Random Family

It's the mid-1980s in the South Bronx, and sixteen-year-old Jessica Martinez steps out of her tenement apartment on Tremont Avenue. She's just going to the store. But she's dressed like she's going somewhere important—borrowed Lee jeans from her sister, earrings from her best friend, her mother's T-shirt and perfume. This isn't vanity. In Jessica's world, every trip outside is a gamble. As Adrian Nicole LeBlanc writes in Random Family, "Chance was opportunity in the ghetto, and you had to be prepared for anything."

Jessica has bright hazel eyes, a huge smile, and a curvy figure. She radiates a kind of warmth that makes you feel like you're sharing secrets even in the middle of Tremont's chaos. Men of all ages notice her. But she struggles to hold onto a steady relationship, always ending up as the second choice, the girl on the sidelines. What she wants more than anything is simple: to be someone's girlfriend, to be loved, to be secure.

This book follows Jessica and another Puerto Rican teenager, Coco Rodriguez, through more than a decade of their lives. It's a story about survival and love, but not the kind you see in movies. This is survival in a world where poverty, gender, and family bonds are tangled together in ways that both trap and sustain the people caught in them.

Jessica lives with her mother Lourdes, her three siblings, and her mother's boyfriend Big Daddy in a cramped apartment just off the Grand Concourse. The street outside is alive with children playing, old people shopping, young people socializing—and drug dealers working their corners. Lourdes warns Jessica to be realistic about her dreams. But Jessica can't help believing that anything might happen once she leaves that apartment. Not much usually does. She goes to the park looking for one of her boyfriends, disappears with her best friend Lillian, or uses her younger brother Cesar as a decoy to lure boys back into her orbit. Mostly, though, Cesar gets left behind, sitting on the broken steps watching the older boys run the street.

The book's opening image of Jessica dressing up for a mundane errand captures something essential about her world. In the ghetto, opportunity doesn't come knocking. You have to be ready to grab it when it passes by. And for a young woman like Jessica, her beauty and sexuality are the currency she has to trade.

But this isn't just Jessica's story. On the other side of Tremont, fifteen-year-old Coco Rodriguez sits in her best friend's third-floor apartment, looking out the window, also looking for distraction. She's a sunny, talkative girl nicknamed Shorty because she's short, or Lollipop because she tucks lollipops in the topknot of her ponytail. Unlike the older women in the neighborhood who have closed their curtains and given up, Coco "courts consequence." She goes after what she wants.

What she wants is Cesar Santos, Jessica's brother. She spots him riding his bike down the street in a red leather jacket with a fur-trimmed collar, and something clicks. Their love will shape her life for years to come, even as Cesar gets swept into a life of crime that lands him in a maximum-security prison for accidentally killing his best friend.

Random Family is the product of a decade of research by LeBlanc, who embedded herself in the lives of these families. She doesn't moralize or lecture. Instead, she lets her subjects speak for themselves, documenting their struggles with the kind of intimate detail that makes you feel like you're sitting in their kitchens, listening to their phone calls, reading their letters.

The book shows how these young women navigate a world where their worth is staked on their sexuality, but where they're also shamed for exercising it. Where men can be open sexual agents while women must operate in the shadows. Where the state, the schools, the housing authorities, and the prison system all seem designed to punish rather than help.

Jessica uses her beauty to try to secure the love and security she craves. She bounces from one thwarted romance to another. She gets pregnant by Puma, a fading breakdancer whose fifteen minutes of fame have already ended. She gives birth to a daughter named Serena, nicknamed Little Star. But Jessica is too young and too focused on her own desires to truly be a mother. The caretaking falls to Lourdes, who is herself struggling under the burden of motherhood and a growing cocaine addiction.

Then Jessica meets Boy George, a twenty-year-old rising star in the illegal drug trade. He's disciplined, shrewd, and sober—a rare combination in his world. He manages a multi-million-dollar heroin empire. He takes Jessica on as one of his mistresses. For a while, she enjoys an upgrade in living conditions and extravagant gifts. But the FBI and DEA are watching. And George's volatile, violent whims make her life a gilded cage.

Coco's path is different but no less difficult. She struggles against scarcity, the demands of her abusive and controlling boyfriend Cesar (even from behind bars), and the care of her children. She endures homelessness, evictions, the baffling logic of state agencies, and the behavioral issues of her "problem child" Mercedes. Yet she manages to carve out conditions for her family to survive, held together by her joyful generosity and her refusal to give up.

LeBlanc's narrative follows these two women and the people around them—Lourdes, Cesar, Milagros, Boy George—through pregnancies, prison sentences, evictions, deaths, and small victories. She shows how the drug trade, the welfare system, the prison industrial complex, and the school system all intersect in the lives of the poor. She shows how love can be both a lifeline and a trap. She shows how children born into these circumstances often repeat the patterns of their parents, not because they're bad, but because they've never been shown another way.

The book opens with Jessica on Tremont Avenue, dressed up for a trip to the store. It ends years later with Cesar, still in prison, lifting his daughter Mercedes high in the air and telling her, "You light as a feather to me." In between, we see the full, complicated humanity of people who are too often reduced to statistics or stereotypes.

What makes a sixteen-year-old girl believe that her beauty will save her? What keeps a young mother going when every system seems designed to crush her? What does love look like when it's expressed through letters from prison, through beatings followed by apologies, through the sheer determination to keep your children alive in a world that doesn't care if they live or die?