When A Heart Turns Rock Solid
By Timothy Black (Pantheon), $29.95

The Rivera family moved to Springfield, Mass., with their three sons, Julio, Fausto and Sammy, in the late 1980s. (No real names are used in this book.) That's right when the city's metalworking factories were closing down, the city was becoming a major center for illicit drug distribution, the public schools were graduating only 50 percent of their Puerto Rican students, and the War on Drugs was handing out mandatory minimum sentences with a vengeance.

It was a perfect storm. Although the Rivera brothers were smart, capable, and had supportive parents, these powerful forces would whip them by varying degrees.

In When A Heart Turns Rock Solid, Timothy Black, a professor at University of Hartford, follows Julio, Fausto and Sammy as they go between the streets and prisons, jobs and crime. Black conducts an 18-year-long ethnographic study. He records conversations, hangs out with them on street corners, plays pool and drinks with them until the early morning. He bails one brother out of jail and leads an intervention to stop another's heroin dependence.

The brothers, on the other hand, shield Black from violence on the streets and in the bars during the study. Their mother and partners feed him well. And most significantly, the brothers allow him, and readers, to enter their lives.

Black, who is a sociologist, first meets Fausto in 1990 in a mentor program at Springfield's Commerce High for students at risk of dropping out. At age 15, the middle brother Fausto is personable, inquisitive, "more engaging than many of the undergraduates I was teaching at the time," writes Black — and practically illiterate.

Black begins to tutor and mentor Fausto, but he can't save him from dropping out. Although Fausto continues studying for the GED, he also starts dealing drugs with his younger brother Sammy, who started working for a major Springfield drug dealer at age 13. Fausto describes his conflicted goals to Black in '93:

"Recently, I don't know, bro, I feel lost, you know, like things are moving too fast. I'm waiting for my test scores. I need a goal to live by day to day. I want that goal to be education. Now, it's just money, girls, cars, that sort of thing. I don't want this to be forever, but the money is good and my family needs it."

Soon Fausto starts abusing heroin, beginning a lifetime addiction. At 19 years old, he fails an attempt to rob a bank and gets sentenced to 10 years.

While visiting Fausto in Massachusetts state prisons, first in Concord, then Gardner, in the '90s with Julio, the eldest, Black proposes writing a book about the three brothers. They accept, and Black begins interacting and interviewing a growing web of the brothers' family, friends and street associates. With Julio, Black would hang out frequently on "the block," a Springfield location described as an "open-air market for drinking beer, smoking blunts, and snorting cocaine, a place where salsa and merengue music blared from large stereo speakers," and also where the city's major drug players held court.

Guiding Black's ethnography are the changing lives of the Rivera brothers. They move through different locations, including Hartford, central Mass., and Puerto Rico, and through some institutions Black did not anticipate, such as the trucking union and the Salvation Army. The book is then divided into eleven chapters, pinned to themes such as Puerto Ricans in Springfield, bilingual education, the illicit drug economy, prison and the low-wage job market.

Throughout, Black practices "sociological storytelling," which he defines as not only telling a person's stories, but then going further to examine the "abstract social forces" that shape the person's life.

The sociological storytelling can be on the academic side; the book gets over-explanatory at points even for those interested in the sociological and historical context.

But don't worry: The twisting story lines and intriguing subplots from the Rivera brothers and their peers are good enough to compete with any series on HBO.

Many of the stories are violent. There's Julio's stint as head of the muscle for La Familia, a Hispanic gang allied with the Latin Kings, during Springfield's heaviest gang wars of '94 and '95. "I had my own special crew and we were the ones who did special missions and shit," Julio recalls. He ends up shooting three members of the rival group Los Sólidos in broad daylight — non-fatally — and hides out in Puerto Rico for a few months.

There's the period early in Sammy's drug-dealing career when he and a friend start selling in Greenfield, a small town in northwestern Massachusetts, where they become popular with the white teenaged residents.

There's Fausto's ultimate low point after his release from prison, when to support a $300-a-day heroin habit, he robs Dominican drug dealers with a crack-addict associate.

Then there's the scandalous familial events, like when Fausto, only 13, has a child with Virginia, a neighbor in her late 30s. Several years later, Julio impregnates Virginia's other child, the 13-year-old Clara. (Julio and Clara stay together and marry in 2000, one of the book's few successful conjugal relationships.) And one time, Juan, the Rivera father, robs Fausto's stash. "He took $2,000 and a whole bunch of coke and left to Florida to have a good time," Fausto later tells Black, laughing.

What When A Heart Turns Rock Solid does brilliantly is expose the lives of Puerto Rican men who are right up against society's margins. It's an especially important read for those in northeastern U.S. cities, the locations of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans living in poverty.

The book doesn't end with much good news from "the block" — Black watches the children of the original crew get led away in handcuffs on the nightly news. But, as Black writes in the introduction, When A Heart Turns Rock Solid was never meant to be an upper. "I even hope that the book will make some people angry or sad," he writes, "to see the personal pain of social inequality, the limits to social mobility, and the futility of wasted lives."