Funtula.

It's attention, you know, it's attention of kind of being a native son and coming back and feeling like a stranger,

but yet feeling like this is still your body or this is still your neighborhood.

From Futuro Miria, it's Latino USA.

I'm Maria Inojosa.

For today's episode, I'm going to hand it to our producer Antonio Cerejido,

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 5 or 6 homicides a day.

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

Since the 1990s, Willy 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 and a Spanish hip-hop speak.

Beto Kesson!

That's Willy 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 Willy's own adolescence.

Basically, this is all my neighborhood, but most of the book takes place in, you know, what do we all want?

Yeah, we're right around, you know, where everything happens basically, where I grew up.

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