The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation by Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (review)

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano's new book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, is a fascinating and much-needed piece of rhetorical history that recovers and analyzes the rhetoric of an important but underexamined social movement organization, the New York Young Lords—a multiracial, radical liberation organization addressing the needs of New York's Puerto Rican community in El Barrio in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A self-professed recovery project of sorts, the book is also much more than that. In Wanzer-Serrano's words, "My goal is to offer one partial, perspectival, and contingent critical-interpretive engagement of the Young Lords that grapples with the geographic and body-political situatedness of their discourse and activism as well as my own position as a diasporic Puerto Rican academic who is thinking and writing from within the Global South" (6). Thus, The New York Young Lords also provides a theoretically rich and thoughtful set of challenges to rhetorical studies and critical theory that are worth serious consideration.

The New York Young Lords represents the fullest and most skillful work to date bringing together de/coloniality theory and rhetorical studies. De/coloniality theory emerges from a loose, interdisciplinary group of North American, Latin American, and U.S. Latinx scholars writing about issues of coloniality and decoloniality in the context of the Global South. WanzerSerrano seeks to read the rhetoric of the Young Lords in conversation with de/coloniality theory because, as he writes, "Perspectives emergent from and speaking principally to the West are ill suited to an engagement of a group like the Young Lords, whose locus of enunciation was not the West" (12). In this way, he illustrates the necessity and fruitfulness of a de/colonial challenge to the field's "epistemic privilege" and its reliance on the "universalism" of Western rhetorical/critical theory (15). At the same time, according to Wanzer-Serrano, de/colonial scholarship, which too often remains at the level of abstract theorizing and universalizing statements, "can benefit from a more rhetorical orientation that is highly attentive to practices of radical contextualization, sociohistorical contingency, and the situatedness of public discourse and activism" (15).

Bringing together de/coloniality theory and rhetorical analysis in the context of the Young Lords, the book illuminates and challenges both areas. The book explores decolonial rhetoric as "both practice and perspective" (27)—as a concrete form of symbolic action as well as a scholarly/critical approach. On one hand, the Young Lords' discourse and activism are exemplary of a kind of decolonial practice "that facilitates a divestment from modernity/coloniality and invents openings through which decolonial epistemic shifts can emerge" (25). On the other hand, Wanzer-Serrano's scholarly approach to the Young Lords is emblematic of a broader decolonial rhetorical perspective, one inspired by the Young Lords and guided by an "ethic of decolonial love" (26) that is oriented to self-reflexively hearing, listening to, and internalizing the voices of marginalized others on their own terms.

These themes are explored through five chapters separated into two parts. Part 1, "History and Ideology," narrates the origins of the Young Lords and their ideology of "revolutionary nationalism." In chapter 1, Wanzer-Serrano traces the historical context in which the Young Lords took shape. Importantly, he aims not to narrate this history in any "objectivist" sense but rather to contextualize the organization as they did so themselves: "to turn the table to explore how the Young Lords themselves imagined their own history" (33). Wanzer-Serrano emphasizes the ways in which the Young Lords crafted "a usable history" (34), including reclaiming the significance of Puerto Rico's Taino (indigenous) heritage; narrating the legacy of U.S. colonialism; and connecting diverse, transnational revolutionary events and figures to their struggles in El Barrio. Through these acts of collective memory making, the Young Lords "challenged the coloniality of...