Down These Mean Streets
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| Author | Piri Thomas |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Published | 1967 |
Down These Mean Streets is a memoir by Piri Thomas, a Latino of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in El Barrio (aka Spanish Harlem), a section of Harlem that has a large Puerto Rican population. The book follows Piri as he goes through the first few decades of his life, lives in poverty, joins and fights with street gangs, faces racism (in both New York City and the South), suffers through heroin addiction, gets involved in crime, and ends up in prison.
Down These Mean Streets is a memoir of experiences of racial prejudice and discrimination, identity formation, and youthful involvement with crime that leads to life-altering prison experiences. One of the major themes of Down These Mean Streets centers on Piri Thomas's identity as a dark-complexioned Afro-Latino. Although he is of Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage, the larger American society sees him as an African-American and fails to recognize him as Latino. His own family rejects the African aspect of their Latin-Caribbean ancestry, causing Piri to spend much of his adolescent and early adult life contemplating his racial and ethnic identity.
Some themes of this memoir include racism and racialization, gender roles and identity, the need to belong, crime and poverty, homosexuality, internal vs. external conflict, and religious meanings. All of these themes are intertwined with his socioeconomic status and Puerto Rican ethnicity. The idea of darkness, skin color, and self-identification are also heavily focused upon within this memoir.
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