Fractured Heart: Locating Puerto Rican Identity and Masculinity in Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets
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2015
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Piri Thomas’ autobiography Down These Mean Streets grapples with the difficulty of selffashioning an identity against a national neglect of Puerto Rican heritage and the pressures of the impoverished street culture of Harlem. Many critics have approached the autobiography by focusing solely on Thomas’ race or masculinity. This essay considers how Thomas unpacks the fractured nature of Puerto Rican identity by examining his usage of movement through space as a guiding structure to emphasize his resistance towards misidentification. I employ the notion of critical geographies and the bildungsroman, or coming of age story, in order to establish Harlem as the text’s epicenter and highlight Thomas’ resistance towards the essentialist racial climates he enters. In addition, I apply Fanon’s theory of the abandonment neurosis to foreground a discussion of the Thomas family’s repressed racial shame and Thomas’ triangulated relationships. Both Fanon and Thomas’s own articulation of his cara palo, or deadpan expression, demonstrate how his racial anxieties inform his hyper masculine performance, resulting in the selfshattering of the subject denied recognition. Thomas’ autobiography ultimately presents a fractured Puerto Rican identity, cocooned under racial marginalization, familial ostracism, and selfdestructive code of the streets. This essay considers how this autobiography disrupts the literary silencing of Nuyoricans, Puerto Ricans, Barrio denizens, and people of color alike.