Struggles Of Pi Thomas

The Puerto Rican Struggle In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Piri Thomas struggled through life to figure out his own true identity and what his vocation in life was. Especially when his life was filled with more wrongs than rights. Throughout his life he came face-to-face with poverty and racial discrimination, which hit him hard at such a young age and all that lead him to being impeded from eventually finding financial and emotional security. Piri, throughout his life goes through poverty and has to constantly deal with finding a way to make money for himself and his family. At a young age, Piri always understood that money was an issue for his family since he would always see his dad deal with stress of having a job that never paid enough for …show more content…
His mother and other siblings were all of light skin, but Piri got his color from his dad who was very dark. Throughout his adolescent life, Piri’s racial discrimination were from being called a Negro when simply walking home with a white girl (Thomas, 90), to not being hired for a new salesman job but his friend Louie does get the job on the spot along with all the other white men that wanted the job (Thomas, 99-104), and all the racial discrimination from classmates in high school and the Italian gang. Thomas just couldn’t escape the consequences of being his color and deviating from the fact that no one saw nothing but his color. Moreover, the Piri and his family also had to live in a ran down place with no heat during the winter but due to the racial problems they were stuck in the same Harlem/Long Island area because at this time redlining, blockbusting, and other things such as the Levittown incident were happening. No matter how rich a black man could be he would not be able to buy a house outside of the poor area he lived in which was the Harlem area because black would either be redlined, and be denied a loan and insurance for living in a poor area (Eisen, September 6). Along with redlining, blockbusting was also in effect which persuaded whites by using fear of economics to not sell to black, which was de facto (Eisen, September 6). In this time, it was difficult to …show more content…
In the North it was full of prejudice, restrictions, and barriers which made it difficult for blacks emotionally and physically. The hatred and prejudice followed along in the South, moreover, it was also difficult for blacks in the south just much worse; in the South there was lynching in which people even took body parts as souvenirs and inequality all around. History as shown that black lives have always gone through complications and unfairness, and it’s still tough to say if in today’s world it has changed. Piri applied to these complications in life; being stuck in the cycle of living in poverty and prejudice which always lead him away from achieving financial and emotional security during this period. At the end of it all, it’s hard to say at the end of the story whether Piri’s life was in a good place or not. It’s certain to say that he was able to find more of himself after coming out of prison than earlier in his