The Garbage Offensive

In summer of 1969, the NY Young Lords launched an ambitious course of community-based protests, involving thousands of residents in East Harlem. They addressed many of the social problems underscored, but unsolved, by the War on Poverty. Their legendary “Garbage Offensive,” name in deference to the Tet Offensive of the Vietnamese, the group barricaded major throughways with East Harlem’s uncollected garbage. It exposed environmental racism and impugned city government for treating Puerto Ricans and Black Americans like garbage. It’s combination of urban guerrilla protest with sharp political messaging pressured politicians to respond, and poor sanitation services became a major issue in the run-up to the heated mayoral elections in November 1969. Although histories of the civil rights and black power movements are popularly understood within the framework of citizenship rights, the work of organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords paint a portrait of struggle that is more composite. They show that the black movement set in motion an awakening of social consciousness wherein virtually no social issue escaped public scrutiny. The Young Lords’ campaigns established standards of decency in city services that expanded the definition of the common good and stretched our nation’s definition of democracy.

The Lincoln Offensive

To dramatize deplorable health conditions and the race and class origins of pre-existing conditions, the Young Lords took-over Lincoln Hospital in July 1970. The occupation forced the construction of a modern medical building and creation of one of the Western world’s first acupuncture drug treatment centers. Cited as the first of its kind in American medicine, the group incited a public clinical hearing where a lay audience cross-examined doctors after the death of a Puerto Rican woman, the result of an abortion procedure conducted by an unsupervised medical resident. The Lords organized with non-medical hospital staff in the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM) and white radical doctors in the Pediatric Collective under the banner, Think Lincoln. Together they drafted the earliest known Patient Bill of Rights. In the wake of late 60s draconian cuts in social spending, they and others staved off the advent of neoliberal social policies in the late 1970s. Historians interpret sixties revolutionary nationalism as a rejection of coalitions with white Americans. These alliances suggest otherwise. But the Lords challenged power dynamics in cross-racial and cross-class alliances, rejecting uninterrogated racial prejudices and liberal tendencies of middle-class white radicals and the potential for their disproportionate influence in coalitions.

The Politics and Culture of the Young Lords Party

The Young Lords applied to the U.S. context the worldview known as Third World socialism—the ideas and strategies for liberation that emerged during wars of decolonization in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria. These drew from Marxism, Maoism, Franz Fanon, and Lenin. In the US, radicals argued that racialized groups—including black Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, Asian Americans, and Puerto Ricans—were internal domestic colonies, politically and economically underdeveloped and dispossessed of their rights to self-determination. While Third World revolutions iconized peasant guerrillas, organizations like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords identified the lumpenproletariat as the most revolutionary class in society. At a moment when economic restructuring and the flight of industries to the suburbs produced permanent unemployment and greater economic and racial segregation in the city, the activism and politics of grassroots radicals like the Young Lords reflected the distinctive social features of their urban environments. The Revolutionary Nationalism of urban radicals was tied to the vast relocation of white Americans from city to suburb. In this environment, the ideal of people of color fighting together with white Americans for change grew more and more difficult to enact as the daily lives of these populations grew further and further apart.

A Second Occupation

In Fall 1970, the Young Lords again occupied the FSUMC church, in response to the shocking death of one of their own, Julio Roldan, who after a false arrest was found hanged in the Tombs, NYC’s notorious detention center. The occupation happened against the backdrop of a prisoner uprising in the Tombs, a precursor to the Attica Rebellion. At the occupied church, the Young Lords mounted a precursor to contemporary movements against mass incarceration and for abolition. They launched a legal defense center to aid poor Black and Latino prisoners; challenged the politics of bail; denounced state repression of the left; the politics of law and order, and the hyper imprisonment of people of color. They identified structural violence, poverty, and racism as root causes of social problems and supported the redistribution of resources and wealth through the revolutionary overthrown of capitalism. The group’s radical actions led to the first official investigation of the death of a single prisoner, Julio Roldan. Roldan’s arrest and arraignment offered a window into the botched legal process that, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exponentially increased the arrest and jailing of people of color living in urban centers.

Beginnings

In 1968, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez sat in solitary confinement wrestling with his record of recidivism. He was the leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican and Mexican gang, which he’d joined to survive Chicago’s mean streets. But his life was about to change. Like other Puerto Rican, Mexican and black American youth, Cha Cha’s people were recent migrants to the city who’d been displaced by urban renewal— structural racism in the form federal housing policy —which forced them to settle in densely populated blocks on the edges of white ethnic neighborhoods. Outnumber, they faced hostility, reaction, and even terror from white resident who resented their presence in Chicago. But with the new confidence produced by the civil rights movement, street organizations like the Young Lords desegregated public spaces with brawn and asserted the rights of racialized people to the city. The social movements also opened up possibilities for self-transformation. Like Malcolm X, Cha Cha was politicized in prison. He transformed the gang into the Black Panthers’ Puerto Rican counterpart—a herculean feat made possible by a series of unforeseen circumstances and conscious interventions, including that of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and his Rainbow Coalition.

Coming of Age in the 1960s

In New York, a circle of Puerto Rican students read a Black Panther newspaper interview with Cha Cha, took a road trip to meet the Chicago gang leader turned revolutionary, and got permission to launch a chapter of the organization in New York. In search of an organizing agenda in East Harlem, they discovered who their parents were and why over 1/3 of them had left Puerto Rico. In 1947, Operation Bootstrap, A US-led industrialization project of the island displaced more farmers than it absorbed into the new economy. A contingency plan encouraged their mass migration to cities like New York, where 70% of Puerto Ricans became proletarianized as superexploited workers in the city’s garment industry. Soon, they encountered displacements in housing and due to urban industrial decline. They wrestled with medical discrimination in the public hospitals and overt racism in the classroom. In 1967, the killing of a Puerto Rican man by police led to the East Harlem riots. The early childhood experiences of the Young Lords in the streets, in the schools, and as language and cultural translators for their parents radicalized them emotionally and compelled the evangelical commitment with which they launched their activism as young adults.

Organizational Decline

Amid polarized deliberations about the organization’s future and with many in its leadership advocating a stronger nationalist orientation, the Young Lords launch two branches in Puerto Rico: in El Caño and Aguadilla. The move to Puerto Rico, for which the group was ill prepared, combined with the decline of the broader movement’s mass character, weakened the ability of the Young Lords to remain connected to the grassroots. Before its final demise, on the request of prisoners, the Young Lords served as mediators during the Attica Rebellion. By 1973, Young Lord membership had declined considerably. At around the same time, key members of the organization left, including its talented writer and political strategist Juan Gonzalez. The chairperson of the organization’s central committee, the authoritarian Gloria Fontanez also married Don Wright, a man who became a sheriff in the south after the demise of the movements and who is believed to have been an FBI agent. Fueled by government repression carried out by COINTELPRO—the Counterintelligence Program of the FBI —political inexperience, and growing dogmatism, the Young Lords became entangled in violent internecine conflict that led to the organization’s demise in 1976.

The Politics of Race and Gender

Influenced by Che Guevara’s writings on revolution and self-transformation, the Young Lords launched the “revolution within the revolution”— a deliberate struggle to name and challenge manifestations of power dynamics, racism, sexism, and homophobia in their ranks. The trademark slogan of second wave feminism, “the personal is political,” articulated the challenge. Among the Lords, an increase in female membership propelled a fierce struggle against male chauvinism that well-positioned women to have their voices heard, leadership respected, and demands met. To that end, the group edited its program and platform; drafted rules against sexism; Denise Oliver was appointed to its formal leadership; and formed men’s caucus and women’s caucus to discuss gender oppression internally. Influenced by Franz Fanon, the Lords also challenged anti-black racism in the psyche of the oppressed, including widely used language that devalues curly hair, dark complexion, African facial features and the tendency among Puerto Ricans and Latinos to deny their ethnicity and blackness and distance themselves from black Americans. The Young Lords prioritized Afro-Latino leadership, including that of Felipe Luciano; theorized race ideology in Latin America; and made public a conversation about race that had been confined to hushed whispers among Puerto Ricans and Latinos.

Diseases of Poverty

Beyond its work on sanitation, the Young Lords responded to a series of other neighborhood problems that fell within the scope of public health. In the fall, the group launched its first children’s breakfast program alongside the Black Panthers. In tandem with community groups and hospital medical and administrative staff, the group was thrust into a larger political debate about the changing structure of healthcare in the city to which it contributed a document called the Young Lords’ 10-Point Health Program and Platform. In what is perhaps the Young Lords’ most enduring legacy, the group brought militancy to a pre-existing campaign against childhood lead poisoning that pressured City Hall to take action on a silent public health crisis. But, why health? Close analysis of this lesser-known campaign reveals that larger forces steered the Young Lords’ turn to health. They were, in part, following the example of the Cuban Revolution, which made dignified healthcare-for-all a signature aspiration of revolutionaries around the world. They were also propelled by post-war changes in the structure of medical care in the U.S. as well as by high rates of illness among the new migrants and the unintended consequences of their greater access to healthcare in the age of civil rights, which ironically also increased the incidence of medical discrimination.

Building Blocks

Immediately following the Garbage Offensive, the Young Lords established an office headquarters in East Harlem, deepened its ties to the welfare rights movement in New York and established a police-watch project in the community. The group also fortified its organizational structure. Two of its Central Committee members Pablo Guzman and Juan Gonzalez drafted a Thirteen-Point Program and Political Platform. The group also developed a rubric for political education, and established an organizational routine for integrating new members and deepening the training of existing ones.