Gerald and Thomas: The Subtext within the Text in Down These Mean Streets

Abstract

I consider myself Un negrito, and I also have blood of Taino, as well as blood of conquerors, Spanish, and Other Europeans along way. Piri Thomas In New York City's Spanish Harlem--el barrio--in 1960s and 1970s, guessing was only way Puerto Ricans could figure out their culture and history. In his introduction to Boricuas (1995), Roberto Santiago points out that school was place where they learned about everyone else except themselves. They learned about Fourth of July and how United States was founded by English people who proclaimed that, in this nation, all men were created equal. They learned about how Europeans shared dinner with Indians on Thanksgiving. They learned about Christianity and how people who hold Christian values treated one another with love and respect. They learned about environment and how important it was to keep air and water clean. But who they were as a people was never a consideration; it was a question that seldom entered their minds. Every other group - Italians, Irish, Jews, African-Americans - seemed to have an idea who they were (xiii-xiv). By looking for an idea of what a Puerto Rican is, Down These Mean Streets (1967) is journey of Piri Thomas, a black-skinned Puerto Rican, from hatred of everything or white-like to a more complex understanding of race. Down These Mean Streets is a hybrid text of testimonial and imaginative literature, initiating Nuyorican stage of continental Puerto Rican writing. In this novelized autobiography, Thomas deals with many of issues society stereotypically associates with Latino minorities: poverty, educational failure, gang membership, drug addiction, welfare, petty crime, sexual perversity, and prison life (Sanchez 118-19). Thomas tells reader not only how poverty in ghetto leads him to drugs, youth gangs, and a series of criminal activities for which he will serve seven years in prison, but also how he faces a racism that he does not understand. Thomas's autobiographical account corresponds to category of radicalized African-American works, such as Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965) and Elridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1967), emerging at time as a reaction to perceived shortcomings of non-violent Civil Rights Movements of fifties and early sixties (Hiraldo 88). Besides African-American literary tradition, Down These Mean Streets is also a book claimed by other literary traditions, such as U.S. Latino/a literature or Hispanic literature of U.S. and Puerto Rican literature written in English. (1) The categorization of Thomas's literary production as an African-American, U.S. Latino, or Puerto Rican exceeds any classification, making reader consider it as something more universal that transcends borders, literary traditions, and time as it might present or deal with issues concerning these societies back then or today. (2) The aim of this paper is to study Chapter 18 (Barroom Sociology) of Down These Mean Streets as a subtext that constructs Piri Thomas's autobiographical account rhetorically. In this chapter, Thomas writes of an encounter among three men - including himself - in a nightclub in South: Gerald Andrew West is a college-educated light-skinned African-American from Pennsylvania who is passing for a Puerto Rican to make, he says, the next step to white (191). He complains that whites allow him to be Negro, but Negroes do not allow him to be white. The second man, Brew, is a dark-skinned African-American from Harlem who talks talk of an angry black nationalist of 1960s. He asks Gerald, [W]hat kinda Negro is yuh? (187). The third man, Piri, an angry and confused dark-skinned Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, is passing for Negro, accepting gaze of a social system that blackens him. By narrating Piri's encounter with Gerald in his trip to Dixie, I will show that this chapter frames writing of Thomas's autobiography both at a formal level and a content level, since Thomas ends up writing story that Gerald proposes to write: a book on situation of black men (or Afro-Caribbean men, in case of Piri) and of his experience in South (or in New York City). …