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Ain’t No Party Like the One We Got: The Young Lords Party and Palante
- Michigan State University Press
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Ain’t No Party Like the One We Got: The Young Lords Party and Palante PABLO “YORÚBA” GUZMÁN Who Am I? The group of college-age Latino males who would later join with two other similar groupings to become the New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization (YLO) was called the Sociedad de Albizu Campos (SAC) when I joined in May 1969. Six or seven of us met Saturdays in Spanish Harlem—El Barrio. I was eighteen at the time and had just come back from a semester of study in Mexico, part of my first year’s work at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. Before leaving for Mexico, I had already been politically active for two years, organizing at my high school for citywide rallies against the Vietnam War, against outdated bureaucratic codes for students, fighting racism, participating in mobilizations in Washington, DC, organizing among both African American students and the radical hippies. I am a Puerto Rican and Cuban in whom the African genes are obvious, and in those pre–Young Lord days, Puerto Ricans in New York often tended to identify either with blacks or whites. From an early age, my father and maternal grandfather had instilled in me a sense of healthy skepticism toward the basic BS that defines this country’s fundamental hypocrisy, racism, and the legacies of slavery. For instance, my folks told me how the Japanese were rounded up during World War II, but not the Germans; how the land was stolen from the Native Americans; how Africans were brought here in chains. How separate and equal was really separate and unequal; how the color of our skin meant we would have to work two or four times as hard as whites alongside us just to keep up. My folks spoke English at home because, they said, “We don’t want you to have a Spanish accent; on top of your dark skin, that would be two strikes against you in this country.” My father often told the story of how, a naive product of El Barrio at nineteen, he had gone into the navy after seeing Anchors Aweigh and gotten assigned to the carrier Midway shortly after the war ended. A movie was being shown on the flight deck, and he told a black friend from the South, “Let’s go up front. There’s some good seats there.” Johnson pulled my father back and said, “Whoa, Guhz-man, that’s for the white boys.” “What are you talkin’ about, Johnson? We just fought a war against Hitler, that stuff is dead, we’re all Americans in this together—” 234 | Pablo “Yorúba” Guzmán “You been watchin’ too many movies, Guhz-man.” “I’m gonna sit up front.” Sure enough, my old man got his ass kicked and tossed in the back row of seats where the colored sailors were supposed to sit. Johnson helped my father up to his feet and said, “Ah tol’ you they was only for the white boys, Guhz-man.” “But I’m Puerto Rican.” “They don’t care what kind a nigger you is.” My parents were almost prevented from taking their room at a hotel in Atlantic City for their honeymoon because it was not for “colored.” My mother started crying, but my father, now a military-trained veteran of Racism USA, began talking to her in Spanish, essentially telling her to follow his lead. The clerk bit: “Oh, pardon me,” he gushed, “I didn’t know you folks were Mexican.” My folks look about as Mexican as the Huxtables. All the kids, my cousins and I, were told these stories so we could be prepared for what life unfortunately had in store. We’d be told about how my grandmother lost her thumb during an industrial accident at the garment factory where she worked in New York while the ambulance attendants argued about taking her; or how my mother was denied giving the valedictory address for her high school class, even though she had won a scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Technology (she was told she had “too much” of an accent, even though she was born and raised in East Harlem and my grandparents were bilingual). So, early in my life I learned about this country’s true history. I was further influenced by reading the stories of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass; by learning of W.E.B. Du...