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IN A CHAPTER humorously entitled "Barroom Sociology" in Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas, a black man of Puerto Rican descent born on the United States mainland, writes of an encounter among three men in a nightclub bar in the American South. Gerald is a collegeeducated, light-skinned African American from Pennsylvania who is passing for Puerto Rican to make, he says, "the next step to white" (191). He complains that whites allow him to be "Negro" but "Negroes" do not allow him to be white. The second man, Brew, is a dark-skinned African American from Harlem who talks the talk of an angry black nationalist of the 1960s. He asks Gerald, "[W]hat kinda Negro is yuh?" (187). The third man, Piri, an angry and confused dark-skinned Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem, is passing for "Negro," accepting the gaze of a social system that blackens him.1 Brew believes that Piri is "Negro": no matter how much Piri "rattle[s] off some different kinda language don' change [his] skin one bit" (132). Brew also finds the elitist-sounding Gerald a "damn p'lite prissy" (186). After drinks, which electrify the conversation, Gerald chiasmatically reverses the North American signs of white and black racial purity: "So, I ask you, if a white man can be a Negro if he has some Negro blood in him, why can't a Negro be a white man if he has white blood in him?" ( 189). Instead of confronting the implications of this question, Brew and Piri focus on what is for them less threatening terrain: sexuality and gender.2 As Lady Day (the jazz singer Billie Holiday) plays on a jukebox, Brew shifts from calling Gerald a "prissy" to proposing, "Le's go see what pussy's sellin' fo' by the pound." Piri assents, thinking to himself, "Pussy's the same in every color" (191).
How does "prissy" become "pussy"? How does a discussion permeated by ethnic, racial, linguistic, and class difference collapse into the essentialized sameness of female body parts? In reading Down These Mean Streets as a Chicana (a woman of Mexican origin living in the United States) who developed political and academic consciousness in the 1970s, I enlist as a critical framework the cultural norms of Chicano ethnic nationalism, in which heterosexual men of color...