We Took the Streets

We Took the Streets

Author: "Mickey" Miguel Melendez

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 146685832X

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An inside look at the Young Lords, the radical Puerto Rican activist group of the 1960s, from one of its founding members. In 1968 Miguel "Mickey" Melendez was a college student, developing pride in his unique cultural identity as Cuban and Puerto Rican, while growing increasingly aware of the lack of quality health care, education, and housing—not to mention respect—his people endured for the sake of the American Dream. He was not alone. Bringing together other like-minded Latino student activists, like Juan Gonzalez, Felipe Luciano, David Perez, and Pablo "Yoruba" Guzman, Melendez helped to form the central committee of what would become the New York branch of the Young Lords. Over the course of the next three years, the Young Lords were a force to be reckoned with. From their storefront offices in East Harlem, they defiantly took back the streets of El Barrio. In addition to running clothing drives, day-care centers, and free breakfast and health programs, the Young Lords became known for their bold radical actions, like the takeovers of the First People's Church and Lincoln Hospital. Front-page news, they forced the city to take notice of their demands for social and political justice and make drastic policy changes. Melendez was part of it all, and describes the idealism, anger, and vitality of the Lords with the unsparing eye of an insider. For the first time, he reveals the extent of the clandestine military branch of the organization and his role coordinating and arming the underground. Although they were active for only a brief period of time, the legacy of the Young Lords—their urban guerrilla, media-savvy tactics, as well as their message of popular power and liberation, civil rights, and ethnic equity—is lasting. We Took the Streets is one man's passionate and inspiring story of the Puerto Rican struggle for equality, civil rights, and independence.


The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano

The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano

Author: Sonia Manzano

Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 0545469589

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One of America's most influential Hispanics -- 'Maria' on Sesame Street -- presents a powerful novel set in New York's El Barrio in 1969There are two secrets Evelyn Serrano is keeping from her Mami and Papo? her true feelings about growing up in her Spanish Harlem neighborhood, and her attitude about Abuela, her sassy grandmother who's come from Puerto Rico to live with them. Then, like an urgent ticking clock, events erupt that change everything. The Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group, dump garbage in the street and set it on fire, igniting a powerful protest. When Abuela steps in to take charge, Evelyn is thrust into the action. Tempers flare, loyalties are tested. Through it all, Evelyn learns important truths about her Latino heritage and the history makers who shaped a nation. Infused with actual news accounts from the time period, Sonia Manzano has crafted a gripping work of fiction based on her own life growing up during a fiery, unforgettable time in America, when young Latinos took control of their destinies.


The Story of The Streets

The Story of The Streets

Author: Mike Skinner

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0593068084

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In 2001, at the age of only 22, the virtually unknown Mike Skinner was signed for a five album record deal. Since then, Mike Skinner has won a worldwide reputation for fusing home-grown hip-hop with the proud British tradition of observational song writing, which stretches from The Beatles and The Kinks to Blur and the Arctic Monkeys. In the multi-faceted guise of The Streets he, along with the likes of his friend and peer Dizzy Rascal, has been largely responsible for giving British rap its own identity, distinct from that of its American influences. Alternating between spells of reckless indulgence and sardonic commentary on his own excesses, Mike Skinner has established the kind of instantly accessible pop persona which only comes along once or twice a generation. Now he brings us The Story of the Streets. Moving chronologically through five albums, and the different phases of his life that they represent, Mike shares personal details of his modest upbringing in Birmingham, as well as the wild extravagances of life in the showbiz fast lane. Personal, shocking and funny; but deeply intelligent, insightful, opinionated and searingly honest - this is a lesson in the making of pop history, narrated by a voice that has informed a generation.


Who

Who

Author: Geoff Smart

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0345504194

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In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to • avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods • define the outcomes you seek • generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople • ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate • attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.


Down These Mean Streets

Down These Mean Streets

Author: Piri Thomas

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780679732389

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"A linguistic event. Gutter language, Spanish imagery and personal poetics . . . mingle into a kind of individual statement that has very much its own sound." --The New York Times Book Review Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.


The Young Lords

The Young Lords

Author: Johanna Fernández

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-12-18

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1469653451

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Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.


Under the Overpass

Under the Overpass

Author: Mike Yankoski

Publisher: Multnomah

Published: 2009-01-21

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 030756343X

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An updated and expanded edition of the gritty, challenging, and utterly captivating portait of the homeless crisis. Ever Wonder What it Would Be Like to Live Homeless? Mike Yankoski did more than just wonder. By his own choice, Mike's life went from upper-middle class plush to scum-of-the-earth repulsive overnight. With only a backpack, a sleeping bag and a guitar, Mike and his traveling companion, Sam, set out to experience life on the streets in six different cities—from Washington D.C. to San Diego— and they put themselves to the test. For more than five months the pair experienced firsthand the extreme pains of hunger, the constant uncertainty and danger of living on the streets, exhaustion, depression, and social rejection—and all of this by their own choice. They wanted to find out if their faith was real, if they could actually be the Christians they said they were apart from the comforts they’d always known…to discover first hand what it means to be homeless in America. What you encounter in these pages will radically alter how you see your world—and may even change your life.


The Address Book

The Address Book

Author: Deirdre Mask

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1250134781

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Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction | One of Time Magazines's 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 | Longlisted for the 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards "An entertaining quest to trace the origins and implications of the names of the roads on which we reside." —Sarah Vowell, The New York Times Book Review When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class. In this wide-ranging and remarkable book, Deirdre Mask looks at the fate of streets named after Martin Luther King Jr., the wayfinding means of ancient Romans, and how Nazis haunt the streets of modern Germany. The flipside of having an address is not having one, and we also see what that means for millions of people today, including those who live in the slums of Kolkata and on the streets of London. Filled with fascinating people and histories, The Address Book illuminates the complex and sometimes hidden stories behind street names and their power to name, to hide, to decide who counts, who doesn’t—and why.


The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street

Author: Sandra Cisneros

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2013-04-30

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0345807197

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.


Surviving On The Streets

Surviving On The Streets

Author: Ace Backwards

Publisher: Loompanics Unlimited

Published: 2002-07-01

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781559502016

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Ace Backwards gives us our first real foray into the daily life of street people. Intended to be written as a how-to for anyone comtemplating or more likely thrust by circumstances into street life, it is an uncensored and candid look at an entirely different world that exists co-dependently with the one with which most of us are familiar. Ace himself admits that no book can teach you to survive the countless turbulent pitfalls awaiting you on the street - each street person's situation is unique. However, this book offers specific tips on street survival that worked - and some that didn't, which might be just as valuable for those who could learn from Ace's mistakes. For those of us who will never live on the streets, this book gives a brutally honest peek into an alien world from the eyes of a native.