Down These Mean Streets: Piri Thomas, Race, and Latino Literature

Introduction: Piri Thomas and Spanish Harlem

"I believe that every child is born a poet, and every poet is a child. Poetry to me was always a very sacred form of expression." — Piri Thomas (qtd. in Fisher 2003)

Born Juan Pedro Tomas, of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents in New York City's Spanish Harlem in 1928, Piri Thomas began his struggle for survival, identity, and recognition at an early age. The vicious street environment of poverty, racism, and street crime took its toll, and he served seven years of nightmarish incarceration at hard labor. But, with the knowledge that he had not been born a criminal, he rose above his violent background of drugs and gang warfare, and he vowed to use his street and prison experience to reach hard-core youth and turn them away from a life of crime.

Thirty years ago, Piri Thomas made literary history with his lacerating, lyrical memoir of coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery — a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop.

As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lockup in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing, and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence continues to touch the souls of all who read Down These Mean Streets.

Born in New York City's Spanish Harlem in 1928, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father, Thomas struggled for his survival, identity, and recognition at an early age. He lived among poverty, racism, and street crime. His autobiography, Down These Mean Streets, published in 1967, made "el barrio" (the neighborhood) a household word to non-Spanish-speaking readers (Fisher 2003).

In the 1930s when he was growing up, "they didn't know whether to call me nigger or spic" (Fisher 2003). So they called him both. "I'm not a nigger and I'm not a spic," he would reply, "I'm a human being" (Fisher 2003). His words reflect his mother's wisdom. When his mother, Dolores Montañez Tomas, witnessed her child's anger, she would say:

No color was born to be superior and no color born to be inferior. All color is born to be beautiful decoration, like the flower gardens of the earth. Nobody's better than you, son. We are not minorities. We are all majorities of one, similar to each other, but like fingerprints, not quite the same. (qtd. in Fisher 2003)

Piri's father, Juan Tomas, had been raised in an orphanage in Cuba by missionaries. He migrated to Puerto Rico at the age of sixteen, intending to enter the United States as a Puerto Rican. After all, he reasoned, Puerto Ricans and Cubans were "kissing cousins" (Fisher 2003). Tired of living on colonized islands, he ventured to live "in the belly of the shark" (Fisher 2003). He was brought to the United States by friends and arrived in Harlem at the age of seventeen. Life there was rugged. Though he was trained to be a tailor, he could only find menial jobs. He changed his name from Tomas to the anglicized Thomas, something he would be ashamed of for the rest of his life (Fisher 2003).

Born John Thomas, the younger Tomas disliked his name and adopted Piri, derived from the word "spirit" (Fisher 2003). Though not a talkative person, his father did instill in him an interest in Cuba and took him to political meetings to hear, among others, Vito Marcantonio, a staunch champion of justice and human rights for the poor and independence for Puerto Rico (Fisher 2003).

Piri's mother was visiting from Bayamón, Puerto Rico, when she met her husband-to-be. She was light-complexioned; Juan was dark, so their seven children ranged from fair to dark-skinned. From his mother, Piri gained spiritual insight, though he could never relate to spirituality in the context of priests or organized religion — unless it was in the sense of sharing and respect for human dignity (Fisher 2003).

As an adult, Piri has long believed that we all need each other. His mother, a Seventh Day Adventist, wanted him to become a minister. But writing was in his blood. Piri always had a flair for words. Once scolded by an irate teacher for speaking Spanish, he determined to master the English language (Fisher 2003). Spanish he knew from his parents; English he had picked up on the streets. His mother was a great storyteller, passing on to him the folklore of Puerto Rico.

Prison, Writing, and Censorship

One day Piri Thomas put a large notebook on the table in his prison cell during a seven-year stretch for armed robbery and said to the book, "I want to tell you a story." He began writing. Thomas had forgotten that he had failed English in school. By his own admission he "didn't know an adjective from a pronoun from a hole in the ground" (Fisher 2003). He began to write his book phonetically until he attended high school in prison and received his diploma. Upon his release, he expressed his concern for his brothers and sisters in Harlem by working with street gangs there (Fisher 2003).

On Thomas's first visit to Puerto Rico, he took in both the beauty of the scenery and the ugliness of colonialism. He was offered a scholarship toward a doctorate in psychology, but after a few months he found academic study too confining. His years in prison had been a learning experience beyond what he could absorb in college. Piri decided that he wanted his doctorate in the art of living rather than in academics. He worked for a time as assistant to the Director of the Hospital of Psychiatry in Río Piedras. As an ex-addict, he was able to help develop a successful program of rehabilitation for addicts.

In protesting the removal of Down These Mean Streets from some libraries, Piri related how much the library had meant to him in his childhood. He used to spend a great deal of time there, borrowing the allotted two books while slipping three or four more under his coat. Through books he had learned of the world outside (Fisher 2003).

Campaigns to remove books from school curricula and libraries go back decades (Heins 2003). In one incident in 1975, seven members of the school board in the Long Island, New York town of Island Trees ordered the removal from school libraries of nine books that had been listed as "objectionable" by a local conservative group. They included Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, and Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes (Heins 2003).

The school board members explained that they had been told the books were "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy" (qtd. in Heins 2003). Unlike many similar school censorship incidents, this one ended up at the Supreme Court, largely because a student named Steven Pico took the school district to court.

The Supreme Court eventually issued what can be described as a compromise decision. On the one hand, it affirmed that school boards have broad discretion to select or remove books they consider "pervasively vulgar" (qtd. in Heins 2003). On the other hand, a narrow majority of five justices held that certain motivations for removing books from school libraries would violate the First Amendment. Four justices joined an opinion explaining that school boards may not act in a narrowly partisan or political manner, because "our Constitution does not permit the official suppression of ideas" (qtd. in Heins 2003). This Pico standard still governs in school censorship cases; as a result, most school boards have learned to frame their censorship decisions in terms of "vulgarity" rather than the suppression of particular ideas.

Surviving an upbringing in a world of racism, brutality, and censorship, Thomas can still write, "My world is really loving, despite promises that never come to be."

The onset of the 1970s and 1980s produced a generation of historians and other academics schooled in the struggles for civil rights during the turbulent 1960s and influenced by the creative expression of their communities (Sanchez Korrol 2000). Intent on expanding the boundaries of academic history to include strong national connections, labor, gender, and ethno-racial perspectives, intergenerational dynamics, interdisciplinary methods, and new categories of analysis, they challenged the demeaning, distorted, and monolithic interpretations of the U.S. Latino experience.

Scholars mined the sources documenting the origins and evolution of Latino communities, unlocking a wide range of materials to new interpretations — sometimes building upon, more often contesting, the intellectual cornerstones of borderlands, frontier, and area studies. Their generation questioned Anglo-American hegemony over historical interpretation and its domination of the historical research agenda (Sanchez Korrol 2000). Not satisfied with merely creating "knowledge for the sake of knowledge," their goals ranged from charting innovative courses and methods that would "set the record straight," to reconstructing social histories important in and of themselves (Sanchez Korrol 15).

The academic generation of the 1970s and 1980s sought to reconstruct nineteenth- and twentieth-century diaspora communities in all of their ethno-racial, class, and gendered complexities. Incorporating popular culture and written and oral traditions, these academics redefined the parameters of the new social history and, in the process, empowered Latino communities. The result was a historical interpretation that conferred agency on U.S. Latinos, bringing them out of the shadows and onto center stage — where their reality contrasted and contested the dominant Anglo experience, and where they interacted within and across class lines and ethno-racial barriers, with counterparts across state lines, oceans, and national boundaries (Sanchez Korrol 2000). The outcome drew strengths from components of both U.S. and Latin American experience. This harvest of knowledge has proceeded at an impressive pace, yet the corpus of this literature remains peripheral to the core of U.S. history.

Racism and Latino Literary Historiography

Much of the groundbreaking scholarship emanates from academic niches in American, Latin American, cultural, or Hispanic-oriented ethnic studies, or from the earliest departments and programs in Mexican-American, Chicano, or Puerto Rican Studies. One need only examine the bibliographic publications on Latinos and Hispanos — Albert Camarillo's Latinos in the United States is a case in point — to appreciate the scope of the new knowledge (Sanchez Korrol 2000).

Topics range from exploration and settlement of northern New Spain to the work of women in industry, commercial agriculture, as union organizers, and as transmitters of culture; from employment and labor history to the politics of language; and from the migration and immigration experience to the forging of diverse communities incorporating grassroots leadership and institutional structures.

Examples abound of seminal work produced by this generation, including the frontier studies of David Weber; the intergenerational focus of Mario T. Garcia's study on Mexican-American leadership; Ramón Gutierrez's interdisciplinary analysis of power and sexuality in New Mexico; the family and community studies of Richard Griswold del Castillo and Albert Camarillo; Chicana culture, consciousness, and interrelationship with non-Hispanic societies by Vicki Ruiz and Sarah Deutsch; studies on race, ethnicity, and identity by Clara E. Rodríguez and Juan Flores; nineteenth-century Cuban community studies by Gerald E. Poyo; the Puerto Rican community studies of Virginia Sanchez Korrol; the migration and immigration studies of Alejandro Portes and of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños; and bilingualism and public education studies of Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr. (Sanchez Korrol 2000).

Until recently, however, historical production has tended to promote primarily the very necessary foundational reconstruction of Latino experiences, viewed predominantly from a North American perspective. In searching for elements of latinidad, scholars have tended to explore contemporary U.S. communities while excluding the broader Latin American and Caribbean context and neglecting to address Hispanic diversity. Like stepping-stones to the past, the collective body of literature encompasses the groundwork for a comprehensive narrative.

Current research trends on Latino historiography and literature in the 1990s mark a move toward the premise that Spanish American history legitimately belongs to the Americas — that the concept of borderlands transcends imaginary geopolitical or academic boundaries. It argues that the history of Latinos forms an indivisible chapter subject to its own universality and specificity, and integral to our understanding of both U.S. and Latin American history (Sanchez Korrol 2000).

To speak in terms of a collective Latino and Hispanic history that posits an integrated consciousness within the broader framework of United States history invites students and scholars alike to conceptualize an area of study still in formation. It incorporates multilingual, multicultural, and interdisciplinary perspectives, ethno-racial realities, and analytical categories based on migration experience, labor, social class, gender, and identity (Sanchez Korrol 2000). As it seeks to reproduce the past in terms of a Hispanic ethnic and national diversity, it urgently challenges us to search for common ground among groups whose historical entry into the United States occurred at different times and was conditioned by different circumstances.

Admittedly, the nomenclatures we ascribe to this body of knowledge are paradoxical, imprecise, and politically laden. The terms Latino, Latina, Hispanic, Hispanic-American, Spanish American, or Ibero-Americano seek to embrace the totality of the U.S. experience regardless of class, color, regional variations, national antecedents, gender, or generational differences.

Scholar Edna Acosta Belén believes the "shorthand label (Hispanic) is turning into a symbol of cultural affirmation and identity in an alienating society that traditionally has been hostile and prejudicial to cultural and racial differences, and unresponsive to the socioeconomic and educational needs of a large segment of the Hispanic population" (Sanchez Korrol 19).

Others, however, argue overwhelmingly on the side of difference, citing centuries of regional disconnection and discontinuity among U.S. Latinos, and point to the absence of a common history as a case in point. Still others probe intra-group and generational dimensions challenging static notions of cultural adaptation, contextual dualities, and the formation of identity. Referring specifically to cultural evolution among Mexican-Americans, who comprise well over half of the total Latino population, historian George J. Sanchez cautions that a bipolar model stressing "either cultural continuity or gradual acculturation has short-circuited a full exploration of the complex process of cultural adaptation" (Sanchez Korrol 20).

Such arguments cannot be ignored, yet in spite of the contradictions, the tide appears to turn increasingly toward endorsement of an overarching Latino and Hispanic ideal. Each group rightfully stakes a nonnegotiable claim to its own past, linguistic variations, creative expression, and overall uniqueness within the broader ethno-racial contours of this nation, but each also proudly appropriates a common historical legacy, shared language, and cultural elements, customs, attitudes, and traditions.

How historians frame the conversation on Latino history is vital. If the danger of assuming affinity within and across this enormously complex population lies in over-generalization, a blurring of distinctions, and total homogenization of the groups, the challenge to historians becomes how best to incorporate and balance the nuances and varied experiences of all Latinos — particularly of those who figured centrally in the historical enterprise in any given period — without misappropriation, distortion, or omission.

According to historian Gerald E. Poyo, grounds indeed exist for collective identity, which he describes as an "evolving phenomenon that by definition thrives on the commonalities within the diverse Latin American background groups" (Sanchez Korrol 21). If identity is understood as a continuum of shared experience, then a comprehensive narrative is surely possible. What has been lacking until now is the development of popular consciousness about an integrated past.

In an autobiographical sketch written in 1986, the respected Chicano-American novelist Rudolfo Anaya observed that "if I am to be a writer, it is the ancestral voices of my people who will form a part of my quest, my search" (qtd. in Suarez 1999).

Ancestral voices are very much a part of Hispanic-American literature today, a tradition stretching back more than three centuries that has witnessed a dramatic renaissance in the past generation. As the Hispanic experience in the United States continues to confront issues of identity, assimilation, cultural heritage, and artistic expression, the works of Hispanic-American writers are read with a great deal of interest and passion.

In a sense, the literature functions as a mirror — a reflection of the way Hispanic-Americans are viewed by mainstream culture, though not always by the majority (Suarez 1999). Readers and critics alike tend to celebrate this literature. It is rich, diverse, constantly growing, blending the history that infuses it with an impassioned feeling of contemporaneity.

The boom in the literature today is being forged in English, by people who live and work in the United States — not in Spanish, as was the case with writers of generations and centuries past (Suarez 1999). This is a key difference and a point of departure.

There are still some very real issues and problems facing Hispanic-American writers in terms of finding outlets and venues for their work, as there are for other multicultural artists and, to be sure, writers in general. Although major publishing houses are issuing more work each year, much of the interesting and engaging literature comes from small, independent presses that rely on U.S. government, private, and university grants for stability (Suarez 1999).

Conclusion: Thomas's Legacy and Message

Piri Thomas lived on the streets and in a neighborhood where racism and hate were everyday occurrences. He now travels around the country and talks with people from all walks of life about his struggle for survival and the effects of racism on present and upcoming generations.