THE LATINA BOOK CLUB

The Latina Book Club is pleased to welcome our Guest Blogger Diana Diaz.               Years ago, my screenwriting professor once told us that writers were unheard children. The statement struck me like a chancleta. The first in my family to attend college, like so many Latina Gen-Xerers, I was very much seen. But even sitting in the intimate, hand-picked class, I rarely felt heard. I was 18 years old for all of three weeks, fresh out of childhood, high school and the Projects that I could see from the window of the NYU library penthouse. At 18, I took professor Dickerman’s statement age-appropriately and literally. But, decades later, I began to recognize my Nuyorican heritage as largely unheard in my own birth city and almost completely unknown of outside of it. So, over the past several years, I wrote creative non-fiction memoirs of growing up on the Lower East side in the 70’s and 80’s. These stories became the basis of my new ...

   We lost Piri Thomas recently. His book, DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS, opened the door to a world of gang violence not seen before. Unfortunately, too many of our young Latino men –nationwide!– are lost to gangs and drugs. But some survive and are able to get out of that land of darkness. One such success is Luis Rodriguez. He too has a gruesome tale to tell. Below is an excerpt from his memoir; Plus, links to his author page and video trailer. --LBC "Vivid, raw . . . fierce, and fearless . . . Here’s truth no television set, burning night and day, could ever begin to offer." —The New York Times “Cry, child, for those without tears have a grief which never ends.”—Mexican saying THIS MEMORY BEGINS WITH flight. A 1950s bondo-spackled Dodge surged through a driving rain, veering around the potholes and upturned tracks of the abandoned Red Line trains on Alameda. Mama was in the front seat. My father was at the wheel. My brother Rano and I sat on one end of the back seat; ...

    Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.          –Piri Thomas, DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS was written by the late Piri Thomas over 30 years ago, but the book is still as true and relevant today as it was then. It's Piri’s memoir of a young dark-skinned—“morenito”—Puerto Rican growing up in Spanish Harlem during the 50s and 60s. He talks truthfully about being an outsider in his home and his neighborhood; of his drug addiction; of joining a gang; of making bad choices; of shooting a police officer; and, of his convicti...

   "We're hung up in the middle, with no place to go." They don't want us here, in the land of the Yankees and in Puerto Rico they deny us our heritage. Creativity: it's the strength, the power, it's healing. Creativity was my salvation in prison because it kept me from becoming a vegetable or a psychopath. It opened worlds up to me where I could time travel with the power of my mind because of the anguish to be free, out of that canary cage.                                                                                          ...