east harlem (new york, n.y.)

It is 1969 in Spanish Harlem, and fourteen-year-old Evelyn Serrano is trying hard to break free from her conservative Puerto Rican surroundings, but when her activist grandmother comes to stay and the neighborhood protests start, things get a lot more complicated--and dangerous.

Petty crimes, drug running and ghetto adventures bring a street-wise seventeen -year-old and his gang closer to an illusory Eldorado in East Harlem in the 1960s.

It is 1969 in Spanish Harlem, and fourteen-year-old Evelyn Serrano is trying hard to break free from her conservative Puerto Rican surroundings, but when her activist grandmother comes to stay and the neighborhood protests start, things get a lot more complicated--and dangerous.

The author recalls his experiences growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, and his struggles with issues of race, poverty, and identity, after his father, a founding minister of the East Harlem Protestant Parish, moved his family from their primarily white, middle-class neighborhood, to a housing project in East Harlem.

The author describes many aspects of jump rope including the role that jump rope played in her own life as a girl in East Harlem in the 1950s.