Category Archives: Corrientes

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Piri Thomas, Spanish Harlem Author, Dies at 83

 

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By JOSEPH BERGER

Piri Thomas, the writer and poet whose 1967 memoir, “Down These Mean Streets,” chronicled his tough childhood in Spanish Harlem and the outlaw years that followed and became a classic portrait of ghetto life, died on Monday at his home in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 83.

Tyrone Dukes/The New York Times
Piri Thomas in 1971. His memoir was an influential portrait of life in Spanish Harlem.

Signet Books
The 1967 memoir, “Down These Mean Streets,” was a best seller and eventually a staple on high school and college reading lists.
The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Suzie Dod Thomas, said.

The memoir, a best seller and eventually a staple on high school and college reading lists, appeared as Americans seemed to be awakening to the rough cultures that poverty and racism were breeding in cities. A new literary genre had cropped up to explore those conditions, in books like “Manchild in the Promised Land,” by Claude Brown, and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

“Down These Mean Streets” joined that list. The memoir, Mr. Thomas wrote on his Web site, had “exploded out of my guts in an outpouring of long suppressed hurts and angers that had boiled over into an ice-cold rage.”

The novelist Daniel Stern, reviewing the book in The New York Times, called it “another stanza in the passionate poem of color and color-hatred being written today.”

In the memoir, Mr. Thomas described how he was brought up as the only dark-skinned child among seven children, the son of a Puerto Rican mother, Dolores Montañez, and a Cuban father, Juan Tomás de la Cruz. His dark skin, Mr. Thomas recalled, made him feel like an outlier in his own family and neighborhood, where he was taunted about this looks. Even his father, he felt, preferred his lighter-skinned children.

He described the bravado, or “machismo,” that he affected on the streets. Protecting his “rep” led him to “waste” people who insulted him, he wrote. He sniffed “horse” — heroin — even though he knew the consequences. “The world of street belonged to the kid alone,” he wrote. “There he could earn his own rights, prestige, his good-o stick of living. It was like being a knight of old, like being 10 feet tall.”

As a merchant seaman in the Jim Crow South, he wrote, he persuaded a white prostitute to sleep with him because, he told her, he was really Puerto Rican, not black. He then enjoyed stunning her by telling her she had just slept with a black man.

He returned home while his mother was dying in a poor people’s ward at Metropolitan Hospital and resumed his old ways — selling and using drugs and robbing people. In one holdup he wounded a police officer and landed in prison for seven years, a harrowing time he vividly evoked. It was in prison that he finished high school and began thinking about writing. He found, he wrote, that words could be used as bullets or butterflies. He called writing “the Flow.”

“It came very naturally,” he told an interviewer. “I promised God that if he didn’t let me die in prison, I would use the Flow.”

The book, with its harsh language and scenes, was banned by some schools but soon became assigned reading in many others. The poet Martin Espada said its influence was enormous.

“Because he became a writer, many of us became writers,” Mr. Espada said. “Before ‘Down These Mean Streets,’ we could not find a book by a Puerto Rican writer in the English language about the experience of that community, in that voice, with that tone and subject matter.”

Carolina González, a professor of literature at Rutgers University, said her students continue to find the book “very immediate and descriptive of their lives.”

After the memoir Mr. Thomas spent much of the rest of his life lecturing about it. He also wrote two novels, “Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand” (1972) and “Seven Long Times” (1974), several plays and the collection “Stories From El Barrio” (1979). He also set his poetry to music.

John Peter Thomas was born on Sept. 30, 1928, in Harlem Hospital, where he was given the Anglo-Saxon name. “They wanted to assimilate me,” he said in an interview in 1995. “Whoever heard of a Puerto Rican named John Peter Thomas?” His mother called him Piri.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Peter Stacker and Ricardo Thomas; four daughters, SanDee Thomas, Raina Thomas, Tanee Thomas and Renee Shank; three stepchildren, Michael and Laura Olenick, and David Elder; seven grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.

Despite Mr. Thomas’s hardships, Olga Luz Tirado, his onetime publicist, said he had retained a sense of humor. She recalled taking him to a reading in Brooklyn in the 1990s. “On the way back I took a wrong turn and said to him, ‘Piri, I think we’re lost,’ ” she told a reporter. “He asked, ‘We got gas?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said: ‘We ain’t lost. We just sightseeing!’ ”

PRdream mourns the passing of Shifra Goldman, Art Historian and Political Activist

 

 

Shifra Goldman dies at 85; champion of modern Mexican Art
By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times

Shifra Goldman was a civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist who joined the Mexican American rights movement in Los Angeles and helped elevate Latin American and Chicano art history into legitimate fields of study.

In the early 1970s, when Shifra Goldman proposed a doctoral dissertation on modern Mexican art, her professors at UCLA sneered. Compared to European art, the art of Latin America was, in their view, imitative, too political, unworthy of serious scholarly attention.

But Goldman, a scrappy civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activist who went back to school in her mid-30s, refused to consider a more mainstream topic. Describing herself years later as a person who was “born on the margins, lived on the margins and … always sympathized with the margins,” she bided her time for several years until a more open-minded professor arrived who was willing to supervise her research.

She not only published her dissertation as a book, “Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change” (1981), but went on to become a seminal figure in the rise of Latin American and Chicano art history as legitimate fields of study.

Goldman died Sept. 11 in Los Angeles from Alzheimer’s disease, said her son, Eric Garcia. She was 85.

Calling herself an activist art historian, Goldman was an early champion of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and persisted for decades to preserve his last public work in the United States: the “América Tropical” mural at Olvera Street. The Getty Conservation Institute is collaborating with the city of Los Angeles to rescue the rare mural.

“There was no one like Shifra,” said artist and Cal State Northridge professor Yreina D. Cervantez. “She was an advocate and a scholar on Chicano and Chicana art long before it was recognized and … she put it in the context of the larger art world. Her commitment was unmovable and constant.”

Goldman “was an intellectual pioneer with strong social convictions,” said Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center where Goldman was a research associate in the mid-1990s. Noriega described one of her books — “Arte Chicano,” a comprehensive 1985 bibliography co-written with Tomás Ybarra-Frausto — as “the bible for Chicano art history.”

“We really have to rewrite the history of modern art,” Goldman told The Times in 1992. “That’s the tall order that many of us have set for ourselves. You have to insert the modern art of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

Born Shifra Meyerowitz on July 18, 1926, she grew up in New York steeped in the leftist politics of her parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. She attended the city’s High School of Music and Art before moving to Los Angeles in the 1940s.

A studio art major at UCLA, she joined a student boycott of Westwood barbers who refused haircuts to African American veterans of World War II attending UCLA on the GI Bill. She left UCLA before earning her degree and immersed herself in the nascent Mexican American civil rights movement led by activist Bert Corona. She learned Spanish living in East Los Angeles and in 1952 married John Garcia.

The marriage ended after a few years, and a second marriage also ended in divorce. She is survived by her son and a grandson.

“She said she was a women’s libber before it existed,” her son, Eric, said last week. “She had a hard time with men. They didn’t want this intellectual powerhouse. She was a very intense woman.”

During the 1950s Goldman worked in a factory assembling refrigerators and stoves; later she was a bookkeeper. She remained active in radical causes, which in 1959 led to a subpoena to appear before a panel of the House Un-American Activities Committee. She refused to answer questions.

Unsatisfied with her life, she returned to UCLA, completing her bachelor’s degree in art in 1963. She earned a master’s from Cal State L.A in 1966 and a doctorate from UCLA in 1977, both in art history.

She taught at a number of colleges in Southern California, including Santa Ana College, until 1992, when she retired from full-time teaching.

In 2008 she donated her meticulously organized collections of correspondence, articles, books, museum catalogs, gallery announcements and art slides — many showing works that have disappeared — to the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC Santa Barbara.

“Anybody who was seriously involved in Latino/Chicano art has visited Shifra at home and gone through her collection. She was the archivist of the field,” Noriega said.

Her archive includes material about Siqueiros’ “América Tropical,” which was badly deteriorated after decades of neglect when Goldman discovered it in 1968. Olvera Street merchants had painted over the mural soon after its completion in 1932 because of its controversial depiction of a Mexican Indian crucified on a double cross under an American eagle. An Aztec and a Mexican revolutionary are pointing rifles at the eagle.

“It was Shifra who really spearheaded the very first effort to preserve the Siqueiros mural,” said filmmaker Jesus Treviño, who worked with her to make a 1971 KCET documentary about it. “There were artists who said to her, ‘Let me repaint it,’ but she said, ‘If the Mona Lisa fades you don’t have someone come in to repaint it for Da Vinci.’ She was adamant that this was by a great artist and the original work should be preserved.”

The Getty and the city expect to unveil the mural and a new interpretive center next year.

“It is the last Siqueiros mural to remain in its original site in the U.S.,” said Leslie Rainer, the Getty mural specialist who is overseeing the conservation project. “Shifra understood its importance.”

A memorial will be held at 2 p.m. on Oct. 15 at the Professional Musicians Local 47, 817 Vine St., Hollywood, CA 90038.

PRdream mourns the passing of Piri Thomas, September 30, 1928 – October 17, 2011

 

 

Nuyorican author, born Juan Pedro Tomas to a Puerto Rican mother and Cuban father in El Barrio, Spanish Harlem, on September 30, 1928. He is best known for his autobiographical novel “Down These Mean Streets.” Other works include “Savior, Savior Hold My Hand,” “Seven Long Times,” and “Stories from El Barrio.”

Piri Thomas traveled around the country as well as Central America and Europe, giving lectures and conducting workshops in colleges and universities. He was the subject of a film “Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas,” by Jonathan Robinson. Thomas died from pneumonia at his home in El Cerrito, California on October 17, 2011.

We express our condolences to the Thomas family.