“Hung on a Ghetto Cross”

Abstract

In his poetry collection The Concrete River (1991), Luis J. Rodríguez dedicates his poem “Mean Streets” to New York Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas. “Mean Streets” initiates a literary conversation between Rodríguez and Thomas, as men who grew up in conditions of poverty during turbulent times in the history of the United States. The poem establishes the two men as “barrio brothers” on the basis of space, economic hardship, writing, and mentorship as unifying discourses. At the outset of the poem, Rodríguez connects the mean streets of Harlem of Thomas’s youth with his own mean streets of East Los Angeles through the publication of Thomas’s memoir, Down These Mean Streets (1967). As a young man growing up prior to the civil rights era of the 1960s, Rodríguez connects the prior racism and discrimination of Thomas’s youth in Harlem to his own. Throughout the remainder of the poem the writings of Thomas structure the relationship between the two men. Through Thomas’s writings on the waste of impoverished urban youth, gripped by drugs and violence, in Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (1972) and the prison experience in Seven Long Times (1974), Rodríguez comes to understand his own experiences of drugs, violence, and prison. He concludes that as his “barrio brother, father/partner and teacher” Thomas has allowed him to pass through the “gateway” from Piri’s “nightmare” to his own “dreams.” Thus the literary dialogue and metaphor of “Mean Streets” serves as a point of departure to compare the uses of community and mentorship as key discourses of the redemptive activist work in the lives and works of Thomas and Rodríguez.

but I knew you, compadre

you, steady companion down the alleyways,

barrio brother,

father/partner … teacher

—Luis J. Rodríguez, “Mean Streets” in The Concrete River

This title is taken from a chapter title of Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (1972) by Piri Thomas.