It's a tension, you know, it's a tension of kind of being a native son and coming back and feeling like a stranger, but yet feeling like this is still your body. This is still your neighborhood.

From Futuro Media, it's Latino USA.

I'm Maria Inojosa.

For today's episode, I'm going to hand it to our producer Antonia Serejido, who's going to take it from here.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, New York City was undergoing a moment of intense change.

It was the golden age of hip-hop.

But it was also a time in which communities of black and brown New Yorkers were seeing the effects of both the crack epidemic and the decades-long war on drugs.

Steve Young reports on a new kind of cocaine called crack.

Last year, we had over 2,000 homicides here in New York City.

That's an average of five or six homicides a day.

This is the East Harlem that Willie Pardoma tries to wrangle with in his newest book of poetry, The Crazy Bunch.

Since the 1990s, Willie has been known as a poet, performer, and writer with a special

interest in the sounds and sights of the city he grew up in.

And it's going to be like two church boys talking loud on the train, praising the Lord

in a spanglish hip-hop speak.

That's Willie on Deaf Poetry Jam back in 2001. the Lord in a spanglish hip-hop speak.

That's Willie on Deaf Poetry Jam back in 2001.

His most recent book focuses on a weekend in the lives of a group of young men growing up in Harlem,

some of them based on characters from Willie's own adolescence.

Basically, this is all my neighborhood, but most of, really, most of the book takes place and, you know, what are we on? 120. Yeah, we're right around, you know, where everything happens,

basically, where I grew up. Along with producer Seor Cabedo, Willie and I decided to take a walk

through his old neighborhood to hear some of his work from his newest book and reflect on his

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