"Puerto Rican Negro": Defining Race in Piri Thomas's "Down These Mean Streets" Author(s): Marta Caminero-Santangelo Source: MELUS , Summer, 2004, Vol. 29, No. 2, Elusive Illusions: Art and Reality (Summer, 2004), pp. 205-226 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/4141826 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press and Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MELUS This content downloaded from 136.145.180.42 on Tue, 21 Jul 2020 18:47:57 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "Puerto Rican Negro": Defining Race in Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets Marta Caminero-Santangelo University of Kansas In a crucial scene of Piri Thomas's classic 1967 Puerto Rican autobiography Down These Mean Streets, almost exactly at the half-way mark of the text, a character named Gerald Andrew West describes himself as "so blended racially that I find it hard to give myself to any.