Down These Mean Streets
Down These Mean Streets is a memoir by Piri Thomas, a Latino of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in Spanish Harlem, a section of Harlem with a large Puerto Rican population. The book follows Piri through the first few decades of his life, lives in poverty, joins and fights with street gangs, faces racism, travels, succumbs to heroin addiction, gets involved in crime, is imprisoned, and is finally released.
One of the major themes of Down These Mean Streets centers on Piri Thomas's identity as a dark-complexioned Puerto Rican. Although he is of Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage, he is seen as black rather than Hispanic or Latino. His own family rejects the African aspect of their Latino-Caribbean ancestry, causing Piri to spend much of his youth and early adult life contemplating his racial and ethnic identity.
The book was originally published in 1967. A special Thirtieth Anniversary Edition in 1997 included a new afterword from the author. A sequel, 7 Long Times, gives more depth to his prison years.
Plot Summary
The book opens with a "Prologue" in which Thomas articulates the reason he has written this memoir: “I wanna tell ya I’m here — you bunch of mother-jumpers — I’m here, and I want recognition, whatever that mudder-fuckin word means.” Piri introduces himself as a “skinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Porty-Ree-can” who is “unsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching.” The Prologue also introduces a note of loneliness, bitterness, and hatred that will continue through the book.Harlem:
The story proper begins in Harlem where Piri is living with his family. The year is 1941, at the tail end of the Depression, and Thomas's father has a job with the Works Progress Administration, while his mother stays at home with the children, often telling them stories of her homeland, Puerto Rico. After the death of Piri’s baby brother Ricardo, the family moves from Spanish Harlem to the Italian section on 114th Street to leave all the bad memories behind. Piri has various encounters with the local kids in the street, and despite various fights, Piri earns the Italians' respect by not ratting on them.
The Thomas family moves back to Spanish Harlem where Piri joins a gang of Puerto Rican kids his age, who become known as the TNT’s. Piri and the TNT’s go to the “faggots’ pad” ; Piri clearly does not want to go, but he wants to belong: “ … we wanted to belong, and belonging meant doing whatever had to be done”. Piri opens up about his attitudes towards school; he thinks it’s a waste of time and so he often sneaks out. Piri also starts a lemonade stand; he and his friends steal the ingredients and some of the other kids are caught by the police. While Piri manages to escape, he feels guilty and believes he should have stayed there with his people.
Suburbia and Return to Harlem:
Piri and his family move to the Long Island suburbs. Piri is apprehensive because he has heard bad things about the area, but upon arriving, Piri seems to do quite well in his new neighbourhood. He plays baseball with classmates and attends a school dance where he flirts with a girl named Marcia; however, Piri is shocked to later hear a group of girls at the dance talking about his skin colour. This, along with Poppa seeing another woman, makes Piri very upset.
Three months later, Piri ends up leaving Long Island with the intention of starting anew back in Harlem. Here, however, he finds himself homeless. Desperate for cash, Piri searches for work and goes after a position as a sales representative. Still in Harlem, Piri introduces himself to the girl of his dreams, Trina, and calls her his “Marine Tiger.” Later on, Piri makes a new friend named Brew, who forces Piri to further question his own identity; Brew tries to convince Piri that if your skin is black, then you are a black man, no matter what your ethnicity is. Piri and Brew discuss heading South so that Piri can discover what it means to be a black man.
Racial Anxiety and a Trip South:
Brew shares with Piri the ABC lesson; this lesson is about how to forgive white men for things such as racism, and how to remain calm in uncomfortable situations because of their skin colour. Piri argues with his brother José because José does not understand why Piri wants to go South; in his view, Piri is Puerto Rican, not black. Piri becomes angry and upset that his own brother does not understand him, and this further intensifies his desire to head South. Poppa makes an effort to relate to and comfort Piri, but Piri still decides to leave, despite the objections from his family.
Piri and Brew check into a hotel in Norfolk, and later talk to a man at the ‘National Maritime Union’ building. The two of them share stories with this man regarding being singled out due to the colour of their skin; however, the man disagrees with Brew’s opinions on identity and explains that every man is free to identify himself with the ethnicity that they choose.
Piri and Brew head out on the ship, on which Piri works as a waiter. When they arrive in Texas, Piri goes out with a man and they both want to hire sexual workers; Piri says he wants to hire a white woman. Through his various encounters down South, Piri realizes that every place he goes to, no matter what language you speak or where you come from, if you are black, then you are black.
A Life of Crime
Shortly after Piri heads back to New York, Momma dies and Piri becomes angry and resentful with Poppa upon remembering that he had another woman. Piri goes back to living on the roofs, streets and apartments of friends in Harlem; he also gets back into drugs and begins to sell everything he can to have money for heroin. Luckily, Waneko and his mother eventually help Piri with the drug detoxification process. To distract him from drugs, Piri participates in robberies with Danny, Billy and Loui; with each and every robbery, Piri becomes less and less concerned with the consequences of his actions and all the people he affects and hurts.
While Trina is in Puerto Rico, Piri impregnates a different Puerto Rican woman, Dulcien. Piri takes responsibility and buys tickets for Dulcien to go back to New York with the baby. Piri also convinces Louie to get into business again; they, along with Billy and Danny, carry out a robbery in bar/discotheque in downtown New York. However, the robbery doesn't go according to plan; Piri is shot in the chest, and upon trying to escape back to Harlem, he shoots the police officer who shot him. Piri is then arrested and taken to a hospital.
Prison
Piri wakes up in the hospital, is questioned by police and is transferred to prison to await trial; he is sentenced to no more than 5-15 years for armed robbery, which he will serves at Sing Sing and then Comstock State Prison. In prison, he studies masonry, works in construction, gets his high school diploma as well as other educational certificates. Above all, Piri describes his encounters he has with other inmates. Among the most significant encounters are with a Nation of Islam study group. Piri also begins to read a lot and becomes interested in psychology, and fascinated by the meaning of God and understanding.
Piri’s family visits him together for the first time in three years; they share with Piri the news that Trina has gotten married. At the end of nearly four years in prison, Piri is finally eligible for parole; however, he is told that he will have to wait another two years because his case is very serious.As his second appearance before the parole board approaches, he tries to remain calm and collected; he even stops himself from fighting another inmate. Piri is later told by the parole board that he will in fact be going home.
Freedom
On the big day, Piri awakes, says his goodbyes, collects his belongings and becomes very emotional. They stop for food and Piri debates escaping, but chooses not to. He is welcomed into his new pad in the Comstock State Prison and the very next morning, he goes to the courthouse and is asked to be held in 5,000 bail on each count. Piri is granted three years' probation; finally a free man, he decides to get a job, but he also immediately breaks one of his parole rules by sleeping with a woman who is not his wife. Yet Piri misses Trina and ends up attending a dinner that she is at; he immediately regrets attending after he realizes she wants nothing to do with him. Piri goes back to visit his old building and claims that the mood hasn’t changed one bit. He runs into Carlito who offers him drugs, but Piri tells him he is clean and the memoir ends as he walks out onto the street.
Afterward:
Piri claims that writing “Down These Mean Streets” was a “soul searching” experience that forced him to go back in time and out-pour “suppressed hurts and angers.” Piri references the Great Depression of the 1930s and speaks about the hardships that were forced upon life in the ghettos of the barrio parts of town. Piri focuses on exploitation, listening to politicians who break their promises, the barrio living conditions and violence in not only the Americas, but the world in general. He suggests that the same conditions still exist today, and that this book was intended to result in improvements, but unfortunately did not. Piri also draws attention to racism, children of the poor, economic inequality and the importance of high-quality education; he ends with a specific focus on children, confidently classifying them as intelligent individuals that need to be considered the top priority.
Characters
Piri The book's protagonist is the author himself, Piri Thomas, as he attempts to come to terms with issues of race, ethnicity, and identity. He must navigate through his confusion, anger, frustration and bitterness in a quest to find answers to his questions. Though Piri is born and raised in New York, both his parents are from Puerto Rico. Piri has dark skin like his father, while his mother and brother and sisters have light skin; this is the source of Piri’s curiosity and hostility towards topics such as race and identity. Piri introduces himself as a “skinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Porty-Ree-can — Unsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching.” He strives for recognition and manhood. Throughout this journey, he must face the harsh realities of racism and discrimination as he seeks to fit into a variety of contexts, and this gets him in a lot of trouble. From theft to drugs, drugs to prison, and everything in between, Piri realizes that the rejections and frustrations that he experiences are related to the colour of his skin. Piri battles the harsh, mean streets, but in the end he takes what he has learned through his experience with violence, race, love, drugs and sex, and uses it to answer his questions about identity and society. In doing so, Piri puts himself on a path to acceptance by acknowledging that he in fact is a dark man, rather than denying it.Momma Piri’s mother was born in Puerto Rico, and is still closely attached to her homeland. She has fair skin, unlike her husband and Piri. Piri and his mother have a close, solid relationship; they support and understand each other. She sees that Piri is struggling at school and getting into fights, but she doesn’t punish him for his actions. In fact, she lets Piri do what he wants, despite differences in opinion. The two of them have a special kind of love; one that Piri respects and cherishes. When Piri heads South with Brew, he learns that his mother is sick and in the hospital; when Piri returns to see her, she is in very critical condition and later dies.
Poppa Piri’s Cuban father has, like Piri, dark skin; both Piri and Poppa initially deny being dark, which is likely where Piri’s curiosity about race stems from in the first place. From a young age, Piri recognizes that his relationship with his father is different than that of his siblings; he believes that his father loves his siblings more than he loves him, and he attributes this lack of love to the fact that he is dark. From this young age, Piri goes out of his way to trigger a loving reaction from his father, but he is not always successful. They tend to get into heated arguments, and Piri tells his father how he feels. Piri often lashes out at his father; for example, when his mother dies, Piri is quick to unload his emotions onto him for having been with another woman. Despite their complicated relationship, at one point in the book, Piri’s father sympathizes with Piri, reassuring him that he knows how hard it is to have dark skin.
Trina Trina is Piri’s girlfriend whom he meets soon after she arrives in New York from Puerto Rico. Piri calls her his “Marine Tiger,” after the ship that carried Puerto Ricans to New York, and describes her as having “dark, curly hair, large black eyes, red mouth and a real down figure.” When Piri travels to the South, he tells Trina that he would write to her, and also tells her how much he likes her. Trina goes back to Puerto Rico because her mother was sick, and when she comes back she finds out that Piri has gotten another woman pregnant, she is angry. After Piri goes to prison, Trina meets and ends up marrying a white man. When Piri gets out of prison he goes to visit her, only to find that she has moved on and wants nothing to do with him anymore.
Brew:
Brew is one of Piri’s “tightest amigos.” He is described as “as black as God is supposed to be white.” Brew is upfront with Piri and expresses his opinions without hesitation; right from their very first meeting, Brew tells Piri that everyone has some kind of pain they struggle with and tends to disagree with Piri’s logic; he questions why Piri denies his blackness to such an extreme, claiming that Piri is a couple shades lighter than him, and even if he was lighter than that, he’d “still be a Negro.” Brew challenges Piri in new ways. He says that "too many Porto Ricans got your eyes closed,” and suggests that Puerto Ricans have social problems too. Brew also claims that Piri doesn’t have the level of understanding that he should have because he’s never been down South, and so they plan to both head down South together so that Piri can further explore race, ethnicity and identity. Piri feels comfortable opening up to Brew about his conflicts with identity.
Reception
Themes
Racial Identity
Racial identity is a prevalent topic in Down These Mean Streets. The book tells the story of Piri, a Puerto Rican black man, who has to navigate through a complex system of discrimination and racial prejudice in the USA. Piri’s story portrays the difficulty of navigating through different racial identities. He has a Latino identity because of his Puerto Rican origin. However, he also has a black identity because his physical features relate him directly with the black community. The conflicting positions of both identities put Piri in the difficult choice to affirm both identities in the strict racial binary formation of the US. Piri struggles in how he should identify himself in order to be accepted by his community. For the most part, he identifies himself only as a Puerto Rican, maybe because his "momma", who is from Puerto Rican ancestry affirmed this racial origin to Piri since he was a child.However, there is also the chance that Piri is aware of the privilege that the Latino heritage has in contrast to the black one. This awareness would have made Piri to use his Latino ancestry in order to prevent any discrimination that could arise because of his condition as a black man.better source
Race and gender
Down These Mean Streets explores how race and gender intersect and influence on the life of Piri Thomas. One indication of how this intersection is at play is where Piri embraces the “black macho” persona in an intent to adapt himself to the urban American landscape of New York. In this attempt, Piri appeals to the “hypermasculinized performance of black masculinity as an object of fear and desire.” This means that Piri has a dual sentiment toward the black macho persona. On one side, this archetype is something he rejects since he thinks that by accepting his black identity, he is denying his Puerto Rican heritage. But, on the other hand, this archetype is also desired by Piri, since this mold is the only one that will permit him to be accepted in the US binary racial culture. These both representations, that Piri either embraces or rejects, come from the very hierarchical racial structure that Piri attempts to navigate.Another perspective that this memoir permits to analyze in terms of race and gender, is how characters continually struggle against racial oppression at expense of women and queer subjects. The struggle in search of recognition makes not only Piri but also characters like his father, and Brew, to neglect women and impose chauvinistic attitudes that only hinders more women and queer folks into the hierarchical structure of the United States.
Thomas’s autobiography suggests a kind of heteropatriarchal privilege through the presence of sexual encounters between dominant and subordinate identities. It is paradoxical that while this book shows how Piri enjoys of his sexual encounters with women of color, white prostitutes, or queer people of color; those sexual encounters do not affect his internalized racism and sexism. In other words, these sexual contacts do not change Piri's mind, or other’s people minds about women, queers and queer people of color. Thomas’ testimonial story positions males as active and females as passive, enabling only to males subjects to invigorate their masculinity. Piri in Down These Mean Streets is a black heterosexual man, who redirects his struggle against his own racial discrimination and impose it on women and homosexual men. An example of this is how Piri and his black friend, Brew, make women and queer folks their sexual targets.
One key scene is where Piri and his friends go to buy weed from some transvestites. This scene is very ambiguous since it is difficult to say if the transvestites feminize Piri and his friends or vice versa. For instance, it could be argued that transvestites put Piri in a passive position since in this scene they are the clients, while Piri and his friends might be serving the role of prostitutes. The transvestites are the ones that as a mode of payment, provide liquor and marijuana in exchange of a sexual favor. The response of Piri to this scene is anxiety. Nervous about his feminization, Piri splits his mind from his body, allowing only his body to experience pleasure. On the other hand, in his imagination, he places himself and his friends far from this apartment, at a rooftop party where music, young women and rival gangs occupy the atmosphere.
Barroom Sociology (Chapter 18)
Chapter 18 of Down These Mean Streets is one of the most interesting, since it provides a provocative notion of racial discrimination and identity. In this chapter, Piri and Brew, has an encounter with another black man in a nightclub in Norfolk. This new man is Gerald Andrew West, a college student from Pennsylvania that is a light-skin African American Gerald introduces a very interesting topic into the conversation, a topic that for Piri is highly contested. Gerald complains that white people allow him only to be a negro, but negroes do not allow him to be white. Gerald perception of identity reflects that he sees race as a “burden.” He states that white men and black men have the burden of their own skins, respectively. However, he has the burden of both skins. Gerald believes in his “right to identify with whatever race or nationality approximates his emotional feelings and physical characteristics.” He is against essentialist view of race, that determines people’s identity only with regard to the color of their skin.On the other hand, Brew, who is a dark-skinned African American from Harlem, represents more the vision of “an angry black nationalists of the 1960s.” Brew believes that if you look like a negro, then you are one, and that there is no way you can escape this destiny. For Brew, the color of your skin is what determines your race. Piri is at the limbo, he is confused about his identity. But, while the social system continually blackens him, he admits to feeling identified as a Puerto Rican.
This chapter captures the underlying problem that Piri introduces in the whole book, the search for an identity. Some interpretations can be made with regard to this chapter. For instance, it can be said that Gerald’s research book about Blacks can be understood as the book that Piri himself ends writing, which permits Piri to resolve his own identity crisis. In the whole book, Piri struggles between being a Puerto Rican born and raised in New York and being a black man in the eyes of the US society. However, his identity crisis is resolved once Piri decides to write his memoir. Similarly, Gerald’s intention to research about the history and lives of black people in the South of the US, could be also seen as a way to reconcile his crisis of identity. In this way, Gerald’s decision to go to the South and research about Black would be a metaphor of Piri’s decision to write Down These Mean Streets.
Another interpretation of Piri’s decision to go to the South, sustains that Piri does so in order to know “what’s shaking” or what is happening down there. His trip to the South would have meant for Piri, an increase in his solidarity sentiment for Afro American people against white supremacy. This trip has also served him to reinforce his resistance toward the white and black binary that obliterates distinctive elements of his identity. So Piri’s trip to the South can be seen as a continuous struggle for the self-recognition of his own blackness.
Nuyorican Literature
The classification of Down These Mean Streets as one genre rather than another is a point of contention among literary critics—both from the time the autobiographical novel was initially released and in current academic discourse. Down These Mean Streets is a “book claimed by literary traditions, such as U.S. Latin literature or Hispanic literature of the U.S. and Puerto Rican literature written in English.” Anne Garland Mahler of the University of Virginia, on the other hand, classifies Down These Mean Streets as “an autobiography and bildungsroman that chronicles the childhood of Piri Thomas, a Harlem-born son of a Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban father, in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s.” Clearly, Down These Mean Streets fits all of these descriptions, depending on which point of view the critic takes in their analysis.Most commonly, however, Down These Mean Streets is recognized as part of the Nuyorican literary canon. Just as Nuyorican, which defines an entire canon of literature from over the past several decades, blends the linguistic rules of Spanish and English, it serves as a representation of multiple cultural traditions. Carmelo Esterrich states that “‘Nuyorican’ writing has always been caught in the critical crossfire between two national spaces—Puerto Rico and the U.S. and between their literary and linguistic borders.” With his brief description of the complexity of the Nuyorican canon, Down These Mean Streets, however, seems to fit neatly into place. It contains a great many Spanish words surrounded by an English narrative—so many that Thomas includes a glossary for his monolingual readers to uncover their meaning within the bilingual context of the narrative. The context of the origins of Nuyorican literature, Esterrich affirms, stems from “a very specific social and historical context of Puerto Rican migrations to the United States” which resulted in “the literary movement created in New York in the sixties and seventies by Puerto Ricans who were either born in the city or moved there when they were very young.”
The Nuyorican movement is based on a concept of hybridity of Puerto Rican and North American culture. In her analysis of race and gender within Thomas’ book, Marta Sánchez argues that Down These Mean Streets is “a hybrid text of testimonial and imaginative literature” which “initiated the nuyorican stage of continental Puerto Rican writing” to create a “cross-pollinated identity.” Thomas’ narrative includes, as Sánchez observes, “many subjects society stereotypically associates with Latino minorities: poverty, educational failure, gang membership, drug addiction, welfare, petty crime, sexual ‘perversity’, and prison life.” By attributing these stereotypes as themes within his narrative, Thomas establishes the North American context as the setting wherein his Puerto Rican heritage struggles to adapt. Moreover, Sánchez states that Thomas “rejected the paradigms of black or white that dominated the period when Down These Mean Streets was published by generating intercultural linkages among Anglo-Americans, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans years before the concepts of hybridity, heterogeneity, and difference gained academic and social repute.” At the time it was first published, in the late 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was well underway. However, Down These Mean Streets overlaps the cultural division of Black and White that was the societal norm of the time. Thomas’ narrative tells of experiences that straddled multiple racial and cultural identities: his father was Black and his mother White; his parents were Cuban and Puerto Rican, respectively, which didn’t clearly fit the niches carved out by North American society. As Piri Thomas states in an interview with Ilan Stavans, “lthough I was born in el norte my soul is Puerto Rican.”
Down These Mean Streets is seen by many scholars to be a foundational work of the Nuyorican literary canon. Thomas has been described as “the best known of his generation of writers and is generally considered the chronicler of the barrio since he was the first to describe his experiences as a second-generation Puerto Rican in the United States.” Indeed, Ilan Stavans notes that Down These Means Streets is “now considered a classic and has never been out of print.”
In another interview, with Lisa McGill, Thomas himself admits “I was one of the first Puerto Rican writers in the U.S. to write about the conditions we were living under. Other Puerto Ricans wrote, but they wrote about Puerto Rico and their home. I wrote about what was happening to us—or at least to me—and the surroundings in those years.” Further on, McGill asks Thomas of his opinions on the term ‘Nuyorican’ and how his book has thus been categorised. Thomas replies, saying “I didn’t want to be categorised. With Nuyorican I was given a name. I really wanted to be a citizen of the world. I wanted to be free because all of my life they were putting me in categories”. When asked if he has since become comfortable with this term, he again replies “No, it’s like when you buy a pair of shoes. If you want to wear those shoes, you wear those shoes. Everyone has accepted Nuyorican, so I just go along with it.”
Critic Regina Bernard-Carreño states that “Nuyorican biographies, novels and poetry, spoke directly to misrepresentations of a people and their anti-colonial struggle. An important factor in Puerto Rican immigrant writing and the Nuyorican experience is the articulation of difference and anger . Puerto Rican writing exposes anger towards Americanization and assimilation”, just as Thomas does in his book. Bernard-Carreño also aserts that “Nuyorican writing became the genre that included the dynamics of language, bicultural identity, and the sociopolitics contained therein. While all these dynamics inform Nuyorican writing, language is perhaps one of the critical constructors of the Nuyorican experience and identity…Nuyorican identity became its own culture composed of bicultural and bilingual people.”
Censorship
Down These Mean Streets has either been banned or challenged in Salinas, California; Teaneck, NJ; Darien, CT; District 25 in Queens, New York City, New York; and in Long Island, New York.According to Regina Bernard-Carreño, “Piri’s Puerto-Ricanness brought him success and enough of an insider perspective to have his book banned by the New York City Board of Education during the 1960s. Due to its explicit depiction of homosexual and heterosexual acts between and among people of color, who are impoverished and live in a ‘ghetto’ full of drugs and other downfalls, Down These Mean Streets was yanked from junior high school libraries in 1971.” While for modern eyes, Down These Mean Streets provides a raw account of life in El Barrio, at the time of its first publication in the late 1960s, the subject matter of homosexual sex acts and sexual interaction between races was taboo. Bernard-Carreño later explains that Thomas’ book has since been “used as a major ‘classic’ in courses of anthropology and sociology and excerpted in English literature courses as well” and that Thomas’ writing style categorised Puerto Ricans “through a literary and non-traditional academic lens” which was, perhaps, too contemporary for its time of initial publication.
An article from the New York Times 9 May 1971, “Book Ban Splits a Queens School District”, describes a passion-fueled debate at board meeting of Community School District 25 in a neighborhood in Queens County, New York, which lasted nearly five and a half hours. The article reports that there are some who seem to perceive a threat to their social values, specifically because the portrayal of New York’s Puerto Rican community in Down These Mean Streets includes “vulgarities and descriptions of sexual acts.” One parent at this meeting stated that she felt Down These Mean Streets “is a beautiful book—full of feelings” and that she views the book as “a learning tool he author was willing to expose his gut feelings so we could better understand the problems he faced. It promotes understanding.” Another parent, on the other hand, stated that she wanted her children “to have social awareness and I want them to know what they can do to correct social ills. But they are not ready to be exposed to sexual perversion .” Meanwhile, the article presents the position of the United Federation of Teachers, who “fought the ban and has requested the New York Civil Liberties Union to initiate litigation to remove it.”
In an interview, Thomas acknowledges that Down These Mean Streets “was censored all over the place.” Specifically, Thomas mentions Darien, Connecticut where a bond was issued unless the book was removed from town’s shelves. Thomas continues, stating that the censorship was due to a worry that it “was going to poison the children’s minds.” While speaking at a college in Darien, Thomas said, “Listen, you can’t keep your kids in a greenhouse. This is the reality of what’s happening.”