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... any struggling with unemployment while Piri was growing up, and he was forced to work for the federal governments Works Progress Administration digging ditches for menial wages in the wintertime. Despite the fact that Piri's parents were extremely hard working, they remained poverty-stricken, as did most Puerto Rican migrants in the 1930 s, 40 s, and 50 s. During the time of the depression, the Thomas family was hit very hard, migrants being the first ones to be laid off in tough times and being paid the lowest of wages. Piri Thomas captures his family's impossible situation when he retells his fathers return from work on a typical day. His father recalls, "It was not always like this Its all the fault of the damn depression. " (Thomas 11) Thomas writes, My father kept talking to the walls.
Some of the words came out loud, others stayed inside. I caught the inside ones the damn WPA, the damn depression, the damn home relief, the damn poorness, the damn cold, the damn crummy apartments, the damn look on his damn kids, living so damn damned and his not being able to do a damn thing about it. (Thomas 11) Later in the book, things get slightly better when Mr. Thomas gets a short-lived job working in an airplane factory during World War II. Thomas comments on the ironic nature of these events by saying, "Things were looking up for us, but it had taken a damn war to do it. A lousy rumble had to get called so we could start to live better. I thought, How do you figure this crap out?" (Thomas 13) After the close of the war, Piri's father loses his factory job and goes back to work for the WPA.
Eventually he loses this job and the Thomas family is forced to go on home relief. Piri's mother asks Piri to skip school and go with her to the Home Relief Office because, like many first-generation migrants, she has trouble negotiating the language barrier. Thomas writes this of the experience, "Most of the people were Puerto Ricans and Negroes It seemed that every mother had brought a kid to interpret for her. " (Thomas 42) Thomas sums up the prideful nature that these Puerto Rican migrants maintain even in such needy times. He describes their pleading as "taking with outstretched hands and resenting it in the same breath. " (Thomas 43) Piri Thomas expresses how his family had to shop in second-hand clothing stores and how they were so poor that, as a youngster, he would sell cans of Home Relief corned beef to the pet-shop owner in exchange for pigeons which his mother would cook for meals. Aside from the poverty that young Piri Thomas is forced to endure, he also becomes deeply confused about his identity while he is growing up. Piri is discriminated against for being of Spanish descent and receives even further prejudice because he is a dark-skinned negrito.
A common thread for Puerto Rican migrants is identity confusion, because although they are considered Americans, they are often not accepted as such. "Since a great many Puerto Ricans are of mixed Spanish and African descent, they have had to endure the same sort of racial discrimination often experienced by African Americans. And some Puerto Ricans are further handicapped by the Spanish-to-English language barrier in American cities. " (Green 1132) Piri Thomas becomes increasingly alienated from white American society as he meets racism over and over again in his daily life. He attends a suburban high school on Long Island, and because of his dark complexion, wooly hair, and flat nose, he is considered black and is, therefore, ostracized by his classmates. He is turned down for a job as a door-to-door salesman while his white-looking friend, with the same qualifications, is hired.
When Piri travels down south with a friend of his, he is not permitted to eat in a whites-only restaurant. These are just a few of the incidents that Piri encounters in his daily struggle to get by in a racist country. Aside from the discrimination that Piri faces in the outside world, prejudice proliferates his own home as well. "Piri's growing realization that he will face prejudice all his life, a sobering experience for anyone, is rendered all the more painfully by the fact that neither his white mother nor his lighter-complexioned siblings can truly share in this experience: The color line cleaves Piri's own family. " (Magill 126) Piri feels rejected by his dark-skinned father who, as he sees it, favors the younger siblings because they are light-skinned. Thomas clarifies the relationship he has with his father through a mental conversation. He asks, Pops, I wondered, how come me and you is always on the outs? Is it something we dont know nothing about?
I wonder if its something I done, or something I am. Why do I feel so left outta things with you like Moms is both of you to me, like if you and me was just an accident around here? I dig when you holler at the other kids for doing something wrong. How come it sounds different when you holler at me? Why does it sound harder and meaner? How come when we all play with you, I cant really enjoy it like the rest?
How come when we all get hit for doing something wrong, I feel it the hardest? Maybe cause Im the biggest, huh? Or maybe because Im the darkest in this family? (Thomas 22) Piri Thomas begins to internalize much of the societal discrimination he is forced to deal with and the favoritism he experiences in his own home and he begins to struggle within himself. He writes, I wondered if it was too mean to hate your brothers a little for looking white like Momma.
I felt my hair thick, black, and wiry. Mentally I compared my hair with my brothers hair I felt my nose mentally I measured it against my brothers, whose noses were sharp, straight, and placed neat-like in the middle of their paddy fair faces. Why did this have to happen to me? Why couldnt I be born like them? I felt sort of chicken- censored thinking like that. I felt shame creep into me.
It wasnt right to be ashamed of what one was. It was like hating Momma for the color she was and Poppa for the color he wasnt. (Thomas 121) Faced with extreme poverty, societal discrimination, and familial alienation, Piri Thomas turns to street life for comfort and some consistent value system. Young Puerto Rican migrants, including second and third generation ones, characteristically turn to street life and gangs because of the wide array of difficult issues facing them. In fact, "despite the presumed advantages of American citizenship, Puerto Ricans are overall- the most economically disadvantaged Latino group in the United States. Puerto Rican communities in urban areas are plagued by problems such as crime, drug-use, poor educational opportunity, unemployment, and the breakdown of the traditionally strong Puerto Rican family structure. " (Green 1132) The value system that Thomas turns to in the streets can best be explained by the Hispanic cultural phenomenon known as machismo, which translates essentially into an "insistent maleness"; a constant display of "heart" and courage in the face of the most dangerous risky situations. (Stern 1) "This can lead a boy to a sense of his own worth or to drugs and jail. " (Stern 1) Piri and his friends are well aware that in their world one can never "punk-out", whether that means shooting up heroin, impregnating a virtual stranger, or committing armed robbery, all of which Piri did unquestioningly. Thomas explains, in very simplistic terms, the way in which he saw the world by stating, "Whether youre right or wrong, as long as youre strong, youre right. " (Thomas 118) Piri's world consists entirely of violence, drug-abuse, crime and casual sex, and it seems that there is absolutely no other way for him.
Thomas says this of himself and his situation, I am a skinny, dark-face, curly-haired, intense Party-Ree-can- Unsatisfied, hoping, and always reaching. I got a feeling of aloneness and a bitterness thats growing and growing Day by day into some kind of hate without un nombre the streets below [are] like a great big dirty Christmas tree with lights but no censored in presents And I begin to listen to the sounds inside me. Get angry, get hating angry, and you wont be scared. What have you got now? Nothing.
What will you ever have? Nothing Unless you cop it for yourself! (Thomas x) A critic of Down These Mean Streets puts it eloquently when he describes this urban street value system as "a trial by ordeal that American society devises when it challenges a boy to feel like a man while hes up to his neck in the muck that is thrown at him" (Bendiner 283). Piri Thomas, through his own personal experiences and tough trials and in his own abrasive street slang, vividly depicts the life of a typical Puerto Rican migrant surviving against all odds. Piri Thomas book "presents a life differing little from that of hundreds of thousands of boys who grew up and continue to grow up under similar conditions" (Aldrich 17). "As a black Puerto Rican he speaks for the negritos of this world, as well as for those captive Americans of Spanish descent and tradition, the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem In speaking for the black as well as for the poor and alien, he speaks for all who are buried alive in a society that troubles itself only minimally with its inarticulate miserable, its humiliated, its defeated and self-defeating. " (Stern 4? X@ A A B B F /F QJ ZJ J 9 K EK ]K iK K RN Zm H 0 J j 0 J U CJ H 6 CJ CJ CJ O - " 1; , -? / @/ 4: : ? ? X@ B B E r? / @/ 4: : ? ?
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Research essay sample on Piri Thomas Down These Mean Streets
