“It Was Like He Was Writing My Life”: How Ethnic Identity Affected One Family’s Interpretation of an Afro Latinx Text

My research explored an African American and Puerto Rican family’s responses to the text Down These Mean Streets (2016), written by and about a dark-skinned Puerto Rican named Piri Thomas. I designed this research to explore the ways Afro Latinx readers in the Velez family found relevance in a text written by a dark-skinned Latinx author based on their own individualized racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural identities; in what ways their individual textual interpretations compared to those of other members of the same family; and how reading a text written by and about someone of similar racial/ethnic identity affected each reader’s own identity formation. The counter-stories provided by my family and the autoethnographic information about myself were used to interrupt the dominant narrative of a lack of early literacy among Hispanic families and add diverse perspectives to existing understandings of reader response theory. While it is important to foreground issues of race and racism in reader response analysis, I suggest an intersectional approach that incorporates multiple identities. Results suggest that while there were individual differences in how readers interpreted the text, most family members felt cultural validation after reading the text and experienced pride in the family tradition of the book being passed from father to child.