In the prelude, I began with two anecdotes—one about Langston Hughes, another about Piri Thomas—in the spirit of inviting my readers to entertain connections among continental Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano (Mexican American) cultures.¹ These three cultures are the points of the intercultural triangle that this book aims to build. Since new populations took their place in the citadel of higher education in the 1970s and 1980s, a period in higher education that stands out for its “diversification,”² these cultures have been locked into separate domains, so that a pattern of relation to each other and to...

Almost forty years ago, three mainstream intellectuals—Octavio Paz, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Oscar Lewis—provided cues for how the American public should think about Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. When Paz looked at Mexicans in Mexico and pachucos¹ in Los Angeles, when Moynihan looked at the African American family in a national context, and when Lewis looked at the Ríos family in San Juan and their kin in New York City, they saw people who lacked the right stuff to compete in middle-class capitalistic society.² They noted similar and in their estimation counterproductive characteristics of these groups...

In the prologue toDown These Mean Streets, the Puerto Rican protagonist stands on a tenement rooftop looking over Spanish Harlem. Exploding with frustration, feeling rage in his blood and bones, he cries out against a world that refuses to take note of his existence.Down These Mean Streetsis Piri’s cri de coeur. He is so invisible to people outside Spanish Harlem that he is not even, as a Puerto Rican, taboo—a sign of danger to whites, a threat—as are his black American friends. Through the persona of Piri, the Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas, in his...

By the 1940s¹ African Americans and Puerto Ricans had settled in communities in New York and were living adjacent to each other in Harlem.² Piri Thomas’s parents, for example, came to New York, as did many others, in the early 1920s, after the United States granted citizenship status to Puerto Ricans in 1917, facilitating movement between the island and the mainland. Many Puerto Rican families arrived by steamship, whose lines had a terminus in New York.³ As a result of Operation Bootstrap⁴ and the development of the modern airline industry, the numbers of Puerto Ricans increased substantially in New York...

“Run!” is the first word of Claude Brown’sManchild in the Promised Land. Claude “Sonny” Brown,¹ the protagonist, is running on the streets of Harlem, at 7th Avenue and 146th Street. He is not far from his home, which is in the same area the 1943 Harlem riots occurred. It is 1950 now, and a woman with a double-barreled shotgun is in hot pursuit. Sonny has stolen sheets off her clothesline. She homes in on her thirteen-year-old target, who is running for dear life through an alley, and lodges a bullet in his stomach, bringing him to a dead halt...

There is an incident inManchild in the Promised Landthat illustrates the pivotal role of black women in shaping black masculinity. At the time of this incident, Sonny’s mother has sent her seemingly incorrigible ten-year-old son down South in the hope that his grandparents will banish the “too much devil in him” (42). She has taken the boy out of the city, but will she be able to pull the city out of the boy once it’s in him?

Our hero’s paternal grandparents are sharecroppers, traditional country folk whose family roots date back to slavery in South Carolina. They...

So speaks author and protagonist Oscar Zeta Acosta¹ in the coda toThe Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. What is refreshing about Acosta’s phrasing is that he does not oppose Chicano to Mexican or Chicano to American, as was the usual practice of ethnic political action in the 1960s and 1970s.² Rather, he allows Chicano to stand in relation to both Mexican and American. He makes Chicano, the name chosen by the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s for building political and ethnic identities, an intercultural term. His word “ancestry” suggests history, parentage, and heritage, not “race.” This is...

I turn once again to the text examined in the previous chapter,The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, but my focus here is Oscar’s exploitation of one of the permutations of the La Malinche trope. This permutation is the Chicano pachuco.¹ The broadest historical meaning of the term “pachuco” refers to Mexican American marginalized male youths of 1940s urban Los Angeles who by way of their stylized dress (the zoot suit), their comportment (gait and stride), and their language (calótalk) announced their defiance to Anglo mainstream society and their refusal to conform to its defined normativity. They also refused...

In an article titled “Life among the Anthros,” Clifford Geertz tells the following anecdote that paraphrases a story told by André Gide:

During the German occupation of France, André Gide published, and was allowed to publish because he was Gide, a series of “interviews imaginaires” in the public press commenting, in an oblique, Aesopian way, on various aspects of literature, politics, and the cultural scene. In one, he takes up the question, then current, of the supposed responsibility of the “intellectuals” for the fall of France, and he ends it with a striking parable.

A rowboat, moored at a riverbank,...