difficult to use ethnography in other
ways, such as in understanding the temporal contours of human action
and the communicative structures that permit subjects to inform the
researcher.
Summarily, Villa Victoria is the finest example of how ethnographic
material can be mobilized to correct, refine, and reframe top-down, policy-
driven research that does not proceed from a verstehen perspective. If
the current fashion continues, more ethnographers will drop conventional
longitudinal research designs for interview studies and snapshot portraits
of individuals and families, all in the service of policy formulation. In
their noble pursuit, they will certainly benefit from reading Villa Victoria.

Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. By

Edward E. Telles. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp.
ix⫹324.

Melissa Nobles
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Edward Telles’s rich and important book is the latest, and most system-
atic, sociological study of Brazilian race relations. As its title implies, the
book is also comparative, as the significance of race in Brazil is explicitly
compared with its significance in the United States and in South Africa,
to a lesser extent. American race relations have, and arguably continue,
to serve as the paradigmatic case against which other countries are com-
pared and from which sociological theories are derived. The resulting
problems, Telles argues, are that Brazil cannot be properly understood
on its own terms, and that extant sociological theory cannot fully explain
the Brazilian case because Brazil deviates from its key assumptions. Thus,
Telles is involved in a three-pronged discussion. He takes issue with both
former and prevailing views of Brazilian social relations, and he seeks to

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