Shakin' Up Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995)

Chapter 2: La Malinche at the Intersection of Puerto Rican and African American Cultures: Piri Thomas and Down These Mean Streets

Two la mal inch e at the inte rsection of puerto r ican an d african am e rican cultures: piri thomas and down thes e mean streets In the prologue to Down These Mean Streets, the Puerto Rican protagonist stands on a tenement rooftop looking over Spanish Harlem . Exploding with frustration, feeling rage in his blood and bones, he cries out against a world that refuses to take note of his existence. Down These Mean Streets is Piri’s cri de coeur. He is so invisible to people outside Spanish Harlem that he is not even, as a Puerto Rican, taboo—a sign of danger to whites, a threat—as are his black American friends. Through the persona of Piri, the Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas, in his novelized autobiography, attempts to correct this invisibility.1 He speaks out as a Puerto Rican man, but he also sees himself and his community in explicit relation to African American, Native American, and Puerto Rican (Taíno) Indian, and ethnic white cultures, for example, Italian American and Irish American. In Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas intervenes in a dichotomized black/white racial space. Although Manchild in the Promised Land was published two years before Down These Mean Streets, I have chosen to discuss the latter first because I want to stress the importance of conceptualizing the United States as an intercultural nation, rather than a black and white space.Down These Mean Streets is a more appropriate text to initiate my discussion about intercultural literature because it explicitly generates interracial linkages. Feeling caged inside the black/white division—“hung up between two sticks” (130)—Piri expresses his intercultural wish: “If there’s anything in between [white and black], and it makes me belong, then that’s what I want” (164). I intend to mobilize the intercultural elements in this text by focusing on sexuality and gender.2 Midway through Down These Mean Streets, in a chapter wittily titled “Barroom Sociology,” Thomas showcases three unhappy and angry men. One is, of course, our hero Piri, a U.S.-born, dark-skinned mulatto of Puerto Rican descent traveling from Spanish Harlem to the Deep South La Malinche at the Intersection of Cultures 41 with his African American buddy, Brew. Brew is from Black Harlem, and he knows firsthand the trauma of racial oppression. Brew sometimes adopts the bravura of an angry black nationalist of the 1960s. Piri and Brew cross the Mason-Dixon line, and in a nightclub bar they encounter the third fellow, an African American named Gerald who, unlike Piri and Brew, is college educated and light-skinned. Gerald unabashedly admits to “passing” for a Puerto Rican to take “the next step to white” (191). He is bothered that whites allow him to be “Negro” but that “Negroes” do not allow him to be white. Brew openly scorns Gerald because he claims Puerto Rican heritage and demeans his Negro ancestry. In a voice with a threatening edge, Brew taunts him, “What kinda Negro is yuh?” (187). Piri speaks both English and Spanish, but he does not know if he is “Negro” or “Puerto Rican.” For the time being, he has decided to accept the gaze of the social system that blackens him and declares himself—momentarily at least—a “Negro” man. Brew is certain that Piri is “Negro”: no matter how much Piri “rattle[s] off some different kinda language don’ change [his] skin one bit” (132). Brew, however, considers Gerald an elitist -sounding “[d]amn p’lite prissy” (186). After several drinks, the tension rises, especially between Gerald and Brew, until Gerald caps the argument by articulating the central issue faced by this unusual social mix of men: “So I ask you, if a white man can be a Negro if he has some Negro blood in him, why can’t a Negro be a white man if he has white blood in him?” (189). Though obsessed with the unfairness of the black/white binary, Piri and Brew are befuddled by Gerald’s question. They retreat from the strained conversation and focus instead on what is for them unambiguous terrain: the traditional repository of sexuality and gender. With Lady Day (the jazz vocalist Billie Holiday) singing from a jukebox in the nightclub background, Brew shifts his attention from “prissy” Gerald and proposes to Piri that they go looking for women: “Le’s go see what pussy’s...