This book chronicles an ethnographic team's involvement over a span of fifteen years with the people of a poor, largely Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York City. Jagna Sharff focuses on a group of families who live within a radius of a few blocks of her storefront office, especially the children who come first to interact with the team.

She contrasts her team's initial observations of how people grapple with daily life with the residents' expressed hopes and dreams in a community lacking jobs but rife with underground activities. Through lively and interconnected stories, she traces over time the fate of the neighborhood and the outcomes for individual children and adults during an era when the local and national policy of the war on poverty was transmuted into a war against the poor.

The book's lyrical, cinematically vivid style makes it appealing both for college social science courses and for the general public.