Piri’s Harlem: Afro-Puerto Rican Documentary and Urban Space

• In Event: Reconfiguring the Nation in Puerto Rican Cultural Production

Abstract

Although celebrated and critically examined for his significant work in Literature, Photography, and Film very little has been said about Gordon Parks’ collaboration with Puerto Rican writer Piri Thomas in the documentary made for television The World of Piri Thomas (1968). Directed by Parks, the film revisits Thomas's bestselling memoir Down These Mean Streets (1967). The documentary, a countercultural portrait, not only performs sections of Thomas’ groundbreaking book, but most importantly, analyzes the interrelationship between economic class, segregation, processes of racialization, and environmental decay in Harlem, New York during the 60's. Working on these topics, I will investigate the possibilities of achieving a compelling indictment of poverty and systemic abandonment employing the documentary genre. I will argue that Park utilizes raw, disjointed audiovisual montages as a metaphor of the neighborhood disintegration while Thomas relies on socio-poetic ruminations and performativity to dissect his crime-ridden youth on screen. By working through their audiovisual performance together, they challenge the separation between documentarian and subject and avoid ethical issues of exploitation. Remarkably, the film opposes grim Harlem to a diasporic-idealized Puerto Rico. As the title suggests, beyond Thomas, the social environment becomes the real protagonist of the documentary. Ultimately, Parks and Thomas portraits Harlem as the locus of pain and Caribbean longing. This conference paper will integrate film theory on both the documentary and urban black film genres and the Afro-diasporic identity.

Author

• Rojo Robles Mejías, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)