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Interlude 2 la mal inch e : shuffling th e pue rto rican borde r in spanish and black harlem By the 1940s1 African Americans and Puerto Ricans had settled in communities in New York and were living adjacent to each other in Harlem.2 Piri Thomas’s parents, for example, came to New York, as did many others, in the early 1920s, after the United States granted citizenship status to Puerto Ricans in 1917, facilitating movement between the island and the mainland. Many Puerto Rican families arrived by steamship, whose lines had a terminus in New York.3 As a result of Operation Bootstrap4 and the development of the modern airline industry, the numbers of Puerto Ricans increased substantially in New York and other cities where African Americans also had migrated: Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. Down These Mean Streets was the first Puerto Rican narrative to bring these two ethnic groups into the same cultural and literary space. In Down These Mean Streets Thomas tugged on the threads that bind the Puerto Ricans of East Harlem and the African Americans living in adjacent Black Harlem. Chapter 17, “Gonna Find Out What’s Shakin’,” unravels one thread of this special relationship. Here Thomas describes an encounter between Piri and two African Americans, Brewster (Brew) Johnson and Alayce, Brew’s girlfriend. At the heart of this chapter stand the personal testimonies of Brew and Alayce.5 Piri is a witness to Brew’s and Alayce’s “spoken” testimonies; he is a brown voyeur into blackness. Before hearing from Brew and Alayce about the torture inflicted on their black bodies, their flesh and blood, Piri observes a picture of a long-haired, kneeling, supplicant Christ. The testimonies of Brew and Alayce and Piri’s reading of the pictorial image of the suffering Jesus represent one of the many contact zones in this Puerto Rican text. This particular contact zone occurs in the middle of the book’s narrative progress, between the episode in which Piri and his “boys” are duped by the Puerto Rican male transves- 56 “Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender tites and the book’s culminating episode of Piri’s conversion in Comstock Prison. Here I want to show how this Puerto Rican text enters into an intercultural relationship with African Americans and also how it offers a different way to look at the conventional troping of La Malinche in this intercultural context. Whereas the Pazian view has the trope stand for an active but negative agent (La Malinche) or passive victim (La Chingada), my reading of what happens in this scene shows how those coded as destructive agents or passive victims may be seen as agents with affirmative power. Paz moored his female La Malinche to three main areas: an anatomical female body, Mexican and Chicano cultures,6 and a dominant Spanish versus a subdominant Indian hierarchical arrangement of social power. Using the fact that malinche is gender-neutral (equally applicable to men and women), I shake up Paz’s neat definition of the La Malinche trope as uniquely Mexican and feminine by casting Piri in the role of a Puerto Rican male malinche. Piri shares a cardinal feature of the La Malinche trope: he is a cultural liaison who negotiates not only in the classic malinche way—between dominant and subdominant (Anglo and Puerto Rican in this case)—but also between subdominant and subdominant (African American and Puerto Rican). Casting Piri, a male boricua (a person from Puerto Rico), as a malinche go-between enables me to upset Paz’s argument on three levels: (1) it recontextualizes the M/malinche trope by locating it in Puerto Rican and African American situations, freeing it from the Mexican and Chicano contexts to which Paz tied it; (2) it loosens Paz’s strict divide between dominant and subdominant; and (3) it disarms his apparently airtight separation, male ⫽ active and female ⫽ passive, the bedrock equation of his analysis. Speaking in African American vernacular, Brew and Alayce recount stories of the racial and sexual atrocities they experienced in the apartheid South, before coming to Harlem. Brew’s sexuality is almost compromised by a close call with rape (a case of attempted sodomy) in his hometown near Mobile, Alabama (143), but his story ends triumphantly as he overpowers his tormentors. Alayce’s story also involves the double jeopardy of race and sex; however, hers ends tragically: she resisted a gang rape but lost the fight to maintain her sexual and bodily integrity...

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