Melancholic Allegorists of the Street: Piri Thomas, Junot Díaz, and Yxta Maya Murray

Abstract

The protagonists of the street allegories by Piri Thomas, Junot Díaz, and Yxta Maya Murray wear many masks. Paramount among them is the mask of the street master. In his fictionalized autobiography Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas calls his mask “cara palo,” the Spanish shorthand for a face like a piece of wood, a fixed expressionless face.¹ Wearing the mask imitates, even as it undermines, a stable sense of self. Piri deceives himself into believing he knows who he is because he knows at least that he is not his masks. “I am not what I am,” he might say along with Shakespeare’s Iago, another great dissembler. To endure an unpleasant situation or to face an opponent, “Put cara palo on, like it dont move you” Piri says.² So important is the mask of toughness that the street macho—and the macho hopefuls, who include women—is prepared to destroy anyone who challenges the masquerade. If Edward Riveras mask of egolessness and humility hid, but could not sublimate, his rage, the U.S. Latino/a street mask registers both pain (melancholia) at not being accepted by the social order and openly aggressive resistance to that order. In the late 1960s Piri wrote about how he grew into and out of the mask of cam palo. Díaz’s and Murray’s deployment of literary doubles thirty years later demonstrated that Latinos and Latinas in the twenty-first century are still struggling with the mask. The mask, always representing pain, aggressiveness, uprootedness, hypersexuality, racial and class marginalization for Latinas and Latinos, then is also a stereotype. Homi K. Bhabha says: “The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality.