Thomas PiriDans Les Rues Du Barrio

In the Streets of the Barrio recounts the author’s adolescence in the Spanish Harlem of post-war New York. The moves, the emancipation of childhood, the girls, the fights, the heroin addiction…
The life of a child who grows up a little too fast, in a marginalized neighbourhood, and ends up making the mistake that will lead him to spend several years behind bars. When he is released, he tries to take his life in hand and to disprove a society that only saw him as a dirty kid, an immigrant, a black, and kept him forcibly in the underworld from which he would like to emancipate himself. If many films and novels document the history of New York at the time, to the point of making us familiar with the Italian, Jewish or black neighbourhoods, it is clear that the Latino neighbourhood is much less well known, and little translated in France. A great initiatory novel, moving, hectic, which tells of those moments when everything can change and castigates the way in which the gaze of others can condemn kids to stay in their rut.