Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] The Young Lords: Revolution in the Barrio

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Sep 10, 2020 In this episode, Breht sits down with historian Johanna Fernández, author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, to explore one of the most militant and visionary revolutionary groups of the 20th century. We trace the origins of the Young Lords from street gang to revolutionary cadre, their Marxist-Leninist politics, their grassroots organizing in poor Puerto Rican and Black neighborhoods, and their fierce fight against racism, colonialism, police violence, and capitalism itself. Dr. Fernández brings deep archival research and firsthand insight into how this organization fused theory and practice, turning the politics of the lumpen and working class into revolutionary power. This is a history not just to remember—but to learn from and build upon. Check out Johanna's book "The Young Lords" HERE Check out the Groundings podcast episode with Johanna, hosted by Devyn Springer HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's wonderful episode, we have Johanna Fernandez on to talk about The Young Lords. Her new book, The Young Lords, A Radical History, recently came out, and it is the work of scholarship on the history of this amazing organization. We cover so much ground. She's an amazing historian with the mind of a history. historian that can constantly connect dots, pull out lessons from history for people organizing and fighting against this system to this very day. Just an amazing interview with an amazing guest. The links to this, to buy this book and support her work will be in the show notes so you can easily go and find that. And if you like what we do here at Rev Left, you can always join our

Patreon and get access to bonus monthly content. I'll also link to that in the show notes as well. So without further ado, let's get into this amazing conversation with the historian Johanna Fernandez on her newest book, The Young Lords, A Radical History. Enjoy. My name is Johanna Fernandez, and I'm Associate Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York. And I'm the author of this new book, The Young Lords, A Radical History, which has been long in coming, and it feels like I left a little piece of my soul in it. Well, I heard about you originally from the Groundings podcast hosted by Devin Springer, a friend and previous guest of the show. And then I dove into the book itself, absolutely loved the deep, rich history and the sort of narrative structure of it. And I knew I had to have you on to educate myself and my audience about this, you know, really crucial formation in the 60s and early 70s. And especially given the sort of parallels that we're dealing with in our society right now to the 60s and the left trying to organize itself to meet the challenges of our time, I think studying these organizations is a crucial thing that we all need to be engaged in.

So I'm very honored to have you on. Before we get into the conversation about the young lords, can you talk a little bit about your own politics and sort of how you became interested in the young lords? You know, that's a question that is always in the process of emerging and reemerging. What are my own politics? I think that there's something profoundly and structurally wrong with capitalism. And I think that that is more manifest domestically and around the world today than previously.

But I think that at a very young age, I had a sense that there was inequality, racially and economically, that there was something off about society. And perhaps it's the fact that my parents are immigrants from the Dominican Republic and I travel to the Dominican Republic and saw profound. poverty there, but also a different social and cultural society, even though it too is a capitalist society. But maybe travel to a different country gave me a sense of comparative perspective, and maybe I intuited that if things were different in the Dominican Republic, perhaps. Perhaps nothing is set in stone in society and things are changeable. So I think that as a child I was inquisitive and my father was orphaned when he was a child and grew up in poverty in the Dominican Republic.

So there were lots of conversations in my household about poverty, even though my father was not definitively political in the traditional sense. but he definitely had what I think is a very sophisticated analysis of society even though he had no formal education at all he might have finished the second or third grade and he was a philosopher of sorts I would say an organic intellectual and he was obsessed with you know there are so few with so much and so many with so little and so that influenced my my worldview and so I would say that I believe that we can build a society organized in the interest of humanity and I'm a socialist I think that most people who ask questions about the structural problems of our society especially under capitalism

and who are involved in social movements or organizing of any kind eventually come to explore the alternative to capitalism, which is socialism or communism. And I'll remind your listening audience that when Marx was critiquing capitalism and writing about it and identifying alternatives, he looked to first people's societies, Native American societies and first people societies in Africa. elsewhere. And that's really where the idea of socialism comes from, and something that most folks don't know. Yeah, absolutely. He saw in those formations the possibility of a truly communal life where society is invested in the people that make it up. And I think we all agree,

however you call yourself a communist, a socialist, whatever, is that we want our economy and our political and our social systems to be geared towards creating the highest quality of life for all human beings, not geared toward profit at all costs and, you know, shareholder investments and the externalities that those produce. But how did you come to be interested in the young lords and how did your scholarship really start focusing on that? Well, I grew up in the Bronx in the neighborhoods where the young lords were active. And I had no idea that this revolutionary organization was,

a thing and relatively popular in New York City in the 1960s. I grew up, of course, much later during the crack epidemic in New York. And I grew up in some of the poorest neighborhoods, but ended up studying in some of the most elite ruling class institutions where, ironically, I learned about the young lords at Brown, where I studied myself. senior year a Latino studies professor was hired for the first time and literature on the young lords,

primary literature on the young lords form part of the curriculum or the syllabus. And so I was introduced there and shocked that this fierce group of very young people self-proclaimed socialists

and Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalists had done so much. much they occupied a hospital in fact a hospital in the bronx lincoln hospital where i later found out my father almost died at around the time that they were organizing in 1970 and uh they did a lot of work around other health related issues they believed that health care was a human is a human right and shouldn't be driven by the pursuit of profit. They occupied a church. They were Marxists or self-proclaimed Marxist Leninists.

They had a newspaper. They organized on the model of a Vanguard Revolutionary Party. And in many ways, I was fascinated that here you had a group of predominantly young people of color who popularized socialism at the local level in a very organic way. And the language they spoke was compelling because they were part of the working class and the people at the bottom of society. So I learned about the young lords in college and I decided that I would go to graduate school not really knowing what that meant as most people in society don't know what it is

that professors do or folks who are getting a PhD that's that process is obfuscated in our society and I figured it out but I decided eventually to to write about the young lords which hadn't been written about and I wrote the first dissertation on the organization the first doctor's thesis for those of you who are not familiar with the lingo of Ph.D. Dem. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's amazing. That's absolutely fascinating. And I know you touched on a little bit of the ideology and a little bit of the political actions. We'll dive deeper into those, but that really gives people, especially those who have little to know understanding of who the young lords are. It gives them a great bird's eye introduction into this broader conversation.

So moving on, how did the young lords come to be as an organization? And what issues were they initially organizing to try and solve? Okay, so this is a complex question because the young lords, before they became a political organization, the group was a gang that was active in Chicago in the 1950s and early 60s, late 1950s. And it was a street organization. And I think it's important to say that the term gang means something different today, than it meant then. Today, because of the underground economy surrounding drugs,

gang life is violent because there are these turf wars around this commodity that's illegal. It's an underground economy, and there's fierce competition to control it across the world and in local neighborhoods in the United States. In an earlier period, gangs were not rife with violent competition over the drug trade. So the gang that was composed mostly of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, Puerto Rican and Mexican youth, was politicized over the course of the 1960s and its leader, Jose Chacha Jimenez. who had been imprisoned over the course of the decade in and out of numerous facilities in Chicago helped steer that transformation. And just to give a deeper sense of what that looked like,

I think that the class experience of the gang members, as people at the bottom of society, the experience of these people of color in the streets with the police, their clash with white gangs, and the imprisonment of its members, especially its leader, in this period of struggle of the 1960s, propelled their politicization, and eventually their ROND,

with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lord's gang after it's transformed into a political organization ends up identifying as the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panther Party. I think that it's important for your listening audience to know that gang membership among people of color increased exponentially in Chicago. in the post-war period, because, as you probably know, people of color migrate to the cities in large numbers after World War II. And they encounter an enormous amount of white racial hostility, but a pre-existing infrastructure of gang life created by ethnic whites in cities

like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia. And as these racial antagonisms increase in Chicago, because of the expansion of people of color, as residents of the city, the young people who are newcomers are forced to form their own gangs to protect themselves from violence. And the young lords talk about how,

gang life help them learn the rules of their new society right these were the children of migrants and they helped them craft a sense of themselves and identity in a world in which being brown and black was to be essentially a child of a lesser god so even though these organizations emerge to defend themselves against white hostility and white violence in the cities, there's a germ of politics in their formation for people of color because they also become institutions where young people can define themselves, young people who are racially oppressed and marginalized and depicted as criminals and inferior. These organizations help to give young people who are racially oppressed a sense of pride

and a sense of themselves. I mean, ultimately, one of the profound questions of humanity and existence, is who am I? And in a society where you are marginalized and demonized, these organizations help these young people redefine that question for themselves. I see. I see. Yeah, I really like that pointing out the idea that, you know, these gangs at that time were

not, you know, done to have some ruthless control over drugs or black market, you know, commodities, but rather as mechanisms of community, of identity formation, and specifically of resistance to the hardcore white racism against them. And I think that's an important thing to understand when you're talking about these organizations and these communities and gangs and why they are so prevalent in certain communities. Can you talk a little bit about the leadership and the personality of Jose Chacha Jimenez and what made him an effective leader and organizer of the young Lords? You know, that's another complex question, and I dedicate the entire first chapter of the book to the person of Jose Chacha Jimenez. In the context of everything that's

happening in Chicago, white hostility, deindustrialization, urban renewal, which displaces on a mass scale, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and African Americans from housing. and pushes them into the margins of working-class white neighborhoods. And that is what, in part, instigates this conflict between youth of color and working-class and poor white youth. Chacha Jimenez was a Puerto Rican kid who, at some point, alongside his other peers, decides to join a gang. And I think the statistic at that point, 1959, 60, when the group emerges, is that Puerto Rican and Mexican kids

are outnumbered by working class white kids 17 to 1. So they decide to form a gang to resist white hostility and racism. And Chachai is one of the kids. What's interesting about him is that he's a fairer-skinned Puerto Rican who has a very Latino last name, Jose Jimenez, and he has green eyes, but curly hair, his features are not phenotypically, what we might call phenotypically white. So he stood between two worlds and in navigating the world of Catholic schools where he was placed by his mother because his mother worked for the Catholic Church. She helped organize the Spanish language services and as a result was able to gain financial aid for her son to go to these production. dominantly Irish and Italian Catholic schools, he was able to, at a very young age,

perceive the racism and white supremacy of the Catholic priests, who often spoke horrifically about black Americans in his presence, probably because he might have passed for white, although he talks about literally straightening his hair, which was kinky with a comb every day before school. And so that experience of being in a white space as an outsider

and hearing the unrepentant racism of people who were supposed to be godly, was a contradiction that stayed with him. He was in the gang. His mother had aspirations for him of becoming a priest, but of course he's seeing that there's a huge discrepancy between the ideals of Catholicism and religion and the reality. And he has this other life going on,

his gang life, which is a, about identity and protection and resistance around against white hostility, but it's also about criminal activity, petty criminal activity. So he, he gets in trouble and is imprisoned. There's an enormous amount of recidivism in his life. At some point, if you can imagine this, something that we don't imagine today, he, he, was facing some serious time in prison. And his mom and the courts cut a deal wherein he would be sent to Puerto Rico for some time rather than serve out a sentence as a youth in prison.

And he talks about how that experience of life in Puerto Rico transforms him. And I'll give you an example. It gives him a sense of the different ways in which Puerto Ricans and the small community that he was in responded to his marginal activity. So when he was sent to Puerto Rico, of course, he was crestfallen and outraged that he was going to be sent off to a place that he didn't know. He could barely speak Spanish and he was being banished from his community. but he gets to Puerto Rico and he falls in love with this girl and he hot wires a car to go see her somewhere up in the mountains and at some point he steals a horse he of course gets punished he gets read the riot act by people in the community and is

shamed for his behavior and he says that huh in many ways that shaming by that elderly woman did more to me and my consciousness than all of the months and years I spent in prison. And she set me straight, essentially. So these experiences expanded his consciousness, and then he got back to Chicago. He gets in trouble again. He's imprisoned precisely at the moment

when Martin Luther King is assassinated in 1968 and he gets exposed to literature that's distributed in the prison by the nation of Islam and he ends up reading Martin Luther Kings, where do we go from here, seven-story mountain by Thomas Merton and the autobiography of Malcolm X while he's in solitary confinement. And there are other things that happen in the prison that politicize him, but he's also listening to the radio in 1968 when the Black Panther Party is active in Chicago. And he tells me in the numerous interviews I conducted with him that what he's seeing is that the Black Panthers are protesting against the police and attempting to expose the police.

And he says, I know from my experience in the streets that the police are no good and they're essentially there to keep people in their place. And so I decide that I want to get with the Black Panther Party when I get out of prison. And when he gets out, he doesn't meet the Black Panther Party immediately. He gets involved in a struggle in Lincoln Park in Chicago against urban renewal. And for those of you who don't know, urban renewal is essentially that epoch's gentrification project. It's a lot more organized and it's backed up by the federal government and it leads to mass displacement of the people at the bottom of society, brown people, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans,

but also black Americans. And that struggle to save his neighborhood from massive displacement. essentially the displacement of people of color and poor people to create middle-class housing in Chicago seals the deal because he tries to get his colleagues, right, other gang members in the Young Lords, but also in other gangs to help stop this project. It's not an easy process because gang members are, to some extent, their worldviews, is organized around turf.

It took a minute for him to convey to them that this was important that they should struggle and engage in political education and in the politics of others on the left who were involved in this struggle to save the neighborhood.

So that struggle of convincing his colleagues or comrades or other gang members is Herculean. He succeeds and that really begins the process of transforming the organization. Eventually, he meets Fred Hampton, the leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago, fierce, eloquent, humble leader who with others in the Black Panther Party is trying to form

the Rainbow Coalition, a coalition that includes Puerto Ricans, Mexicans in the Young young lords, poor whites from Appalachia in a group called the Young Patriots and Black Americans in the Black Panther Party, a coalition across racial lines organized on the idea that these people shared class interests and should come together on that basis. And so this is all happening very quickly. There's also a killing by police of one of the young lords. And all of these things together with cha-cha at the helm lead to the transformation of this gang into a political organization.

Absolutely fascinating. For those who don't know, we have a good, like, two-hour episode just on the life and legacy of Fred Hampton, for people who want to dive deeper into the absolute hero. that Fred Hampton was. But the parallels between Chachaw and Malcolm X are really interesting. Malcolm X, you know, his nickname used to be red because he had red hair. And Malcolm X would talk about, especially in his biography, about looking in the mirror and seeing his own red hair

and seeing it as a sign or, you know, hating that aspect of him because it came from, you know, slave owners who owned his family, his ancestors. And that's how he got that into his overall look. He also spent some time, Malcolm, I'm talking, like Chacha, in some white spaces as a young child and was really confronted with the racism of those spaces, even mentors that he looked up to would make just casual but deeply racist anti-black statements in front of him that really pushed him in the direction of awakening that liberatory aspect of his personality. And then just the whole idea that Chachaw read Malcolm's autobiography in prison and Malcolm's time in prison. was really formative and him coming to not only the nation of Islam, which was a huge presence in prisons during Chacha's time, but also to that radical politic that he would later be known for. So those parallels are really beautiful and fascinating. And I think speak to something deep

in American society for marginalized and oppressed people who kind of go through this process of political awakening. You did mention earlier in this episode that the young lords were Marxist or even Marxist Leninist, could you go a little bit deeper into that and maybe even talk about the tension if there was any between nationalism and Marxism, which we did see that tension in the Black Panther Party. I was wondering if that was at all present

in the Young Lords as well. Yes, so you're asking me this question and I want to go back to the infrastructure of the city and its economic decay as a springboard for the politics that emerge among urban radicals of color in this period, including the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. So we tend to think of deindustrialization as something that affects communities where white working class people live in the United States.

but before the industrialization hit white working class communities, it devastated communities of color in the cities. So precisely at the moment, when people of color are migrating from countryside to city during and after World War II, we see the beginnings of deindustrialization in the city. That is that industries are leaving the cities to the suburbs and to the south and eventually abroad in stages. So as you know, the city is a place where historically, both domestically and around the world and throughout human history, people go and become part of a laboring class. And because there's a bustling economy in the cities, employment is not an issue or hadn't been up until World War II when we see domestically and in other parts of the world, especially now, industries leaving. So people of color go from being rural people in the main, African Americans who are sharecroppers in the same.

South start migrating in larger numbers than ever to cities like Chicago, Detroit, but also Mexicans from the Southwest and Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico, but also Native Americans, start migrating to the city during World War II in pursuit of wartime jobs. But after World War II, again, this process of deindustrialization begins. So what happens in this period, and there are stuff. conducted by the government, the Bureau of Labor Studies, begin to see this development that entire segments of these communities that are new migrants are experiencing permanent unemployment

or men between the ages of like 16 and 30 are leaving the labor market because they've attempted to find employment over the course of a year and have failed in that process. So they leave the labor market altogether. And so a class of permanently unemployed people emerges for the first time in the history of the cities. And that gets us to the politics of the young lords and the Black Panthers. Part of what I argue in my book is that these organizations consider themselves Marxist.

They emerged at the end of the 1960s after the movements had been radicalized and were turning to anti-capitalist theories to understand society and how to change it. And what's interesting about the Young Lords and the Black Panthers is that unlike traditional Marxists who identify the working class as the class that can transform, society because, not because it's morally better, but because it produces the wealth in society. It makes society run. The example I give folks is that in New York City, I think in 2006, the subway workers, the folks who make transportation run in New York City, which is dependent on the subway and buses,

they went out on strike. and the city was paralyzed, like we'd never seen before. That illustrates the power of the working class when it acts collectively, and it removes its labor from the point of production. Well, at a moment when it appeared that the working class had lost team and when this other class of people who were permanently out of the working class emerges, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords decide that the most revolutionary class in society is precisely that class, which they call the lumpin proletariat.

This is a term used by Marx to identify this class that lives at the margins of society, often engaged in petty criminal activity, that's disconnected from the working class at the bottom of society. So that's how the young lords impart and Black Panthers come to Marxism. They consider themselves Marxist-Leninists and revolutionaries, first and foremost. But they also consider themselves revolutionary nationalists. So one of the things I've not mentioned is that above all, the young lords believed in the independence of Puerto Rico. And they were the first group of mainland-raised Puerto Ricans who organized to free Puerto Rico. Again, I don't know if your listening audience is aware of this, but Puerto Ricans became, and the island of Puerto Rico becomes an addendum or

part of the United States as a colonial possession during the Spanish-American War of 1898. But the Jones Act of 1914, I believe, gives Puerto Ricans a limited kind of citizenship. It allows them citizenship on the island, but they're not allowed to vote for the president unless they live. here in the U.S. mainland. So it's a limited colonial citizenship, but citizenship, nonetheless, a lot of people don't understand that Puerto Ricans are considered citizens of the United States. So the young lords, in many ways, they set out to understand who they are in relation to the United States and the nation.

And they want to understand and educate the new left of that period, but also their peers, about the U.S. Colonial Project in Puerto Rico and its impact on the diaspora that migrates in large numbers to places like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York after World War II. And just more on this, because Americans really don't know, Puerto Rico is the oldest colony in the world. It was colonized by the Spaniards in 1508, I believe, and then recolonized by the United States in 1898. And the value of Puerto Rico for the U.S. is geostrategic. From the military bases that the United States built in Puerto Rico, the United States launched all of its

military interventions in the 20th century in Latin America. Wow. And Puerto Rico was the the place where the United States tested and developed the blueprint for capitalist expansion into the third world during the Cold War. So this is what the young lords as budding radicals are trying to understand with a whole diverse series of theories that are emerging and becoming popular at the time, Marxism, but also the theories that are emerging after World War II with the hurricane of national liberation struggles against European colonial rule

in places like Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, that are emerging. So the politics of the young lords are an amalgam of Marxism, revolutionary nationalist theories emerging out of that struggle to decolonize the third world that was massively colonized in the late 19th century by Europe in order to get itself out of a crisis of overproduction in the late 19th century there was a long depression

and the European countries decided to colonize Asia and Africa as a means out of capitalists' economic crisis. So in this period that we're talking about before the 60s, all these theories emerge about colonization, its impact on the psyche of the colonized, what might the new revolutionary nations look like? And so the young lords are influenced by these theories, writings of France Fanon,

who was a psychologist from Martinique, who supported the Algerian revolution. And France Fanon, is very important, in part because it expands our understanding of racism and European white supremacy and its impact on society, but also the psyche of the oppressed. You mentioned earlier that Malcolm X, like Chacha, were both conflicted about their European features. They were both conflicted about them, but also attracted to them because whiteness is the ideal around which all people who live in the world post-settler colonialism

of an earlier epoch of the 1400s have had to live with, which is that the white ideal sets the standards of beauty, education, and civilization for the world. And of course, these were the ideas of racism and white supremacy and the advanced culture and civilization of Europe was promoted in order to justify slavery and the colonization project of Europe. So France Fanon, in many ways and his writings about this, helps to decolonize knowledge and the self and the psychology of the oppressed. So not sure if that's all coming through,

but just to summarize, the young lords consider themselves revolutionary nationalists. That meant that they believe that colonized people, oppressed people had to liberate themselves from their colonized. And the reason why they call themselves revolutionary nationalists is because they believed that class was central to that project and that there were collaborators among Puerto Ricans and other people of color in colonized places, but also in the United States, Puerto Ricans who were collaborating with the colonial project and that people of color who are racialized don't. all have the same class interests, like Obama, for example, shares a very different worldview on the world, its problems and how to resolve them than working class black people and poor black people. Essentially, Obama's class influences his opinion about the world. For example,

most recently, he convinced LeBron James and the other players of the NBA, to retreat from their strike. That's clearly a position that benefits the owners of the MBA, right? Yeah. The ruling class. He's part of the ruling class. He's a manager of the ruling class. This doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't experience racism because he is black,

and we know that the reason in part why Trump won in 2016 was because of, of the white backlash against the prominence of a black person in American society. Of course, that conversation is a lot deeper than that because the politics of the Democratic Party that the Obama administration advanced also didn't meet and address the needs of black people or working class white people or working class white people in the United States. Okay, so they were revolutionary nationalists who believed in the National Liberation Project, but also they argued that that process to liberate the nation from colonial rule had to be intertwined with the fight for socialism,

a society that overturns capitalism and that is organized and control. controlled by the working class in the interest of human need rather than profit. So they were both nationalist and socialist. And they essentially believed that in order to gain a sense of themselves in a racist society and gain power, people of color, racialized black people had to form their own organizations separate from white Americans, although because these organizations were socialist, you have the emergence of the Rainbow Coalition that encourages and promotes cross-racial collaboration on the basis of shared class interests.

Yeah. Yeah, that was a great answer. I mean, you connected so many dots. You covered huge swaths of history. I didn't even understand the geostrategic nature of Puerto Rico as a colony and how that was the launching off point for a lot of the attacks in Latin America done during the Cold War period. And even before you mentioned Franz Fanon, I had already written down his name and his book to bring that up because so much of that ideology really comes out of, I mean, Phenonian theory comes out of those national liberation struggles. And Fanana in the opening chapters of Retched of the Earth talks about how the Marxist analysis needs to be stretched slightly for the colonial context. And the Black Panthers and now the young lords picking that up and running with it

is fascinating and really crucial to understand where they were coming from ideologically. And for those who want to understand more about that text, Wretched of the Earth, we did a three-part series explaining and reflecting on that entire text, going through it and walking people through it so that people can have a resource to understand it because I truly believe that Wretched of the Earth is an essential text for anybody on the left. And the last thing I just wanted to mention because you mentioned Obama and Trump, and it's just worth pointing out that, you know, talking about white supremacy and the backlash to Obama, Trump was the primary purveyor of birtherism, of that entire movement. And his presidential election really started with that

birtherist movement and then turned into a campaign. And so you really can't understate the white supremacy at play there, even though Obama's class interests are clearly aligned with the ruling class and not the working class. But you'd mentioned earlier as well in the intro, some of the occupations that the young lords took part. And I was hoping you could dive a little deeper in some other of the political actions or even expand on those occupations that they organized and took part and so that people can get a good idea of how they acted in their communities and what political activity they were engaged in. Okay. So just to paint a clearer picture of the politics of the young lords, they were organizers on the ground at the local level.

and they were part of a generation of radicals who decided to organize at the level of the community rather than at the point of production in the workplace. But they organized a Vanguard Revolutionary Party. They had a 13-point program and platform, and the first point of that platform read. I'm trying to think, I think it's like something like we want liberation. on the island and inside the United States, on the island of Puerto Rico. It's a 13-point program proclaimed that we want a socialist society.

They had a newspaper, a bilingual newspaper. I think it might have been the first socialist bilingual newspaper in the United States. So they were organizing at the level of the community, and they're trying to figure out, okay, so how can we transform, translate these theories that we're learning about from France Van On and Marx and the revolutionary nationalist movements across the world, including what's going on in Vietnam, how do we integrate theory and practice? So they organize in East Harlem, which is the Puerto Rican community in New York City. What's interesting about this is,

that the Puerto Rican community in historically Puerto Rican community in New York City East Harlem is also ethnically diverse. 30% of the people who live there are Puerto Rican. 30% of the people who live there are also

African Americans and another 30% is Italian. This is important because the campaigns that they decide on which have a strong class current attract black Americans.

So even though the young lords are self-proclaimed Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalists, 30% of its membership is composed of African Americans. And another like 5%

is composed of other Latinos, including Dominicans, Colombians, Panamanians. This is in New York. This is in New York City. In Chicago, the organization is composed of mostly Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. In Chicago, the young lords resist urban renewal.

They organized around housing displacement, and they organize against police brutality. In New York, the organization is somewhat more sophisticated in part because it is led by the first generation of Puerto Rican youth who are admitted to college, places like Columbia University and City College, that are allowing folks who had previously been excluded from those spaces admission. So a very talented group of young, mostly Puerto Rican, but also African American, Dominican and Panamanian, young people

build a branch of the organization in New York and in New York they decide that they are going to literally take an informal poll of the community on what's wrong and the community says the garbage garbage is everywhere

in East Harlem but also Harlem garbage is in fact a crisis of epic proportion in New York and the reasons for that are fascinating not sure that we have the time to get into it, but it has to do with the fact that in the 1950s,

the United States becomes a consumer society. And its apparatus for disposing garbage doesn't catch up until much later. So our society doesn't know what to do with all of this garbage that consumption is creating. and that is experienced profoundly in communities of color that are allowed to fall and to disrepair because of racism and municipal policy. So garbage is the problem they're told in this poll, and they start collecting the garbage and expecting the sanitation department to pick it up. And of course, the sanitation department is composed mostly of Irish and Italian workers with a history of racism in New York City who end up collecting half the garbage and leaving the rest of it strown in the streets because they could care less about the people of color who live in East Harlem.

So the young lords call attention to this. the garbage they collect in these you know streets they took a few blocks of of east Harlem to do this work in doesn't get picked up and they end up putting the garbage in the middle of the street and stopping traffic in one of the major arteries in the city for blocks and blocks and blocks on end people get involved in the community because everyone's pissed off about it and the community starts burning the garbage in the middle of the streets, the firemen come in, then the firemen get pelted with the garbage by the people in the community, in part because the fire department is known to be racist in New York

City and exclusionary, historically excludes people of color from its rank and file, and works closely with the police that's hated. So they call their guard. The garbage protest, the garbage offensive, in deference to the Tet Offensive of the Vietnamese in 1968, the most important military operation launched by the Vietnamese in that decade in which they attack American military installations in the cities rather than in the jungle. This is a surprise attack that the Vietnamese launch in 1968, which turns the Vietnam War around and pretty much signals the end of that war because for the first time in the history of war, journalists are able to capture what it looks like because the war comes to the cities,

cities like Saigon. So this is interesting about the young lords that they are, organizing locally, but they're attempting to make international connections with other people fighting for freedom and against imperial rule in Vietnam. And they create a name for themselves. The New York Times starts picking this up. They happen to create this ruckus around the garbage daily. Over the course of two months, they're engaged in this militant hit and run urban

guerrilla struggle is what they called it, that attempts to demobilize or interfere with business as usual in the city. They happen to do this during a mayoral election, and their campaigns literally end up being referenced in the mayoral debates of that fall. Then they decide that they are going to address the issue of lead poisoning, which is a massive problem in urban centers, you know about it from Flint, Michigan. Lead is a neurotoxin that produces permanent brain damage. And historically in cities like Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, there have been these, what are known as lead belts, entire neighborhoods with

the lappidated housing in which the paint used on the walls of those buildings are infected with lead. And what happens is that the lead that is chipping off the walls is picked up by children when they're toddlers and they eat the chips of paint and get lead poisoned. And so that was an issue. there was a kid by the name of Gregory Franklin who died in East Harlem, a black American kid from lead poisoning.

And they took on this issue and they created a strategic campaign wherein they worked with medical technicians, nurses and doctors from a nearby metropolitan hospital to go door to door to test to test two. children in East Harlem to see if it was if they were lead poisoned and they discovered that 30% of the children they tested had dangerous levels of lead poison in them or lead in them and they held a series of press conferences that exposed the city shamed the city for what they called a racist policy they exposed the environmental racism that is lead poisoning and they were at it. They took over in a sit-in, the Department

of Health in New York, demanding that the city do something about this. And they were very smart about using the new media, which at that point was television. And they held press conferences almost every day and they engaged in militant action that brought the media around and they were very intent on influencing the narrative in the public discourse and offering a radical analysis and critique of the problem. In the end, the mayor's office cites the activism of the young lords in its papers. And the Journal of Public Health in 1974 or 75 credits the activism and militancy of the young lords in the late 60s with the passage of anti-lead poisoning legislation, which creates, among other things, the Bureau

of Lead Poisoning in New York, which forces landlords to strip the lead paint from the buildings finds them if they don't but also calls in a team of folks to do that work

if the landlords don't amazing yeah they also took over a church to dramatize the horrific conditions of poverty under which Puerto Ricans and black Americans lived and they occupied

Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx again to dramatize the horrors of medical discrimination and just a hospital that looked like something of a different epoch

but called itself a hospital deteriorating falling apart in fact children who were sent to Lincoln Hospital because they were let poison got re-infected because there was led everywhere in the hospital. So they occupy the hospital and one of the most incredible things about their work with workers,

with the very low-paid workers at the bottom of the health care chain, the people who clean the hospitals, the orderlies, and nurses who were poor. paid in that period, but also doctors come together with the young lords, and they draft the first known patient Bill of Rights. Something that we see everywhere we go in a hospital today, there's this document called the Patient Bill of Rights. Their Patient Bill of Rights, however, said that health care is a right, not a privilege, that health care should not be driven by profit.

that poor patients should not be subjected to observation and care by medical students without the prior consent of the patient because in this period, poor populations and poor people of color become guinea pigs for medical schools. So they checked that. They called attention to medical discrimination and demanded that doctors provide considerate and respectful care to people of color. They demanded that doctors explained to patients their medical condition. They demanded competent translation on site,

and they highlighted the fatal consequences of medical negligence, unsanitary conditions, and hospitals, and many other issues. They called for decent wages for medical workers or workers in hospitals and in the medical field who were poorly paid. Yeah. So these are some of the stress. struggles of the 60s that many people don't know about. If you look at the campaigns of the Young Lords, but also the Black Panthers, the breakfast program of the Black Panthers, a lot of

the issues that these organizations turned to were issues of health, public health. The Black Panthers are known for having initiated a service to transport patients to the hospital. The last thing I'm going to say is this, something that folks don't know. In Pittsburgh, the black American community in the Hill District and organizers there decided that they were going to create an alternate transportation system for people who got sick. Because prior to 911 and EMT, which emerges in the 1960s, by the way, the police were called whenever there was an emergency or people got sick, and people got transported in cop cars to the hospital. Many people die. What do you imagine happen in communities of color?

People got killed and beaten up by the police. So at this moment that black radicals organize an alternate transportation system, some doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Hospital are creating a method of offering medical saving devices outside of the hospital, something that can be transported to aid people in need who can't necessarily get to the hospital. And so this is how the EMT is born in a collaboration between black radicals

and their transportation service and doctors who are figuring out how to provide medical care outside of the hospital. setting for sick patients. So this is important because we tend to think that everything in society is handed to us by the people at the top of society, but in fact it's people at the bottom of society who are responsible for massive advances who create alternate systems to meet the needs that are before them. And we're seeing that across the country today in the middle of this pandemic.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. What really arises here, I mean, so much fascinating content, but what really arises is this picture of the young lords as deeply embedded in their community, deeply engaged with the actual daily material needs of the people in their community. And insofar as they're a vanguard party, they are leading the fight for their community, for these basic, really in a lot of cases, amounts to basic human rights. Humans should not have to raise their kids in dilapidated housing with lead paint. People shouldn't have to die on hospital beds because they have bad translators or can't get to the hospital in the first place. And so you really see this radical agitation, meeting the needs of the people, having these downstream effects that we all benefit from today.

But we don't know where they actually originated in many of these cases. And most of these cases, it originates with people on the bottom of society, fighting as hard as they can for these gains. And then the rest of us taking him for granted in part because obviously we're not taught about these histories in our normal educational system. And then, of course, the savvy use of media was also another thing they took advantage of to help get their message and narrative out. What role, though, I'm really interested in this because we know in organizations of all kinds, particularly revolutionary organizations, that women are the backbone, the nervous system of any of these movements.

So I was wondering what role that women played in the outlook and the activity of the Young Lords and how feminism sort of took root inside of that organization, if at all. So the structure of the organization, the Young Lords, much like the Black Panther Party, is somewhat militaristic in many ways the Young Lords and the Black Panthers influenced by the revolutionary struggles of the third world, adopt the structure of the Liberation Army. So if you think about the structure, they had, what did they call? They had a chairman, they had deputy, lieutenant of communication,

lieutenant of communication, of outreach. I can't remember all the different areas of work. But it was a somewhat military-styled vanguard party, which meant that it had a male-centered leadership. And a disproportionate number of men formed part of the membership in the Young Lords when it first formed in 1916. But interestingly enough, after the young lords took over the church in East Harlem, the first Spanish United Methodist Church,

and they transformed it into a social service sanctuary for the poor, this amplified the presence of the organization. This was huge. These young Puerto Rican radicals took over a church. It was headline news in New York City and around the world, including in Japan, by the way, but this is what raised their profile within the new left. Women came to the occupation of the church.

The church was occupied for 11 days, and women's membership increased exponentially. They had been involved previously and active, and in fact got beaten up in one of the actions the organization took in the run-up to the church at the church. And when the women joined and their membership increased, they started meeting separately.

And they told the men and the men were like, yeah, sure, no problem. Go have your hand meeting. We don't care. But what the women ended up doing was drafting a list of demands that exposed sexism and patriarchy in the group. The fact that the women were doing the grunt work but didn't form part of the leadership body of the organization

and they wanted to be equal partners in the struggle for human liberation and they created a ruckus and a conversation about women's liberation. That wasn't an easy one. There was a backlash that took all kinds of different and this is the subject of one of my chapters. But they got the leadership eventually over many weeks and months to appoint a woman to the leadership body. And the first woman elected to the leadership body was Denise Oliver,

who's not Puerto Rican, interestingly enough, but African-American. And the reasons why she was chosen was fascinating, in part because, As you said, women formed the backbone of organizations. She was assigned to be the officer of the day. That's a position they had of the person who was going to manage the office. Their office in East Harlem was a central point of activity. It's where members of the organization went to get their assignments for the day. it's the place where people came in from the community

to say that they had a problem to ask if the young lords could help. It was organization central and she was assigned to manage the office because the man in charge of doing that work was not getting the job done, was not particularly well organized. And that gave her an enormous amount of visibility, authority, and experience that then became recognized

after the struggle over the place of women in the organization. Within the fascinating things about the young lords is that they, for a brief moment, succeeded in getting both men and women in women's caucuses and men's caucuses to discuss issues of gender and sexism and women's liberation at the grassroots in the organization. So men had meetings in which they talked about their contribution to the problem of sexism within the organization and in society. They read on these issues. There was an attempt to also address issues of gay oppression, gay and lesbian oppression. And they also, for a brief moment, offered security to Sylvia Rodriguez, a charge. transgender person who was famous in New York City.

She was never a member of the organization, but the young lords offered security for her at a moment when she thought that her life was in danger. And so it was a conversation that was begun in the organization around depression, gender oppression, federal normativity, but also the impact of race, racism on the psychology of the oppressed, which the organization theorized and called

colonized mentality. You know, if you're demonized and depicted as ugly and bad as happens in European societies, in Euro-America, essentially, that has a profound impact on your own sense of yourself and your own humanity. And so part of what the group helped to do was theorize these issues, especially among people from Latin America. So there's a different racial formation in Latin America than in the United States. In Latin America, racial ideology is organized around the notion that a drop of white blood brings you closer to the white ideal. So there's a whitening, explicitly whitening of the race movement in Latin America that informs the way people think of themselves.

In the United States, a different racial formation emerges around the one-drop rule that a drop of black blood makes you black. So there's an enormous amount of denial of African ancestry among people from Latin America and Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, particular to colonization under Spanish rule, as opposed to under British rule here in North America. And so part of what the young lords did was to expose and explain and historicize the logic. of racial formation and recidiology in Latin America. That hadn't been done before. So that's pretty phenomenal advance in our understanding of human phenomenon that these very young people contributed to. And of course, now conversations around race in Latin America are popular in the university.

But this was theorized in, newspapers by young people, many of whom didn't have any formal training, and the young lords are known in New York, especially, but also in Chicago, for having made literate and educated an entire generation of young people who had been kicked out of high school, have been kicked out of their public school. So many young lords are autodidacts, and they got their training intellectually and politically in this revolutionary organization. Yeah.

That is truly sort of profound how very young, often, no formal education to speak of, but they're wrestling with these profound issues that, you know, today we perhaps made a lot of progress on, but we can't always see where those conversations. started and insofar as organizations like the Black Panthers or the young lords were not perfect when it comes to LGBTQ issues or feminist issues the fact that they really dedicated themselves to trying to wrestle with those and how that push to wrestle with those issues came internally often and almost always from the women in those organizations i think really speaks to one of the core strengths of these movements and not only were they doing this political

activity, but they were theorizing in the midst of this activity, and that theorization can obviously opened up entire departments in academia, but also continues to inform and deepen our theory and practice today as organizers, activists, revolutionaries, et cetera. Another important issue that doesn't really get addressed, and it's important to address it because it makes the young lord's singular, is that it was disproportionately led by black Puerto Ricans. So when you think of Latinos in the United States, you think perhaps of brown-skinned or light-skinned people of color.

But the fact is that the majority of enslaved Africans who were brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade were enslaved in Latin America. of the 12 million enslaved Africans who landed here in the Americas, only a quarter were enslaved in North America. The rest were sent to Latin America. And black people from Latin America in the United States are excluded from the notion of what it means to be Latino or Puerto Rican.

And what's fascinating is that the Young Lords, its leadership was disproportionately people from those countries whose parents migrated here and who were disproportionately darker-skinned. And its membership was also darker, darker-looking Latinos, black Latinos, essentially. And that's part of the reason why the organization attracted African Americans. And it's stretched for a moment there our conceptualization and understanding of race in the United States, right? Yeah.

Which is understood within this dichotomy of black Americans who trace their ancestry to slavery in the South and white Americans, but there is an entire universe of other racially oppressed people in the United States who were excluded from the conversation in the public sphere. I see. Yeah, fascinating indeed. So let's shift towards the end of this conversation, a couple more questions for you. I know listeners to this program, we talk about Cointel Pro a lot. We've talked about it in various episodes. We've talked about it generally. We talk about how possible it could still exist in possible forms and like all revolutionary organizations of this time the young lords were targeted by the fbi's infamous co-intel program this this repression

this infiltration obviously puts huge pressure on organizations and this often leads to schisms widespread paranoia and even outright destruction so i was hoping you know without going too deep into co-intel pro because i think a lot of people understand the basics of that i was hoping you could just kind of talk about the ultimate divisions and decline of the young lords sort of why and how it happened that's a complex question but essentially there were infiltrators and provocateurs in the organization from the beginning and for example when the young lords decided to rent an office space in east harlem co-intelpro visited the landlord that rented the young lords their first office and it's

very likely that their office was completely wired. Essentially, there were different currents within the organization, different political currents. One of those currents argued that the organization should move to Puerto Rico to fight for Puerto Rican independence there. And that was the beginning of the end for the organization because the organization was a very U.S. mainland domestic formation that had more in common with the new left, students for a democratic society, the anti-war movement, the Black Panthers, the American

Indian movement, than it had with revolutionaries on the island of Puerto Rico, who had been fighting for Puerto Rican independence for some time. And interestingly enough, for disproportionately middle class, upper middle class, Puerto Ricans who are also white or whiter. These kids, the young lords, were raised in the American ghetto and had a completely different culture, a different way of operating, seeing the world, and even speaking, and most of them didn't properly speak Spanish.

They had to literally take Spanish class. as part of their move to Puerto Rico. And there they were received by a very elite, erudite class of Puerto Rican revolutionary Marxists who looked down upon them as the riffraff, literally, and ask legitimately, how are you going to tell us anything about Puerto Rican and. independence as outsiders. We've been in this struggle for a minute here on the island. So that move to Puerto Rico was exploited by CointelPro.

It was probably driven in part by Cointel Pro. And it disconnected the organization from the grassroots, from its local organizing that made it popular and a phenomenon here in New York. New York, even within the media or among the media core, the young lords were known for their fierce, intrepid, creative militancy. As you probably know, part of what Cointel Pro did successfully was to create distrust among people who previously considered themselves brothers and sisters and comrades. And once you destroy trust through all kinds of different strategies and encouraging of internecine struggle among people in an organization, you've destroyed the organization.

Because at core, part of what organizations, especially revolutionary organizations are built upon is the trust that comes from common struggle over time and so they were in Puerto Rico their their resources were stretched immensely as you can imagine they were trying to organize in Puerto Rico and still in East Harlem and in Philadelphia and in other parts they had quite a number of branches but they were overstretched it wasn't they didn't have the capacity or infrastructure to go internationally. And they became inward-looking and disconnected from the grassroots, like other organizations, they became entrenched in political education, disconnected from praxis organizing, did a lot of

reading of Maoist thought, but Marxism and other theories. And they became very dogmatic in their understanding of the world. And that came as a result of their isolation from the grassroots, but also as a result of government infiltration. And there were epic violent fights and struggles. And the use of Maoist theories to purge people who disagreed with the orientation and trajectory of the organization. So folks were demonized as enemies of the people because they disagreed with the term the

organization was taking. And it was ugly. And that pretty much led to the end of their influence and existence in New York at around 1974, 75, 76. I see. Yeah, so I think once again, especially for people that have studied a lot of the organizations of this time, we do see these patterns continue to emerge of, you know, these grassroots movements, often of very young people in their community doing great things as the dimensions of their organization and their reputation start to grow. They get huge pressure from the state in the form of co-intel pro, backlash of various sorts from white America overall, internal divisions. A lot of that coming from the pressure put on the them by the state but even just you know but by being overstretched by having disagreements by certain segments becoming hyper dogmatic or whatever it may be we see and and i think importantly that you pointed out the disconnection from theory and practice where you know practice gets put on the

back burner in favor of just sort of navel gazing theory in exclusivity almost and that's always sort of a death sentence for an organization as well um so i think you know people should really think about that and the reason we study these history is precisely so that we can learn from not only their amazing successes, but for their depressing failures as well. And we can do whatever we can in our power to prevent our organizations and our movements from following those exact same patterns, or at least creating bulwarks to prevent some of the worst of it, seeing as we can see over and over again how these things sort of play out. So the final question I have for you, Johanna, and thank you so much for coming

on. This has been absolutely fascinating. And after this, I'll obviously let you let people know where they can find your book. But I like to end it on this question. What is the legacy of the young lords? And what can revolutionaries today learn from them, in your opinion? So there are many legacies. And there are legacies for many different people. And I wrote this book for a new generation of revolutionaries.

And I wrote it in a way that captures the politics of the period domestically and international. beyond the young lords. I also tried to write a history about the social, economic, and demographic changes that propelled all of the movements of the 1960s into being. I also dedicate an entire chapter to the politics of the period, its Maoist proclivities, what the revolutionary nationalism mean and where did it come from? So if you want to understand the 1960s and its totality and how and why radicalization happened, you're going to get that from this book. But I think that for Puerto Ricans and oppressed people and people at the bottom of society,

I think what the young lords did brilliantly was that they gave their generation the language to understand the root causes of their discontent and malaise. And that's why we remember them today, because they tapped into the imagination of their generation because they brilliantly articulated the zeitgeist and the malaise of their generation. You know, every generation is preoccupied. and depressed about something. And they articulated that and offered an alternative.

One of the incredible things about the young lords was that they were not just fighting against something. They were fighting for something and they demonstrated that in their militancy and activism. these occupations, they transformed Lincoln into a socialist hospital and literally called their Lincoln offensive socialism at Lincoln and gave people a sense of what that might look like in collaboration with medical workers, doctors, but also the non-medical staff at the bottom of the chain in the public hospitals. I think what we learn from the 60s and organizations like the Young Lords and the Black Panthers is that organization is critical, but also models to follow. One of the reasons why the Young Lords was successful was because it literally adopted hook, line, and sinker, the organizational model of the Black Panthers.

And, of course, it transformed that, and that Black Panther model might have had a distinct flavor, particular to the culture of New York, East Harlem, and the disproportionately Puerto Rican membership. But had they not had a clear model of organization to follow, they would not have been able to hit the ground running and launch all of these incredible creative campaigns because they would have spent years

landing on a model around which to organize. Political education. They did an enormous amount of work in the streets, but they mandated political education, nightly, I think. They were, you know, a little evangelical about everything. But they mandated an hour of reading every day to their members. They had a theory and strategy that brought the people in the organization together,

but also that offered some kind of framework for struggle and vision for the future. You know, one of the important challenges for all of us who want to transform the world is to figure out the balance between the collective and the individual. In many ways,

when we are engaged in organizations, revolutionary organizations, we subsume the individual within the collective and marginalize the individual and I think that that we need to be able to fight for the collective

and uphold individual freedoms as well within the struggle for human liberation that's important because part of what we need is for you to bring not your ego and sense of entitlement but your brain to the project of human liberation

and it's takes courage to challenge an orientation that you think is wrongheaded. But if you've subsumed yourself in the collective, you're going to be less likely to bring the critical analysis and challenges to the table that our movements need. So it's a balance. And I think that organizations need democracy. People need to be able to openly debate and discuss and disagree

about how we're going to do this. And social movements and uprisings are important because they shift the terms of public discourse and they raise issues and

understandings of social problems that previously had been excluded from public discourse. For example, there's a conversation today about defunding and abolishing the police that we would never have imagined could have been a thing. So I'm thinking of Lenin's famous quote when he said there are decades when nothing happens, there are weeks when decades happen. That's part of what we've seen in this period. So social movements change history because they shift the terms of debate and they establish new standards and values.

And we need a whole hell of a lot of that because neo-fascists are gaining ground in this country and they are influencing Americans and how Americans perceive and understand the problems in American society. We also need organizations and coalitions of organizations and movements to think through a strategy for winning that's influenced by an understanding of history and theory. This is not the first time Americans have rebelled on a mass scale. And I think we need to learn the lessons of the social movements last time and in history. And what we know from the study of history domestically and internationally, at least under capitalism, is that when a radicalization process has happened since the 19th century, whether in Algeria, or South Africa or Puerto Rico or the United States or Jamaica or Cuba or Argentina or Chile is that young people but also everyone who's out in the streets begins to ask the question okay the system is rotten what's the alternative and the and the only alternative that has been theorized and thought through by generations of revolutionaries the world over everywhere in the world is this thing

that we call socialism and Marxism, which is essentially a theory of what's wrong with this society, a strategy for changing it or fighting against it, and a model of what a new society might look like. Absolutely. Beautifully said, I love and agree with every syllable of that. And again, the book is called The Young Lords a radical history. We could only cover some bullet points and some highlights, but this book is deep and rich and profound. And I encourage every single one of my listeners who's at all interested in any aspect of this conversation to go out and get this book and really support an important piece of scholarship. For revolutionaries, just for history overall. Before I let you go, though, Johanna, can you please

let listeners know where they can find you and this book online? So the publisher is the University of North Carolina Press and if you type University of North Carolina Press and the Young Lords or Johanna Fernandez, it should come up. Okay. I will link to that in the show notes so people can easily find the book and support your work. Thank you so much for coming on. I learned so much and it's been an absolute pleasure and an honor to speak with you today. Thank you so very much for this important work you're doing. We need more of it. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded.

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