An Ethnographic Portrait of a Precarious Life: Getting By on Even Less

This article presents an ethnographic study of life in an impoverished black urban neighborhood through the experiences and perspectives of a single mother of four. Her survival strategies shed light on the disproportionate effects of recent social policies on poor racial-ethnic minority groups. Having trouble paying bills is nothing new. As Carol Stack has shown, extended kinship networks offer crucial resources that can enable single-parent families to survive. Over the past decade and a half, however, welfare reform, increases in the rates of arrest and incarceration for poor black men, and a spate of evictions are putting serious pressure on networks that were already overextended and now have too few solvent members. Poor families are left in a precarious situation. The in-depth story of one woman illuminates the issues that many people in this precarious position face in everyday life.