In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

introduction: intercultural connections 1. the players In the prelude, I began with two anecdotes—one about Langston Hughes, another about Piri Thomas—in the spirit of inviting my readers to entertain connections among continental Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano (Mexican American) cultures.1 These three cultures are the points of the intercultural triangle that this book aims to build. Since new populations took their place in the citadel of higher education in the 1970s and 1980s, a period in higher education that stands out for its “diversification,”2 these cultures have been locked into separate domains, so that a pattern of relation to each other and to yet other cultures has remained in the background of intellectual inquiry. My objective is to make visible through literature a fuller picture of the interculturalism —the complex movement and interplay—among these three so-called minority3 cultures during the years they began to emerge into our national consciousness. I aim to show hidden yet real ties that connect ethnic peoples of color to each other and to white ethnic peoples in a shared intercultural history.4 Interculturalism is the theme of this book. The beginning of the second phase of the Civil Rights movement (1965) and the formal closure of the war in Vietnam and the beginning of Watergate (1973) frame the period of this study. This sliver of history is a crucial turning point in the development of these three cultural groups and of the United States as a whole. Events since 1973 allow me to see sets of relationships in literature and history that were not visible, or as visible, then or immediately thereafter. New generations and new audiences have asked new questions, brought to the fore new understandings and approaches, proposed and pursued different ways to think about race and gender, ethnicity and sexuality, that make it possible to revisit this period with fresh eyes. More accurately, then, the span of this book encompasses more than 2 “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender eight years: it is a retrospective of 1965 to 1973 from the perspective of the past thirty years. I engage Chicano, African American, and Puerto Rican cultures in conversation by way of three literary narratives—one from each of the three cultures and all published between 1965 and 1973. Down These Mean Streets (1967) by the Puerto Rican Piri Thomas, Manchild in the Promised Land (1965) by the African American Claude Brown, and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) by the Chicano Oscar Zeta Acosta are my windows for viewing clusterings of these cultures. I use these narratives to shake up the compartmentalization that keeps Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano cultures apart in the historical record. It is in this spirit that I have used the expression “shakin’ up” in my book’s title, a motif I take from a chapter inDown These Mean Streets, “Gonna Find Out What’s Shakin’.” Down These Mean Streets was a unique text for its time because it made explicit interracial linkages when the dominant trend in ethnic cultural movements was toward singular identities. I take Down These Mean Streets to represent the first moment of the intercultural approach to literature and culture that I am committed to validate. It is the paradigmatic text of my book. In history’s public record, the relationship of the three ethnic groups of color—Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and Chicanos—to white ethnic groups, the “dominant” cultures—is arranged along a subdominant to dominant axis. In chapter 1, I show how each ethnic group of color, for example, is keyed to a particular prominent and public intellectual who wrote what I call narratives of “family” about them: the Mexican Octavio Paz and his landmark book of essays on Mexican culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude, is linked to Chicanos;5 the Irish American Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his influential government document on the black American family, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (more simply called “the Moynihan report”), is tied to African Americans; and the Jewish American Oscar Lewis’s best-selling ethnographic “life stories,” La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York, about an extended Puerto Rican family, is associated with island and continental Puerto Ricans. Our way of organizing the study of these cultures has been to maintain these dual and hierarchical—subdominant /dominant—relationships. Although the ideas these thinkers proposed about these populations were part of a broader...

Share