Every Child Is Born a Poet

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Overview | Producer's Notes | Outreach Resource Guide | Core Results

EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET Addresses AECF's Core Results

Launched in March 2001, the Making Connections Media Outreach Initiative (MCMOI), funded by The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) offers vital media-based resources and strategies to the Making Connections Network. Outreach Extensions will assist public television stations and their partners by identifying relevant content within MCMOI productions and by creating outreach materials that can be used as resources to address AECF's Core Results. This will enable stations to collaborate with the Casey site teams to help them reach their goals - and link their efforts to the long-term development of neighborhoods and families.

Core Results
AECF hopes that children will be healthier and do better in school; that more parents will be working and have good jobs; that more families will be able to save for the future; that more residents will be involved in community groups and activities. It also hopes people will feel safer and more connected, and as importantly, have a voice in decisions that affect their families and communities. To achieve these kinds of results, the local Casey sites are moving toward specific, measurable results for children, families, and neighborhoods.

The following information suggests "matches" for EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas that can assist stations/sites in achieving specific Core Results related to Economic Opportunity, Social Networks, and Quality Services and Supports. This film by Jonathan Robinson is produced by When in Doubt Productions, Inc.

Families have increased income and earnings.

Piri Thomas: I was born into a barrio of hot and cold running cockroaches and king size rats. Horror, hunger, and pain and shame running free. I was born into a barrio where many promises never came to be. Oh say can't you see? Check it out.

Piri Thomas: During my childhood in the 30's and 40's, I thought the whole world lived in ghettos and poverty was the norm; that is, until I saw movies depicting the life of the rich with, uh, "Tennis anyone?" and seeing what movie gangsters gave away in tips could pay the rent and buy groceries for a year.

Piri Thomas: My father Juan worked very hard for the WPA - Works Progress Administration - construction gang with picky pala shovels, digging very deep holes and filling them up too. When he left for trabajo [work] in the morning, he would give my mother money to buy food, always leaving something extra on top of the table to make sure that we'd also got dessert.

Piri Thomas: Have you ever stood small and quiet-like and watched your mom and pop fight for lack of money to push off the abundance of wants? Did you ever stand with outstretched hands and cop a plea from life and watch your mom's pride on bended knees asking a welfare investigator for the needy welfare check, while you stood there, getting from nothing and resenting it just the same?

Piri Thomas: I was seventeen years old and had left school for good to enter the harsh world of the streets with its drugs and mucho crimes, earning my way toward a doctorate in the university of hard knocks and a seven out of fifteen year sentence behind bars.

Letter from Piri Thomas to the Parole Board: I went before Mr. Burnett, the Educational Supervisor [at the prison], and he led me to the trade of Brick Masonry, I took it and graduated with 2300 hours under my belt, I am now a pretty fair mason, only lacking actual work experience, such as is done on the outside. Mr. Loos, all these things you and the members of the Board know, I brought them up not because I want to say, "Look, I got a good prison record, why don't you let me out," but rather to show that I am trying very hard to make a responsible man of myself, a man who can be an asset instead of a drawback.
Families have increased assets.

Narrator: The book's [Down These Mean Streets] author, Piri Thomas, the first writer of Puerto Rican ancestry to receive national recognition, is considered by many to be a cultural icon and community treasure. Thomas' writings, his poetry, and his work as an educator have inspired and influenced generations of students, writers, artists, and activists who have identified with his journey of struggle, self-discovery, and transformation.

Piri Thomas: I believe there is a spirit. Within each of us, there is a spirit. And so, I couldn't see God, you know, but I finally figured out that God was a smile on the face of a child that wasn't being wasted. You gotta have faith, you gotta have some kind of faith or else you'll never make it. Faith within you, make you strong, make you brave, give you wisdom.

Narrator: Piri Thomas was born in New York City in 1928. His parents had arrived in America a few years earlier. His mother, Dolores Montanez, from Puerto Rico and his father, Juan Thomas, from Cuba by way of Puerto Rico. Thomas' father was determined to fit in and to find better opportunities for himself and his family. His mother was determined to maintain the religious and cultural traditions she brought from the island and to protect her children from the unfamiliar and confusing forces of this new world.

Piri Thomas: Humans live in ghettos simply because they cannot afford to live anywhere else, but soon after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Poppi, like thousands of others, got war jobs. Poppi began to work at Republic Aviation. We moved to a foreign country called Babylon, Long Island and I was uprooted from my barrio.

(Question) Juvenile Hall Inmate: When you sold, when you sold drugs, did you ever become big time? Did you make money and so you had cars and jewelry and all that stuff?

(Answer) Piri Thomas: No, bro, cuz I was using the stuff. You never have, you never have all that stuff if you're using. You're working for somebody else. It's a sucker's game, papito. For every one that has all those jewelry and so forth, soon they're dead, cuz somebody wants what they got. You know? My mother said, people don't have to kill you with hatred, they can kill you with envy. They'll envy you to death.

Narrator: While on parole, Piri began to attend his aunt's Pentecostal church, got married, began a family, and then made his way from porter to packer to foreman at Fink Baking Company, before an offer came for a job as a Youth Counselor in El Barrio.

Narrator: Over the course of three marriages, six children, five grandchildren, writing, reading, traveling, Piri Thomas has continued to move from classroom to classroom reiterating his message that no one is lost, no one is beyond repair, and no one, not even himself, is doomed to repeat the mistakes of one's past.
Families, youth, and neighborhoods increase their civic engagement.
Neighborhoods support families through informal supports and networks.

Piri Thomas: Like I'm standing here and there ain't nothin' happenin'. Diggit, man, what's in this here world for me, except I gotta give, give, give? I'm tired of being a half-past nothin'. I've come into this stone world of streets, with all its living, laughing, crying, and dying. A world full of backyards and rooftops and street sets and all kinds of people of acts and hustles and rackets and eyedropper drugs. A world of those who is and those who ain't.

Piri Thomas (to Gang Members): And you guys are the perfect people that can go out there and stop all this jazz that's going out in the street. Guys like you. You and you and you and you and you and you. Guys like you...could do...with the help of God...can do the work that a thousand agencies can't, are trying to do and they can't even do it. Because you know the problems. That's all. Let's bow our heads down and pray.

Piri Thomas (to Juvenile Hall Inmates): Vaya .you have proven tonight the talent that is within you. If you want to reach out and get it, and the whole forth. Society, some part of society is willing to invest in each of you. But you gotta learn how to invest in your own self. It's your life. Ain't nobody can live it for you.nor can die for you. So you take the beauty that is you, and do the best that you can with your beauty, man. Respect yourself and shake hands if you're angry at yourselves and make friends with yourselves, and know that we're all beautiful.
Families have increased access to quality services and support systems that work for them.

Piri Thomas: One of the worst feelings I can imagine is to be something or someplace and not be able to accept the fact. I was a con in jail, but nothing in the world could make me accept that. No matter how hard I tried, it kept pounding on me..My life became a gray mass of hatred. The reasoning that my punishment was deserved was absent. As prison blocks off your body, so it suffocates your mind.

Piri Thomas: It was in prison that I really started to dig myself. A lot of times you'd be keep-locked and you get to think about things. So I started to write my feelings, la poesia, short stories, self-analyzations..Learning made me painfully aware of life and me. I began to dig what was inside of me. What had I been? How had I become that way? What could I be? How could I make it?

Piri Thomas (to gang members): I mean scared of jail, scared of courts, scared of the gangs, scared of everything, because if you're scared, then you don't mess with them and then you don't get into trouble.

Narrator: Piri followed his pioneering violence prevention work in East Harlem by helping to develop "The New Breed," a peer-to-peer drug rehab program, in New York and Puerto Rico, and, over a period of five years, wrote his first of four books.
Children are healthy and ready to learn.

Piri Thomas: [The street]'s got our beautiful children living in all kinds of hell, hoping to survive and making it well. Swinging together in misty darkness with all their love to share. Smiling their Christ-like forgiveness that only a ghetto cross could bear..Oh, the streets got life man, like a young tender sun, and gentleness like a long awaited dream to come. For children are roses with nary a thorn. Forced to feel racist scorn. Our children are beauty with the right to be born.

Mother (after Piri had stolen a quarter from the money his father left his mother to buy food): Don't hit him in the head, because you can make him loco. If you got to hit him, around the legs is good enough. Por favor Juan , [husband/father] don't hit him in the head. I want him to be intellegente when he grows up. Piri Thomas: And then, I was caught. I tried to smile as I waited for the blows that were to come, but my father just looked at me sadly and said, Father: Vaya, hijo, why didn't you ask for it? I would have given it to you. Did you have to steal it?

Narrator: As a boy, Piri Thomas dreamed of being an architect. He dreamed of designing great big houses with great big windows to let in the air and sunlight. He dreamed big; it didn't cost anything.

Piri Thomas: Before I knew it, I was gang age. I thought it was cool to be in a gang. I had respect, a feeling of belonging, and protection.

Piri Thomas: Sometimes the thoughts would start flapping around inside me about the three worlds I lived in - the world of the home, the world of school, and the world of the street, where the pull was the strongest. The world of home and school were made up of rules laid down by adults who had forgotten what it meant to be a kid, but expected a kid to think like an adult. The world of the ghetto street belonged to the kid alone.

Piri Thomas: As a kid, I couldn't pick one specific blood to hang onto. The color of my skin was not the white of the stars and stripes of the flag, but the kids on Long Island didn't know whether to call me a nigger or a spic. I went through a long painful search for what was my true identity.

Narrator: While his family, like many other Puerto Rican families, refused to acknowledge its African heritage, Piri Thomas was compelled by the force of his own experience of prejudice and discrimination to come to terms with the question of his own racial identity in America.

Nuyorican Poet (talking to Piri Thomas): In the introduction I think, there's an introductory poem in Down These Mean Streets. In one of the lines it says, 'I'm a skinny curly haired dark skinned intense Puerto Rican.' That's what I got from Down These Mean Streets. Love of self. Picture yourself, um, fourteen years old, taking the train downtown, going to school with rich white boys and girls. Same day getting back on the train, going uptown to the 'hood, wanting to be part of that. And in between that, you sort of trying to find yourself. And who you are. And when I read that book, I found it. Suddenly my neighborhood came alive.

Piri Thomas (reciting one of his poems): For while you are smiling and living well, black children, brown children, red children, yellow children, white children, multi-colored children, children, children, children, because of your hypocrisy, are dying, physically, mentally, spiritually, morally, and worst of all, America, secretly in broad daylight.

The value of utilizing AECF's framework for EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET and other MCMOI campaigns is that it directly links our outreach efforts to the core work of the neighborhood sites. We then share a common structure to develop and implement projects, establish project goals, and evaluate results, as well as communicate success.