Back in the day, with Cleaver and Che, Malcolm and Claude Brown, John “Piri” Thomas was essential reading. That his Down These Mean Streets is less devoured today is a sign of changing times, and simply less reading punto, not of the novel’s power to evoke life in El Barrio. At the 18^th Annual African Diaspora International Film Festival, president Reinaldo Barroso-Spech introduced opening afternoon feature Every Child Is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas, noting how the autobiographical testimonial surprised his college students with its relevance for the Latino experience in the country today: “if you’re poor and black, they had thought, you couldn’t write well.”

Under the festival’s “U.S. Latino Stories” heading, the unusual biopic was preceded by the short, White Like the Moon, about the skin-color identity crisis of young Tex-Mex Nita (Christel Khaul) in the 1950s Southwest. Piri, too, undergoes such crises, the first fully overt signs of which erupt in a reenacted 1945 fistfight with one of his brothers, who think of themselves as white Puerto Ricans, while Piri spits out the N-word about himself, caught between cultures, ethnicities and races. He was born in 1928, the oldest of seven mixed-hue children of parents who arrived in the ‘20s, dark Juan Tomás, a Cuban by way of Puerto Rico, and lighter heritage-conscious Dolores “Lola.”

The parents would later divorce, though they figure as a couple in reenactments of East, or Spanish, Harlem family and street life, most notably an episode in which the seventy-something-year-old writer plays himself as a kid who steals one of five quarters, hides the coin in his sock and himself under a table, while Juan and Lola argue in an imagined flat with animated walls and furnishings.

There is color and black-and-white footage of that ghetto of sixty years ago, along with images of kids (one representing the young author-to-be) on stoops or in the streets or beside the open coffin of slow Dopey, who died from gutter water the others told him to drink, for “children are roses, with many a thorn.”

In this curious mix of documentary and dramatization, the star is Piri today, in courtyards or on mean streets reciting his rap-rhythm verse which draws on ghetto jive and Spanglish. Along his way, he drops out of school, heads south from new suburbia’s “university of hard knocks,” enlists in the Merchant Marine only to find that “if you’re black, you’re black” throughout Europe and South America, as well.

Home once more, still rudder- and identity-less, he falls in with street gangs and drugs and is sentenced to Sing Sing for a Greenwich Village nightclub holdup in which he is among five who are shot. Doing five-to-fifteen in maximum security, he realizes that he is a nobody going nowhere, and remakes himself, writing voraciously and reading, ultimately composing the confessional letter that leads to parole. With a wife now, at twenty-eight he attends an aunt’s Presbyterian church and, in jacket and tie, works as a youth counselor and, with the book published, becomes a celebrity who appears on TV programs like Hugh Downs’s The Today Show.

The film is two minutes short of one hour, so this is all of necessity sketched broadly. Throughout, in tee-shirt and vest he writes and reads his barrio poetry to the camera, right-hand fingers wriggling. And he reads it to the adolescents in the San Francisco Juvenile Center for Violent Offenders. These Unit B-5 baby-faces are allowed pencils only for Piri’s weekly hour classes, and it is with shy joy that they read their own work aloud and gain the author’s praise, their peers’ applause, and the start of self-esteem.

ECIBP is a variant of multimedia on celluloid, an inspirational by-one’s-own-bootstraps, up-from-printer’s-devil/-slavery/-ghetto success story. Unlike the few who rise from the bottom, most usually through entertainment-sports, but never give back to their roots, this outgoing, thrice-married grandfather and Nuyorican Movement activist has never left, in creating and reaching out to lift others, for “if every child is a poet, every poet is a child.”