Born in 1928, Piri Thomas was a Puerto Rican immigrant who grew up in Spanish Harlem in New York City. After a life of racial discrimination, street fighting, drugs, and a prison sentence for shooting a police officer, Thomas wrote his now-famous account of growing up as an outsider in America, called Down These Mean Streets. Originally published in 1967, a thirtieth-anniversary edition came out in 1997 with a new afterward discussing the worsening conditions on the streets of Spanish Harlem.

Martín Espada's fifth collection of poetry, Imagine the Angels of Bread: Poems (1996), contains a series of autobiographical poems recalling family, school, and work experiences. This is a mixture of personal and political poems in which he addresses the bread of imagination, the bread of the table, and the bread of justice.

The Spanish-American War does not always receive as much...