Discuss your understanding of Fernando from a bio-psychosocial perspective. Detail significant events in his life and how it affected his development. Provide evidence/reasoning for your conclusions based on the clinical material.
The Fernando story is listed below, starting on the second page:
.IN THE PAPER, DISCUSS EACH OF THESE POINTS:
- What are Fernando’s strengths and weaknesses? What are signs of problems and where are signs of good functioning. Describe in layman’s language (as if you were describing a person you just met to a friend).
- Psychological factors: Utilizing the theories we have studied to date (Attachment, Freudian or Ego Psychology, Social Learning Theory), explain Fernando’s development at different stages in his life and at his current age. Use two of the theories.
- Ego Functioning: Where is there impairment and where health (give examples of functioning from the clinical vignette for evidence)? What are the major ego defenses utilized (evidence)?
- Based on his current functioning, how do you think he traversed Mahler’s Separation-Individuation phase? Has he achieved object constancy?
- What role did biological, gender, and physical factors play in his development?
- What is the role of social, culture, class, racial/ethnic, and community factors?
- How do you explain Fernando’s move into the drug trade rather than accept his relatives offer to help with legitimate work (i.e. distributing bread, car repair, fast-food restaurants)?
- When discussing community and environment, assume he lives in University Heights in the Bronx and utilize “Keeping Track of NY’s Children” for your data (as well as other).
- Systems perspective – what is the interplay of all of the above.
- Integrate readings and other relevant readings from other social work courses throughout the paper but avoid using lengthy quotes from the story. Assume that I know the story. Explain the theory to show your understanding of it and then give an example from the narrative or evidence. For example, in discussing the ego function or object relations, define it and then give examples of it in his functioning with your conclusion, as to whether it is impaired or not, or to what extent.
Papers will be graded based on integration of, insight into, and understanding of the readings and class discussion, application of relevant concepts/theories, and quality of writing. All papers should be carefully proofread. Provide evidence/reasoning for your conclusions based on the clinical material.
“Fernando,
16, Finds a Sanctuary in Crime”
Copyright 1993 The New York Times
Company
April 13, 1993, Tuesday, Late
Edition – Final
NAME: Fernando Morales
SECTION: Section A; Page 1;
Column 3; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 2519 words
SERIES: Children of the Shadows:
The fifth of ten lives in the cities.
BYLINE: By JOHN TIERNEY, Special to The New York
Times
DATELINE: BRIDGEPORT, Conn.
BODY:
Fernando Morales was glad to discuss his life as a 16-year-old drug dealer, but
he had one stipulation owing to his status as a fugitive. He explained that he
had recently escaped from Long Lane School in Middletown, Conn., a state
correctional institution that became his home after he was caught with $1,100
worth of the heroin known as P.
“The Five-O caught me right here with the bundles of P,” he said,
referring to a police officer, as he stood in front of a boarded-up house on
Bridgeport’s East Side. “They sentenced me to 18 months, but I jetted
after four. Three of us got out a bathroom window. We ran through the woods and
stole a car. Then we got back here and the Five-O’s came to my apartment, and I
had to jump out the side window on the second floor.”
What Future?
Since his escape in December, Fernando had been on the run for weeks. He still
went to the weekly meetings of his gang, but he was afraid to go back to his
apartment, afraid even to go to a friend’s place to pick up the three guns he
had stashed away. “I would love to get my baby Uzi, but it’s too hot
now.”
He knew the police were still looking for him, which was why he made a special
request before agreeing to be interviewed.
“Could you bring a photographer here?” he asked. “I want my
picture in the newspaper. I’d love to have me holding a bundle right there on
the front page so the cops can see it. They’re going to bug out.”
The other dealers on the corner looked on with a certain admiration. They
realized that a publicity campaign might not be the smartest long-term career
move for a fugitive drug dealer — “Man, you be the one bugging out,”
another dealer told him — but they also recognized the logic in Fernando’s
attitude. He was living his life according to a common assumption on these
streets: There is no future.
When you ask the Hispanic teen-agers selling drugs here what they expect to be
doing in five years, you tend to get a lot of bored shrugs. Occasionally
they’ll talk about being back in school or being a retired drug dealer in a
Porsche. But the most common answer is the one that Fernando gave without hesitation
or emotion: “Dead or in jail.”
The story of how Fernando got that way is a particularly sad one, but the basic
elements are fairly typical in the lives of drug dealers and gang members in
any urban ghetto. He has grown up amid tenements, housing projects, torched
buildings and abandoned factories. His role models have been adults who used
“the city” and “the state” primarily as terms for the
different types of welfare checks. His neighborhood is a place where
13-year-olds know by heart the visiting hours at local prisons.
It is also a place where drugs and gangs are always around and parents are
often missing. When Fernando and his relatives try to explain what went wrong
in his life, they see a cycle over two generations. It began with a father
addicted to drugs and alcohol, chronically jobless, prone to battering and
abandoning his family. By the time death came, the son was on the street
selling the bundles that destroyed the father.
The Family
A Mother Leaves,
A Father Drinks
Fernando Morales was born in Bridgeport on Sept. 16, 1976, and his mother
moved out a few months later. Since then he has occasionally run into her on
the street. Neither he nor his relatives can say exactly why she left — or why
she didn’t take Fernando and her other son with her — but the general
assumption is that she was tired of being hit by their father.
The father, Bernabe Morales, who was 24 years old and had emigrated from Puerto
Rico as a teen-ager, moved the two boys in with his mother at the P. T. Barnum
public housing project. Fernando lived there until the age of 8, when his
grandmother died.
“She was the only one who was really there for him, and it was terrible
for him when she died,” said Camilia Mendez, an older cousin who lived
there as well. “At the funeral he was going crazy thinking about one night
his uncle came in drunk and started hitting her. Nando tried to stop it. He
picked up a pool stick and swung it at his uncle, but it hit her by mistake. At
the funeral he kept screaming out her name and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t
mean to hit you.’ “
‘Very Bad Life’
After that Fernando and his brother Bernard lived sometimes with their father
and his current girlfriend, sometimes with relatives in Bridgeport or Puerto
Rico. They eventually settled with their father’s cousin, Monserrate Bruno, who
already had 10 children living in her two-bedroom apartment.
“Nando’s had a very bad life — different parents all the time,” said
Mrs. Bruno, who is now his legal guardian. “Living with his father was bad
for him. The father would get drunk and beat him up. One time Nando came over
here crying at 3 in the morning and said his father wanted to cut his penis off
with a scissors.”
Fernando was reluctant to talk about his father or the traumas of his youth. He
said he had fond memories of his grandmother and of his two years in in Puerto
Rico — “They don’t sell there on the streets” — but not much else.
“I used to always bug out,” he said. “They had to lock me in my
room all the time. One time in school the principal made me bend over and
whacked me, so I got mad and picked up a chair and hit him in the head. My
father’s sister took me in for a little while, but she didn’t like me because I
used to beat up her kids and make trouble. I used to burn things — if I see a
rug, I get some matches.”
His relatives say they tried but failed to give him the parental guidance that
was missing. He seemed lost and would sometimes refer to himself a hand-me-down
Raggedy Ann doll. When the mood struck he would go to video arcades instead of
school. He often dismissed his relatives’ warnings or help by saying, “I’m
going to end up like my father.”
His father, by all accounts, was a charming, generous man when sober but
something else altogether when drinking or doing drugs. He was arrested more
than two dozen times, usually for fighting or for drugs, and spent five years
in jail while Fernando was growing up. He lived on welfare, odd jobs, and money
from selling drugs, a trade that was taken up by both his sons.
At times he tried to be conscientious. Fernando’s second-grade teacher, Richard
Patton, recalls that Fernando’s father was one of the few parents who picked up
his child every day after school. But then he started showing up drunk for
parent-teacher conferences, and before long he was off to jail.
Fernando’s brother Bernard, a year older, also traced their problems to their
father. “They be saying you can live anywhere and it don’t affect you —
that’s stupid. It would have made a difference if we would have had somebody
taking care of us. My father would always say, ‘Stay in school, don’t drop out,
don’t drink or do drugs.’ But he never did anything about it himself, so what’s
the use? It’s funny how you can learn to memorize those words.”
The ‘Industry’
Moving Up
In the Drug Trade
Fernando’s school days ended two years ago, when he dropped out of ninth grade.
“School was corny,” he explained. “I was smart, I learned quick,
but I got bored. I was just learning things when I could be out making
money.”
Fernando might have found other opportunities — he had relatives working in
fast-food restaurants and car repair shops, and one cousin tried to interest
him in a job distributing bread that might pay $700 a week — but nothing with
such quick rewards as the drug business flourishing on the East Side.
He had friends and relatives in the business, and he started as one of the
runners on the street corner making sales or directing buyers to another runner
holding the marijuana, cocaine, crack, or heroin. The runners on each block buy
their drugs — paying, for instance, $200, for 50 bags of crack that sell for
$250 — from the block’s lieutenant, who supervises them and takes the money to
the absentee dealer called the owner of the block.
By this winter Fernando had moved up slightly on the corporate ladder.
“I’m not the block lieutenant yet, but I have some runners selling for
me,” he explained as he sat in a bar near the block. Another teen-ager
came in with money for him, which he proudly added to a thick wad in his
pocket. “You see? I make money while they work for me.”
Fernando still worked the block himself, too, standing on the corner watching
for cars slowing down, shouting out “You want P?” or responding to
veteran customers for crack who asked, “Got any slab, man?” Fernando
said he usually made between $100 and $300 a day, and that the money usually
went as quickly as it came.
He had recently bought a car for $500 and wrecked it making a fast turn into a
telephone pole. He spent money on gold chains with crucifixes, rings, Nike
sneakers, Timberland boots, an assortment of Russell hooded sweatshirts called
hoodies, gang dues, trips to New York City, and his 23-year-old girlfriend.
His dream was to get out of Bridgeport. “I’d be living fat somewhere. I’d
go to somewhere hot, Florida or Puerto Rico or somewhere, buy me a house, get
six blazing girls with dope bodies.” In the meantime, he tried not to
think about what his product was doing to his customers.
“Sometimes it bothers me. But see, I’m a hustler. I got to look out for
myself. I got to be making money. Forget them. If you put that in your head,
you’re going to be caught out. You going to be a sucker. You going to be like
them.” He said he had used marijuana, cocaine and angel dust himself, but
made a point of never using crack or heroin, the drugs that plagued the last
years of his father’s life.
At the end, at age 40, the father was living in a rooming house with Donna
Strawn, a middle-aged woman who described herself as his fiancée and as a
person with her own history of drugs and prison. Ms. Strawn, who had left
behind four children in California, said that she had tried to get Fernando’s
father to intervene as they saw Fernando drop out of school and sell drugs.
“But he’d just throw up his hands and say he didn’t know what to do,”
she said. “Or he might get upset and go take a drink. He felt really
guilty because he wasn’t the father he should be.”
On his final night, last May 23, Fernando’s father and Miss Strawn got into an
argument about a stereo speaker of hers that he had sold. “He was out of
it,” she recalled. “His eyes were rotating in his head. He was
ramming me in the face with his head. I told him, ‘I have no family here and
I’m going to let you kill me? I don’t think so.’ I got a knife and tried to stab
him but I stabbed the bed.”
The police broke up the fight and arrested Fernando’s father, who was taken to
police headquarters and charged with third-degree assault and refusing to be
fingerprinted. That night he hanged himself in his cell, according to the
police and the Medical Examiner. An autopsy found evidence of acute cocaine and
ethanol intoxication.
The Gangs
‘Like a Family’
Or Drug
Dealers?
“I cried a little, that’s it,” was all that Fernando would say about
his father’s death. But he did allow that it had something to do with his
subsequent decision to join a Hispanic gang named Neta. He went with friends to
a meeting, answered questions during an initiation ceremony, and began wearing
its colors, a necklace of red, white and blue beads.
“It’s like a family, and you need that if you’ve lost your own
family,” he said. “At the meetings we talk about having heart, trust,
and all that. We don’t disrespect nobody. If we need money, we get it. If I
need anything, they’re right there to help me.”
Neta is allied with Bridgeport’s most notorious gang, the Latin Kings, and both
claim to be peaceful Hispanic cultural organizations opposed to drug use. But
they are financed at least indirectly by the drug trade, because many members
like Fernando work independently in drug operations, and the drug dealers’
disputes can turn into gang wars.
Gang meetings are often devoted to adjudicating or avenging acts of disrespect,
which is such a central concept on the streets that the language has evolved
with a host of synonyms: you can dis someone, play someone, rank someone, try
someone, or, when it starts to get violent, beef someone. This can eventually
lead to killing someone, which occurred 17 times last year in the 12 blocks of
the East Side.
Fernando and the other teen-agers on the street professed to be inured to the
violence. They were used to seeing teen-agers in wheelchairs at local night
clubs. They casually chatted about gang “missions” — which can range
from “beat-downs” of errant members to drive-by shootings — and the
proper way to coat a bullet with Teflon so that it can penetrate a bulletproof
vest. Fernando lamented that he couldn’t yet afford a rocket launcher.
‘I Like Guns’
“I like guns, I like stealing cars, I like selling drugs, and I like
money,” he said. “I got to go to the block. That’s where I get my
spirit at. When I die, my spirit’s going to be at the block, still making
money. Booming.”
It was hard to tell whether he really believed what he was saying about his
life and death. Fernando sounded callous and fatalistic most of the time, but
occasionally another side came out. One evening, as he and a friend who was
high on angel dust sat in a restaurant laughing about a police car they had
stolen, two police officers appeared at the entrance. The two teen-agers turned
quiet and stared uneasily at their plates until the officers left.
Then a waitress, Valerie Mendez, who was married to an older cousin of
Fernando’s and had known him since childhood, came over to the table. She
looked in disgust at him and his gold chain and black stocking cap.
“Are you happy now?” she asked. “That’s how it going to be the
rest of your life. You did it your way because it was easy, and now you’re
never going to have a life. You’ll always be looking over your shoulder. You
were smart enough to know better. Why are you going around like a titere?”
He knew that titere meant hoodlum, and he did not have an answer for her. For a
moment he looked like nothing more than an embarrassed, baby-faced 16-year-old.
After she went away, he said softly, “No, I don’t always want to be a bum.
I want to be an actor. That’s all I wanted to be since I was young. I always
loved cameras and performing in front of people. I like to go on TV. Man, I be
straight, I be so happy, I leave everything on the street.”
For a moment, at least, he could imagine a future. But he was not ready to do
anything about it.
“I’m chilling now,” he said in late January, during his last
interview. (After the interview he lost touch with this reporter, and the two
have not talked since.) “I’ll be selling till I get my act together. I’m
just a little kid. Nothing runs through my head. All I think about is doing
crazy things. But when I be big, I know I need education. If I get caught and
do a couple of years, I’ll come out and go back to school. But I don’t have
that in my head yet. I’ll have my little fun while I’m out.”
