The Young Lords: A Reader

Foreword: Why Read the Young Lords Today?

ix Foreword Why Read the Young Lords Today? Iris Morales and Denise Oliver-Velez “¡El Pueblo Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido! The People United, Shall Never be Defeated!” Ten thousand people chanted and marched through the streets of El Barrio heading downtown on Lexington Avenue in New York City. The Young Lords had called the march to the United Nations to demand the end of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, freedom for Puerto Rican political prisoners, and an end to police brutality in our communities . Young people, artists, and community activists joined it, excited to be part of the momentous event. Looking from the hilltop on 100th Street, we saw the bright purple, black, and maroon berets of the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, and the Puerto Rican Student Union. Activists from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, El Comite, Justicia Latina, and others were also present. Young people wearing jeans and t-shirts, military jackets, dashikis, combat boots, and big Afros carried Puerto Rican flags and huge, almost avenue -wide banners that read, “Serve the people” and “Fight U.S. imperialism.” With confidence , we marched, believing deep in our hearts in the power of poor people to change the world. “¡Despierta Boricua, Defiende Lo Tuyo!” (Wake Up Boricua, Defend What Is Yours!) It was October 30, 1971. Some of the issues we faced as political young people back in those early halcyon days of the movements of the 1960s and ‘70s have changed. We were “BC”: “before crack.” There was no AIDS pandemic. Youth gangs didn’t have automatic weapons. No one had a computer , a cell phone, or email. There was no Homeland Security or PATRIOT Act. The World Trade Center hadn’t been built, much less destroyed. There were no music videos or MTV. Our rap music was spoken word poetry set to the sound of conga drums or do-wops sung on street corners. Oprah Winfrey didn’t have a TV show, and J-Lo hadn’t been born. The women and men whom we strove to emulate and live up to had names like Lolita Lebron, Don Pedro Albizu Campos, Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, Blanca Canales, and Fannie Lou Hamer. The “Rainbow Coalition” was Fred Hampton’s revolutionary vision of unity among poor people, not Jesse Jackson’s poverty program. When we entered the Young Lords in its early days, the leadership was all male. We helped to change that and to create an organization of young women and men struggling together to change the world and ourselves in the process. We connected to a larger movement in our opposition to the war in Vietnam. Inspired by the Cuban and Chinese revolutions and by the liberation struggles in Africa and Latin America, we believed that we could change the U.S. economic, political, and social system. Puerto Rican and African American youth joined the Young Lords, determined to change the status quo. x Foreword We awoke early each day to serve breakfast to school children, went door to door testing residents for lead poisoning and anemia, developed ground-breaking programs to deal with drug addiction, conducted community political education classes, and mobilized demonstrations. We advocated for community control of schools and educational curriculums that included Puerto Rican history and culture. We organized hospital and factory workers and worker-community alliances; and from the beginning, health care was a priority. We organized to change prison conditions and defined the prison system as another form of genocide. We raised awareness about the triple oppression of women of color by class, race, and gender. We wanted to change our communities, and perhaps while doing so, change our brothers. We organized high school and college students, and with the Puerto Rican Student Union formed “Free Puerto Rico Now” committees on college campuses. We published and distributed Palante, a bilingual newspaper, and produced a radio show on WBAI-FM, Pacifica, New York. We inspired, and were inspired by, our artists, poets, and musicians to play to the drumbeat of revolution. We were breaking new ground and lived each day as if there would be no tomorrow, and for some of our comrades and compañeras, the struggle ended in jails, institutions, and the Long Island cemeteries of Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary.” Latino youth and community activists have tried to keep the Young Lords’ history alive, identifying with the group’s spirit of resistance, its ideas about equality, and its bold and dramatic actions. When Palante, a book of essays...