Down These Mean Streets Summary - eNotes.com.
Down These Mean Streets is a memoir by Piri Thomas, a Latino of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in Spanish Harlem, a section of Harlem with a large Puerto Rican population. The book follows Piri 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 elsewhere), travels, succumbs to heroin addiction.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas is a memoir about Piri Thomas' life. In this book, Thomas starts out when he is twelve years old living in Spanish Harlem. The book is broken down into three sections overall: life between Harlem and Long Island, Down South, and Prison. In the first section, Piri is living in Harlem with his family. His father is working but does not earn enough money to.

This book Down These Mean Streets is a classic confessional autobiography. This book was first published in 1967. It was written by Piri Thomas, he was a man of African descent living in Spanish Harlem. It relates how he was lost even within his own family and his identity through drugs, st.

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.

In his book Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas has managed to write his life experiences from different perspectives. In this autobiography, he describes his passage to maturity in Spanish Harlem. During his early life, Piri Thomas faced myriad challenges ranging from poverty to racism. He also suffered from drug addiction, which probably influenced his behavior. Owing to the life.

Dakota and Down These Mean Streets. Word Count: 430; Approx Pages: 2; Save Essay; View my Saved Essays; Downloads: 9; Grade level: High School; Login or Join Now to rate the paper Problems? Flag this paper! All ExampleEssays.com members take advantage of the following benefits: Access to over 100,000 complete essays and term papers; Fully built bibliographies and works cited; One-on-one.

Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas is a story of struggles, heart and identity. Speaking from his own experiences, Piri Thomas writes of his life as a teenager growing up in El Barrio--Spanish Harlem. He faces many battles as he fights to find his true identity and place in this racial society. Thomas explains the life of a lower-class Puerto Rican kid who tried to fit-in in a world where.