Down These Mean Streets
by Piri Thomas
Growing up dark-skinned and Puerto Rican in Spanish Harlem.
For you if
you want to understand race in America through someone caught between every category it offers
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Thomas grew up in East Harlem in the 1940s and 50s — Puerto Rican, dark-skinned, belonging neither to the Black world nor the white one, claiming the streets because nothing else would claim him. Drugs, prison, the specific violence of a boy trying to build an identity from the fragments America left him. He wrote this in 1967 and it changed how New York understood its own Puerto Rican community. The rawest dispatch on this shelf — unmediated, furious, alive on every page. The book that gave Spanish Harlem its own literary voice.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Puerto Rico • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Puerto Rican author
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