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pre lude All the faces are brown, tinged with brown, lightly brown, the feeling of brown. — oscar zeta acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo Langston Hughes wrote what became his most famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” on a train trip from St. Louis, Missouri , to Mexico.1 In this poem, Hughes mentions the Mississippi, the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile, a gesture, I believe, to situate African Americans within international culture. Although he does not name the Rio Grande in the poem, Hughes crossed this river many times on his travels to and from Mexico. These frequent crossings suggest that Hughes’s experiential relationships extended to Mexico and the Southwest and that these territories for him were more than touristic geography. Hughes writes in his autobiography, The Big Sea, that on one of his many train trips between the two countries—in this case from Mexico into Texas—some white Americans mistook him for “Mexican.” Hughes’s self-description might provide a clue why: “I am of a copper-brown complexion , with black hair that can be made quite slick and shiny if it has enough pomade on it in the Mexican fashion” (50). When he arrived in San Antonio, where he was to change trains, this African American turned saboteur of taken-for-granted racial indicators that he knew would consign him to Jim Crow waiting rooms. He emphasized one of the many stereotypes already banked in the U.S. popular imagination for Mexicans —the “greasy” hair. He added another characteristic to make himself more convincing to his “white” audience: he ordered his ticket in Spanish and reserved a comfortable Pullman berth for the journey home to Cleveland. Most important, Spanish was a language that would set him far enough from “Negro” to allow him to pass for “Mexican.” In other words, xiv “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender “Mexican,” even in the 1920s, contained an ambiguity that would bring him, in the perception of those around him, closer to “white.” Hughes felt compelled to perform an identity “trick,” to perform an intercultural2 transaction, in order to pass as “Mexican,” so that he might claim in his native country the equal rights enjoyed by “white” people. This anecdote about Hughes intrigues me because it concerns an African American’s surpassing the black/white binary3 of white supremacy, not by rising above it or dismissing it but by confronting it head-on and working through it in an intercultural contact zone.4 Hughes was able to play up his appearance as a “Mexican-looking” man in Texas because of the state’s history encompassing Mexican, Native, Anglo, and African Americans. In 1845 the United States conducted its invasion of Mexico, at least in part to satisfy the interests of those who would extend the enslavement of the black population in the Texas territory, at that time owned by Mexico, in which Mexicans and Native Americans were the indigenous peoples. In this historical contact zone, more than half a century after the U.S.Mexico war, Hughes created imaginative and real cross-cultural meaning the day he took advantage of the ambiguity offered him in a “Mexican” identity. He “shook up” the one-drop theorem and drew a line to connect African American and Mexican American peoples, bringing both into a simultaneous conjuncture of belonging. In this book I use a key Puerto Rican literary text, Down These Mean Streets (1967), to link three literary cultures—Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano—at the time of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Down These Mean Streets is an autobiographical novel by Piri Thomas and the point of departure or metaphor of my book. Although not as well known to a general audience in the United States as Hughes, Thomas knew as well as Hughes that racial identification was a messy business. A New York–born writer, he captures in Down These Mean Streets what it meant to be an adolescent, Puerto Rican male on the U.S. mainland in the 1940s. Thomas’s protagonist, like the author,5 was born in a Harlem hospital in 1928, twenty-six years after the birth of Hughes, and he grew up in East (or Spanish) Harlem, the Puerto Rican neighborhood adjacent to Black Harlem. Outside his home “turf” of East Harlem, the autobiographical and fictional character, also named Piri, was called every name in the racist lexicon for black people because he was dark-skinned, had nappy hair...

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