Properly considering the monumental force that were the Young Lords (69-71) required the match of a monumental work such as “The Young Lords: A Radical History” by Johanna Fernandez.
The genesis of the Young Lords started with a petty criminal, Cha Cha Gonzalez, who, through his interactions with the criminal justice system and racist society molded his street gang into a political unit.
Key as he was to the Young Lords’ story, Gonzalez drops from the narrative as the book shifts focus to the East Harlem chapter which, when all was said and done, brought the ruckus.
It was on that upper parcel of Manhattan Island where a core group of Puerto Rican students from State University of New York at Old Westbury had enough intellectual chops to form an outfit that took hold….the Young Lords Party (YLP). They borrowed, by rote, the Black Panthers’ organizational template, in the author’s estimation, to great effect.
Rupture
The Chicago group’s gang origins marked significant differences with the New York collegians. “Ironically,” the author writes, “the New York group broke with the Chicago Young Lords because of their lumpen ways, precisely at the moment they identified that class as its social base.”
Fernandez’s radical history of the street-gang-cum-political party reconstructs the United States-born Puerto Rican youths' unique viewpoint as New York City’s post-war demographic shifts convinced the organization that community organizing was preferable to a focus on the workplace.
Fernandez observes that, “the Young Lords encountered sections of the Puerto Rican community that were not traditionally employed: housewives, welfare recipients, the elderly young hustlers … In many ways, their attribution of revolutionary consciousness to the lumpen was a crude assessment of what they were seeing around them on the streets -- that radical ideas may sound appealing to many people who live on the margins of society.”
Begotten by parents native to the island of Puerto Rico thrust the mainland born youth into a very specific role
“Often called upon to help parents and neighbors navigate the inhospitable bureaucratic institutions of New York,” says Fernandez, “Puerto Rican children were informal but indispensable interpreters of language and culture from hospitals to police stations, and from welfare offices and banks to their own schools.”
These skills included: analytical instinct, communications, and a mental dexterity required of those switching between two languages and two worlds.
“As revolutionaries,” the text reads, “they were honing sensibilities they acquired early in life - as their parents’ cultural and language intermediaries -- and putting them to political use. At their best, the Young Lords had a keen grasp of the power of language, symbols, and stories to enlarge their message.”
Breathless
Felipe Luciano
The Young Lords’ idealism, the breadth of their efforts across multiple issues, running from the prosaic local to the exotic international, were breathless. In the book, their story is told in two parts, with the opening stanza infinitely more inspiring; the second chronicling a familiar-looking demise not unknown to New Left organizations.
The YLP’s founding statement, Fernandez writes, “consolidated in one short document the breadth of the New Left’s social analyses and most radical aspirations. Beyond solidarity with colonized people, it supported women’s equality, advocated the seizure of political power, and imagined a new world…”
The author reconstructs the Young Lords in praxis; the direct action tactics, the savvy media strategy, the organizational processes, and mercurial growth of a group that captured the heart of their community while flagging attention from the mass media, New York’s City Hall, and like-minded radicals of the time.
“They offered,” she notes, “a political platform within which to organize the rebellious spirit of the ghetto beyond isolated outbursts of anger and toward a long-term project for social changes fortified by their analyses of the structural roots of poverty, racism, and war.” 105
The hands-on, street level efforts included a campaign against inadequate garbage collection, takeover of a local Methodist church to establish a community services center, a neighborhood anti-lead paint campaign, and a subsequent armed takeover of the same church, all of which yielded some positive reforms in the way of official response.
Their cool purple berets and rousing neighborhood marches served as political spectacle that increased the appeal of socialist organizations to slum youth, according to Fernandez. “This was the first time in the U.S. that influential socialist organizations were launched, led, and built from the bottom up by young, poor, and working-class people of color.”
Model Democracy
Its opening, halcyon days were characterized by an inclusive plurality when it came to expressing opinions and criticism within The Young Lords, which eventually changed its name to the Young Lords Party.
“The Young Lords were themselves zealots,” says Ferdnandez. “They lived among the people of East Harlem, stood on streets, linked community grievances to the evils of colonialism and capitalism, and deployed militancy to recuperate Puerto Rican rights and dignity.”
The Weathermen, or Students for Democratic Society, or even the Black Panthers, were wagers of domestic political war, not so the young Puerto Ricans. “Although the Young Lords used the metaphor of guerrilla warfare, their organizing efforts had more in common with nonviolent civil disobedience than with armed insurrection,” notes Fernandez.
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All the while, the group subjected itself - leadership, cadre and trainees - to internal examination where the treatment of women was concerned, excising the term “revolutionary machismo” from its founding statement of purpose.
“On the questions of gender inequality...The Young Lords stood apart, as their members struggled with misogyny within the organization, working to foreground the experience of class and racial oppression in public discourses on women’s inequality in U.S. society,” Fernandez points out.
Further, they understood that the questions of who has access to the production of culture and who does not; how subjugated peoples are represented artistically, and who gets to make art and amplify it, are part of the struggle for liberation.
Which is a good place to observe how, when the poets exit, a whiff of rigidity and sectarianism may be sensed in the air of revolutionary movements.
Adios, Felipe...
So it went with the expulsion of all-important poet/founding member Felipe Luciano which represented a turning away from the freewheeling democracy-as-carnival atmosphere that characterized the group’s opening stanzas.
What followed was the devolution into a more centralized leadership with limited group and community participation that reversed the group’s mercurial ascent, sending it hurtling toward oblivion.
The Young Lords’ orientation changed as its not insignificant membership of 1,000 (about 3,000 total were associated over the Party’s lifetime) aligned with more traditional left political theory.
The Young Lords story might read more positively were it not for the fateful decision to open outposts in Puerto Rico.
The Lords felt their revolutionary identity had something to do with Puerto Rico, a country separate from the one in which they lived. Writes Fernandez, “While it enriched and particularized their brand of Puerto Rican nationalism as expressed on the mainland, the temptation to bridge New York City and Puerto Rico as a political party proved fatal.”
The decision was not a unanimous one. It stretched the group’s resources at a time when exhaustion was setting in, and replaced its bread-and-butter neighborhood services approach with something more grandiose and out of reach.
Crucial members bailed. An ivory tower orientation toward Marxist-Lenninist education, and divorce of Central Committee leadership decisions from rank-and-file input, both served to separate the group from the real-world cares of those it had once so ably served.
At the end, one woman, Gloria Fontanez, gained iron-fisted control. Fernandez opines that her “use of fear and desire to control the people around her - as both siren and executioner - flew in the face of women’s struggle for equality and respect in the organization.”
By the time Fontanez learned that her husband and fellow activist was actually an FBI agent, the jig was up.
While it suffered from the internal divisions natural to any political formation, law enforcement’s exploitations of these rifts made the situation much worse, increasing distrust and heightening paranoia in a movement first characterized by an unbridled joy.
“The volume of Young Lords’ [Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Counter Intelligence Program] documents (and agents designed to disrupt the organization) is dizzying,” says Fernandez. “The Young Lords’ violent collapse, the unforgiving enmity and distrust sowed within its ranks, and the trauma inflicted on its members are largely products of the FBI’s systematic campaign to destroy this particular section of the New Left.”
Fernandez concludes: The YLP’s political inexperience, the difficulties it faced when it came to reading the political moment in which it was operating, and its shift to a dogmatic embrace of the particular kind of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ that was increasingly popular on the New Left were all used by COINTELPRO to bring about its demise.”
The author has compiled a comprehensive and passionate portrait of a unique group of activists worthy of the attention.
