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2 “Puerto Rican Negro” Defining Race in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets In Latino Crossings, Nicholas De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas recount a joke “that was circulating among Mexican migrants in Chicago in the spring of 1997”: It is the time of the Mexican Revolution, and Pancho Villa’s army has just captured an invading U.S. regiment; addressing his lieutenants, Pancho Villa gives the order: “Take all the Americans [americanos]—shoot them, kill them; the Blacks [morenos] and Puerto Ricans—just let them go.” The lieutenants are confused and dismayed: “What?! What are you saying?!? But why??” Coolly, Pancho Villa replies, “Don’t waste the bullets—they’ll all just die of hunger—because here, there’s no welfare.” (76) Although hegemonic U.S. culture generally assumes that Latinos see themselves as a single group—or at least as having very strong ties among the subgroups —De Genova and Ramos-Zayas maintain that very often Puerto Ricans and Mexicans (at least in Chicago) have seen themselves in opposition and even marked antagonism to each other. As they note, “the inequalities generated through the politics of citizenship”—for instance, Puerto Ricans’ access to “welfare” programs that were not available to Mexican immigrant noncitizens—“became particularly salient for Mexicans’ and Puerto Ricans’ understandings of the differences between one another, as groups, in ways that ultimately came to be quite forcefully racialized” (27). These racialized identities, of course, have a history in U.S. colonizing efforts and attendant policies toward Mexico and Puerto Rico. As De Genova and Ramos-Zayas recount of historical debates about the possible colonization of Mexico by the United States, “the position that finally prevailed against the proposition to colonize all of Mexico was that articulated by Michigan senator Lewis Cass, who declared, ‘We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where inhabited at all, sparsely so, and with a population, which would soon recede [by which he meant Indians], or identify itself with ours [by which he meant those who could be considered whites]’” 52 On Latinidad (12; Horsman 241, qtd. in De Genova 12; bracketed phrases in original). The hegemonic U.S. perspective routinely considered Mexicans to be largely “‘savage ’ or ‘barbarous’ Indians” (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 13). By contrast, “Puerto Rico [. . .] was widely characterized as being populated by a ‘hybrid’ people produced principally from the racial mixing of Spaniards and Africans, a significant portion of whom, furthermore, were considered to be simply Black” (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 14). We can see the Mexican American acceptance and revision of this racial construction in the joke that opens this chapter, in which Puerto Ricans are dramatically opposed to Mexicans (by the Mexicans) and linked, instead, to blacks.1 In De Genova and Ramos-Zayas’s findings, “Mexicans and Puerto Ricans viewed themselves as racially distinct from one another” (27), rather than as the “same” people. Piri Thomas’s classic Puerto Rican autobiography Down These Mean Streets (1967), published five years before Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, shares with that Chicano novel the theme of racial denial. Like Antonio in Ultima, the protagonist of Mean Streets (whom I will call “Piri” to distinguish him from the author, “Thomas”) must learn the “lessons” of racial identity suppressed by his family and its narrated myths of origin, no doubt in a defensive move against precisely the racial construction outlined above. In their place, he comes to embrace a construction of Puerto Rican racial identity that acknowledges a common “peoplehood” with African Americans. (In this respect, Thomas’s writing can also be grouped with that of Nuyorican poets of the 1960s and 1970s such as Felipe Luciano and Miguel Algarín, who—as William Luis points out—thematized “the important African component of Puerto Rican culture, race, and identity” [68].) Yet this perceived commonality based on racial identity, arguably , also appears in many ways to be racially essentialist (as the Chicano celebration of “raza” can also seem to be in retrospect). William Luis, in his discussion of Down These Mean Streets, has noted that the Young Lords Party’s 13-Point Program and Platform, which appeared in the late sixties, included an insistence on Puerto Rican solidarity with Chicanos , based on experiences of common marginalization: We Want Self-Determination for All Latinos. Our Latin Brothers and Sisters, inside and outside the united states [sic], are...

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