[The literary qualities of "Down These Mean Streets"] are primitive. Yet it has an undeniable power that I think comes from the fact that it is a report from the guts and heart of a submerged population group, itself submerged in the guts and hearts of our cities. It claims our attention and emotional response because of the honesty and pain of a life led in outlaw, fringe status, where the dream is always to escape.

There is, in reports such as this, a certain lack of suspense. The reader knows from the start that the survivor who wrote the book is one of those who got away. There remains the question of how the escape was worked. And there is the fascination of being told of it in a special language created in conflict….

What I, for one, did not know until I read Piri Thomas's tough, lyrical autobiography was the pervasiveness of the Hispanic cultural and social legacy, particularly that phenomenon known as machismo, which can be roughly translated as a kind of insistent maleness.

In Piri Thomas's gutter world, machismo is even more roughly translated as "heart." It can lead a boy to a sense of his own worth—or to drugs and jail. "Down These Mean Streets" is the story of Piri Thomas and his "heart." But, more important, it is the odyssey of one member of a submerged population group whose claim on our attention is immediate and overdue. (p. 1)

Piri Thomas addresses us secondarily as a writer, but first as a messenger (not a man with a message; that is quite a different thing.)

Like the messenger in the Book of Job, he tells us: I, only, am escaped alive to tell thee. Sentimental, rough-hewn, and unliterary as his tale may be, behind it stands a submerged population group that has had few voices. As a black Puerto Rican he speaks for the negritos of this world, as well as for those captive Americans of Spanish descent and tradition, the Puerto Ricans of Spanish Harlem.

From the inferno of the sidewalks Thomas has written another stanza in the passionate poem of color and color hatred being written today all over the world. James Baldwin tells us he was brought up to believe white was good and black was bad. Piri Thomas had to prove for himself that this was not true. In speaking for the black as well as for the poor and alien, he speaks for all who are buried alive in a society that troubles itself only minimally with its inarticulate miserable, its humiliated, its defeated and self-defeating.

His is a cautionary voice informed with honesty, warmth and intelligence. It is up to us to listen. (p. 44)