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"Puerto Rican Negro": Defining Race in Piri Thomas's "Down These Mean Streets" Author(S): Marta Caminero-Santangelo Source: MELUS , Summer, 2004, Vol

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"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. .. one of the blends" (174). This description would seem to fit perfectly with much more recent, resistant accounts of racial and ethnic identity, such as Gloria Anzald-ia's description of inhabiting the "borderlands" among racial, ethnic, national, and sexual categories: the "new mestiza. .. learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view" (79). Gerald's self-representation, like Anzaldida's, seems-within a contemporary, poststructural critical context in which stable, fixed, and singular notions of identity have been challenged and debunked-to powerfully suggest subversion of socially- constructed and all-too-limiting racial categories that, in truth, have little meaning in biology. Indeed, it is surely this scene, among others, that has triggered the critical view that Thomas "rejected the paradigms of black or white. years before the concepts of hybridity, heterogeneity, and difference gained academic and social repute" (Sainchez 119).1 As it turns out, however, Gerald is a highly dislikable character, whose rejection of racial paradigms is wholly predicated on his desire to "make the next step to white" (177), as he himself admits. In his need to claim racial privilege, Gerald is an echo of the MEL US, Volume 29, Number 2 (Summer 2004) 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 206 MARTA CAMINERO-SANTANGELO protagonist himself (whom I will call "Piri" to distinguish him from the author "Thomas"), who has been struggling all along with precisely such an impulse. Thus Gerald, whose understanding of race seems more "radical," is actually a deeply conservative character. While Thomas's autobiography certainly points towards the instability of racial categories, it ultimately relies less on notions of hybridity and heterogeneity than on what Gayatri Spivak might call a strategic essentialism that often reproduces the language of racial polarities; taken as a whole, the text suggests that a defini- tion of race is radical or conservative based on the circumstances of its deployment, rather than on its "inherent" challenge to dominant ideology. In this respect, Down These Mean Streets resonates with much more recent currents in theoretical discussions of race and racial discourse, to which I now, briefly, wish to turn. Gerald Andrew West would, no doubt, have embraced and celebrated news that race was, scientifically speaking, an illegiti- mate category.2 This news was still treated as startling (that is, as "news") when Henry Louis Gates observed in 1985 that "Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction" (4). As Gates's statement implies, this "news" had in fact been around for a while, although when Gates edited the two issues of Critical Inquiry (1985-86) that became the ground-breaking volume "Race, " Writing and Difference (1986), he still felt the need to assert within his introduction the lack of biological grounding for any idea of "race," and to signal this fact through the use of quotation marks around the word "race" in the title of his volume. Anthony Appiah, another prominent contribu- tor to the volume, was apparently even more anxious about the degree to which this "long... recognized" fact was indeed recog- nized, in the academic community and elsewhere. Declaring at the outset that "Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations" ("Uncompleted Argument" 21), Appiah was at pains to point out that, by 1911, with the publication of the August issue of Crisis, the outlines of this scientific conclusion were already publicized (30). Yet, he commented, "it is my experience that the biological 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 DEFINING RACE IN DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS 207 evidence about race is not sufficiently known and appreciated" (22).3 Surely Appiah's anxiety was not misplaced. In 1995, almost a decade after the publication of "Race, " Writing, and Difference, Newsweek ran an article on the scientific (non)basis for racial categorizations under the sub-heading: "Surprising new lessons from the controversial science of race" (Begley 67). "Even with racial mixing," the first paragraph ran, "the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors." "Or is it?," the second paragraph began, in what was clearly meant to be a jarring lead-in to the "surprising new" information about race: namely, that it doesn't exist (Begley 67). At about the same time, Time magazine covered the publication of a new book, The History and Geography of Human Genes, with an article whose sub-head read, "A landmark global study flattens The Bell Curve, proving that racial differences are only skin deep" (see Cavalli-Sforza, et al.). The bottom line, the article noted, is that "the whole concept of race becomes meaningless at the genetic level" (Subramanian 54). Clearly for mainstream popular culture, the idea that race is not biology is still "surprising" news.4 If the notion of race as a scientific fiction has become more of a given for academics, however, we still cannot seem to agree on what to do with this information. For Appiah, it is apparently quite a concern that W.E.B. Du Bois was never able to fully escape a biological conception of race, despite the fact that his "life's work" was devoted to challenging the underpinnings of racial and racist thought in America ("Uncompleted Argument" 36). In Paul Gilroy's words, race is a "tainted logic" (15), suggesting that any concept of race as biology is politically suspect, contaminating all efforts towards a truly liberatory radical politics.5 More strident voices push this position toward its extreme conclusion, arguing that if race does not exist, we ought not to continue discussing it.6 In turn, the latter approach has faced its detractors: Gayle Wald has expressed concern about "the emergence of arguments seeking to appropriate anti-essentialist racial critique to question the social relevance of race" (9); the fear is that "radical" arguments (if ninety-year-old arguments about the lack of scientific basis of race can be called "radical") are being deployed for "conservative" purposes. Houston Baker critiques Appiah's analysis of Du Bois 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 208 MARTA CAMINERO-SANTANGELO on similar grounds, calling it "instructive but, ultimately, unhelpful in a world where New York cab drivers scarcely ever think of mitochondria before refusing to pick me up" (385). The risk of such arguments, Baker points out, lies in their possible effects at a time when a violent reinforcement and retrenchment of white- male hegemony dictates the dismantling of quotas meant to repair damages done by old (and scientifically sanctioned) differentiations, of revolutionary initiatives (such as women's and black studies) predicated upon accepted and championed differences, and of federal support systems grounded on policies that forthrightly acknowledge manifest (and scientifically sanctioned) racial differences. The sce- nario they seem to endorse reads as follows: when science apologizes and says there is no such thing, all talk of "race" must cease. (385)7 Baker shares with Wald a concern about the pragmatic political effects of arguments about race that, to some degree, supercedes concern with their scientific (not to say "political") "correctness."8 Wald and Baker want us to consider effects and ends before judging the "means" to be illegitimate because they are somehow tainted by racial thinking.9 A "tainted" argument and "tainted" politics do not necessarily go hand in hand, just as the spouting of arguments about the non-existence (and therefore insignificance) of race is no guarantor of radical or liberatory politics. In the debate over "race," then, an increasingly vocal collection of voices underscores the importance of taking into account the context within which, and purposes for which, racial discourse is deployed.
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