The Young Lords' legacy of fighting for Puerto Rico from the mainland

Hey, it's Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Don't miss my interview with actor Kate Hudson. We talk about her music career, motherhood, and of course, her breakout role. Penny Lane, man, show some respect. You can find my interview on the Fresh Air podcast. What's good with you? This is Gene, obviously. And today we have something real special we want to share with you. Okay, so our friends, I mean, I guess our play cousins at Futuro Studios have launched season three of their podcast, La Brega. And this season is so good. It's so dope. And we think that if you rock with us at Code Switch, you're probably going to love this too. So for those of y'all who are new to La Brega, it's a show that focuses on the stories of the Puerto Rican experience or many Puerto Rican experiences. In this season, they're wading into the cultural battlefields to talk about people who champion Puerto Rico. Like, they want to know what we can learn about Puerto Ricanness by talking to these folks. And so we are going to play for you episode eight. This episode is called I Fuego Rico in My Heart. And in it, the folks at La Borrega take us back to the late 1960s. That's when the young lords were coming into being as this political force made up mainly of Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. Some of these people did not speak Spanish. Some people had never been to Puerto Rico, but nonetheless, they rode for and went up for and claimed Puerto Rico. And many of these young Puerto Ricos were hungry for stories about their history, and they would try to learn about it in any way they could. One of those people was Iris Morales. She led the Young Lords education mission in New York. La Brega sits down with Iris to talk about the long tale of the young lords and what it means that a group of young Boricuas in the diaspora champion the island and why that resonates so deeply with this moment we find ourselves in right now. The series is out now and you can find new episodes every Tuesday in the La Brega Campeones feed. And if you can't wait, you can just binge all the episodes ad-free by joining Futuro Plus at futuromediagroup.org backslash join plus. Alana Casanova-Bergis is the host of La Brega, and she's going to take it from here. Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, sparked a movement to warn kids and their parents about the harms of social media. Yes, my claim is that we'll change brain development in ways that will make you less capable, confident, happy, and sociable as an adult. But what do young people think? Gen Z is just going to think, well, we're cursed. That's on the TED Radio Hour. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's not so much we get to talk to celebrities, it's that we get to talk to celebrities about other celebrities, like we did with actor Nathan Lane. I remember having to tell George C. Scott that I was leaving the show to do this musical, and he said to me, You're leaving me to do a f***ing magic show? Listen to Wait, Wait in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there an acquaintance in your life that you'd love to turn into an actual friend? And have you thought about saying, hey, we should hang out sometime? Maybe think again. The more specific you are, the more likely it is that you're actually going to get together, you know, pull out your calendar, pick a time, pick a thing to do together, and actually follow through. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever looked at a vintage photo or video and could almost feel what it must have been like to be there. And you just know that this old video captured something really important, something that was meant to be recorded for future generations, something that even in that moment, decades ago, people knew had to be preserved for posterity. That's how I feel about this video that I recently played for the very person who's in it. My name is Iris Morales. I'm also known as Iris Morales. That's my dual identity. Iris is now in her late 70s. The clip I have is from 1969, when she was 21. Well, can I ask you about the clip? Do you want to play it? Yeah, I have it. Okay. Iris winces a little when I bring it up. She's seen it before. She even did the voiceover for it. The footage is in black and white, and she's inside a church. Edis is sitting on top of a table. Several male activists are in chairs, looking up at her. She's the only woman in the shot. She's wearing bell bottoms and hoop earrings, smoking a cigarette. All eyes are on her. Um, let's see. Boom. Go back to 1898, you know, when the resistance, Lolita Rodriguez del Tiro, Mariana Brassetti, who were involved in that struggle. We can go to the Nationalist Party and see the different women that were involved in that struggle. We can go to 1950 and the uprising in Jaiuya. And that uprising was led in part by a woman named Blanca Canales. In the video, Edis is talking about Puerto Rican women throughout history. We can bring it up to 1954. And Lolita Lebron, she went into Congress when they were discussing the whole question of Puerto Rico, the whole status of Puerto Rico. and she went into Congress with three brothers and shot up the Congress with her little revolver. And she was a... Little, big old 45. It was little at all. She was considered a little... One of the five congressmen. She was considered a little Puerto Rican lady, you know. This footage is from the documentary El Pueblo Se Levanta, and it captured a crucial moment from the Boricua experience in New York. But Edis, and other women, were almost left out of this history. The reason the video exists is thanks to a woman involved in the film's production. Her name was Beverly, and she had insisted that there be a woman on camera. So they called Edis. I said to her, if it had been for you, there would have been women in that documentary. We would have been totally erased from history. Edis is still grateful that someone thought to include women in this record that we weren't erased from that moment, because it happens all the time. And you can hear how much it meant to young Edis to learn about those other Puerto Rican women in history. Where were you learning about those women? You know, there was one thing for our learning, and then there was another phase of our disseminating that knowledge, which was part of that generation. And I say it was a generational effort. As we struggled collectively, for us, we were grappling with this issue of identity and we were learning wherever we could. Edis had grown up as a Puerto Rican in New York City with this dual identity she referenced, Edis and Iris. And Edis, along with a group of young Boricuas in the 60s and 70s, were reaching back and trying to learn about this homeland many of them had never lived in. We used to call ourselves the children of the Great Migration. Large numbers of Puerto Ricans coming. Pretty amazing. Primarily poor people, you know, people from the countryside. And then raising children in one of the largest cities in the world. Right. In another language. and being vilified. It was a bit like these Puerto Ricans had been exiled twice. They were pushed out of their old home and then rejected in their new one. And as though that wasn't enough, they were also scrutinized back in Puerto Rico. Many of them didn't exactly fit in anywhere. Even so, many of the children of this generation joined together and organized to defend their communities. They embraced their Puerto Rican-ness and they fought for Puerto Rico. all while facing that eternal challenge of the diaspora, trying to figure out where exactly you fit in. Their organization had a name, the Young Lords, and Edis was one of them. Have you come up with a pithy sentence, like what the Young Lords represent or what they were, how to identify them? One of my pet peeves was that the Young Lords in so many places are sanitized as social workers or something like that, reformers. The Young Lords started out as a street gang in Chicago and became a left-wing political movement in 1959. They were organized with radio shows and a newspaper. Like the Black Panthers, one of their biggest allies, they also had programs like daycares and breakfasts for kids. And they were effective, staging strikes and occupations to force local policy changes. And we were reformers and we had elements of social work, but we were also socialists and revolutionaries. They opened local chapters all over the country, including one in New York in 1969. That's where Edie's led their ministry of education. So depending who I'm speaking to, I might stress a human rights organization or a militant organization. that believed in the independence of Puerto Rico. Edis is the first person to say she's not speaking on behalf of all the Young Lords or on behalf of the other Puerto Rican organizations at the time, but she's done the research. She's written multiple books, produced an award-winning documentary on the women in the movement, and given countless talks. She's an icon, activist, and at her core, an educator. Do you also, when you're describing the Young Lords, focus in on the Puerto Rican-ness? Absolutely. We were a primarily Puerto Rican organization. First generation, second generation. We did have some third generation folks. We were also a young organization. And the leadership group, we had 16-year-olds. The oldest one was 22. That's young. The other thing that was very important for me was for people to recognize that we were an Afro-descendant people. And of course, that women were present. Present and leading. And leading. Iris's documentary about the Young Lords is called Palante, Siempre Palante. When she'd do events, many people didn't even recognize she was a leader in the movement. They assumed that the Young Lords were all men. People would often say, are the Young Lords coming? And I would say, the Young Lords are here. That would be me. At the time, there was little to no education about Puerto Rican history. And many of the Young Lords had grown up in a society that taught them, either tacitly or directly, to be ashamed of being Puerto Rican. But they centered their roots in their mission anyway. Their motto was, Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón. I have Puerto Rico in my heart. I never doubted I was Puerto Rican. I mean, we spoke Spanish. Everybody we knew was Puerto Rican. My family played dominoes every Sunday. We ate rice and beans. I think that the challenge for my generation was that individually, we didn't doubt we were Puerto Rican. We were trying to figure out how we were related to one another, what it meant for us in terms of Puerto Rico and where we fit in. So what does it mean to be Puerto Rican in the United States? What does it mean to be Puerto Rican in a diaspora What unites us you know It got to be more than food And dominoes And dominoes on Sunday The Young Lords were part of a larger movement that built a bridge between Puerto Rico and the diaspora in the 60s and 70s, like El Comité, Puerto Rican student unions, Vieques Support Network's New York Committee. But while they were championing their home, they also had to learn their own history and figure out what it meant to be Puerto Rican in the diaspora. They were trying to put the two sides of themselves together again at a time, like today, that felt like a touchstone moment for justice and change. It would have been a great embarrassment at the height of the struggle for social justice and global change for the Puerto Ricans not to be represented. Right. It would have been embarrassing. Where were you in the 1960s? I don't know. At the beach. Iris is now 77. Her nose is pierced and she wears heels and colorful glasses. Her life's mission has been building education and awareness about Puerto Rico. It's all rooted in who she comes from. My dad is from Sabana Grande. He was raised in the countryside. And I got to visit the first time when I was four years old. It was a wooden house that had been built by my grandfather. And they had no running water. My grandmother cooked with leña. Yeah. Edlina, yeah. So there was an outhouse, which I was not very fond of. And I have fond memories of my grandmother, who felt so tall to me and so strong. She used to sit on the porch and she would serve me coffee and bread and, you know, we would just talk. And then my mom was from a small town outside of Aguadilla called San Antonio. Even as a child, her visits to Puerto Rico reaffirmed her identity. It made her proud to see that she had a country. And, you know, my father would go with this sense of giving everybody money, like that he had been successful. I guess that it was part of the Puerto Rican pain of having to have left and then having to go back and say that it was worth it. My generation grew up with our parents telling us we're going to go back. And so he did try, but he had to return. He couldn't make it in Puerto Rico. So my dad in this country, he had started as a dishwasher and then started working in a hotel. And his last two jobs were at the Hotel New Yorker and at the Waldorf. I remember him saying he'd met every single president on that elevator ride up and down. and that at the end of the day, the workers at the hotel would give him whatever bread was left over from the restaurant and then he would make boudin out of it. And so we were always, did you get bread? Because we loved his boudin. My mom worked in a garment factory and she did embroidery work. and she'd take us very proudly to show off her little girls, you know, at the factory. She was in ladies lingerie. So we always had great lingerie. And since I was the oldest, I would be the one that did the translating. My mother never learned how to speak English. She knew a couple of words at the end, but I was the one that went with her to the social security office or to the hospital, to the emergency room, you know. And of course, most of these places were primarily, you know, working class poor Puerto Ricans or African Americans. And I would see the disdain, how people were treated. So that started, I think, to develop kind of an anger and try and figure out, you know, whose fault was this. And it started to shape how I saw the world. That sense of unfairness led Edies to become a tenant organizer in her high school years. And I discovered that I loved organizing. You know, I loved going to people's houses and having meetings, bringing everybody together and filling out the paperwork. I love paperwork, too. But it was what it represented, what it could do to change people's lives. And then Edis traveled to a social justice conference in Denver, and that's where she met Chacha Jimenez, the founder of the Young Lords. It was 1969, a defining year. Each moment in history is a fleeting time. Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president. Precious and unique. We landed on the moon. One giant leap for mankind. Mass people-powered movements protested for human rights, like gay pride. Society keeps on saying you can't do this because this isn't your role. Who is to tell who what role we're supposed to take? And to end the war in Vietnam. Those who charge that this is unpatriotic do not know the history of their own nation. and the Yorikans were plugged into the protests that were erupting. We have to begin to stand up as a people, the Puerto Rican people, and say that's enough. That's enough. The New York chapter of the Young Lords stepped into the fray. The first action was the garbage offensive that summer. The young lords had asked the city for brooms so they could address the lack of street sweeping in El Barrio, in upper Manhattan. When the city refused, they took matters into their own hands. Here's Felipe Luciano, speaking on Palante Radio at the time, describing their commitment. Here we were with our purple berets sweeping the streets every Sunday. Then they started blocking traffic on 3rd Avenue, with garbage the city hadn't picked up in weeks. Residents joined in, sometimes burning the piles. It brought attention to the lack of sanitation services during a heated mayoral race. Maybe we should establish that the Young Lords were successful. Yes, of course. You know, we started from the streets in East Harlem, then opened an office, and then opened another office in the Bronx and had a Newark branch and a Bridgeport branch and a Philadelphia branch. They occupied a church to do the breakfast program. They occupied a hospital in the Bronx to demand a patient's bill of rights, which is actually the one that we all have today. From 1969 to 1971, the Young Lords were busy. And forced changes and influenced and created new programs and forced politicians to clean the streets, to take care of the lead poisoning in the buildings, to deal with the question of poverty, to deal with the question of prisons. You know, that was at the height of the Young Lords. It sounds very exciting and energized and just the way you're describing it. It was, and it was very intense also, which is sometimes I say, I can't believe this was in the matter of three years. And while they were doing all this locally, they were also studying up on their roots. How could this group, many of whom had never been to the archipelago, claim Puerto Rico? One of the big questions that came up immediately was, well, you're not born in Puerto Rico, so you're not Puerto Rican. So that's one question that came up. The other one was, well, do you speak Spanish? If you don't speak Spanish, you can't be Puerto Rican. I think a lot of these tests are still given. Exactly. Exactly. We began to fuse politics and culture. And we said essential to the Puerto Rican experience is colonization. What would it mean to support the independence of Puerto Rico from here, though? Everywhere we went, we raised the issue of Puerto Rico. Our newspaper raised the issue of the colonial status of Puerto Rico. So education, essentially. Education, money, supporting campaigns on the island, fundraising for people perhaps that had been arrested as a part of university struggles. And we had a demonstration at the United Nations, 10,000 people demanding the decolonization of Puerto Rico. And importantly, I feel that the Young Lords helped put the issue of the colonization of Puerto Rico on the U.S. left agenda. Coming up, the Young Lords head to Puerto Rico, where they face tension and division. This is La Brega. I met this guy on the bar train one time, and I had my bass with me, and he goes, man, what do you want to do? What's your dream? I'm Jesse Thorn. On Bullseye, Raphael Sadiq. He's nominated for an Oscar, he played bass for Prince, and of course, he co-founded Tony, Tony, Tony. And I go, I want to be in a band with my brother. That's on the next Bullseye. Find us in the NPR app at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts. LifeKit can help you change your life in record time. In just about 20 minutes, a Life Kit episode gives you evidence-based tips you can put into practice that day. No fast-forwarding to get to the good stuff. Just smart, straightforward advice right away. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. There's more to that clip of Edith as a young lord in her 20s, the one we heard at the beginning. It's the part that made her flinch when she realized what piece of tape we had dug up. But I always thought that it was my parents' fault, that my parents were the ones that had made this oppression, that they had made everything so dirty, that they were not giving me a better education, and that all of the problems that I saw were my parents' fault. But then I started thinking why I always thought that Puerto Ricans had no culture, that Puerto Ricans had no history and that Puerto Ricans had nothing. But that cannot be because we have to have something. Because my mother always talked to me about Puerto Rico, and when I went there, I saw a very beautiful island. But at the same time, I saw that conditions were very ugly. And then I was confronted with the conflict that I wanted to be an American, and at the same time, I saw that Puerto Ricans were poor, and it wasn't the fault of the Puerto Ricans. That's when I began to examine the history of Puerto Ricans. We have a role to play in the American Revolution because we're one-third here. The nation, we've got a stake here. Our parents have sweated here. We have died here so that we have a stake here. And for that revolution within the United States, we see ourselves hooking up with black people, with Native Americans, with Asians, and with those of Latinos to form a united front as oppressed people to wage against the real enemy. It interesting hearing that It always makes me a little nervous because first of all it was a long time ago And what I feel is the ambivalence in that moment Right. And ambivalence in the actual sense of the word, which is feeling two things, not feeling nothing. Exactly. Feeling everything that I said about family and the island, and at the same time feeling like wanting to be American, whatever that meant, which I translate as wanting to feel like belonging, you know, not being othered at that moment. You know, I know earlier you said that you flinch about the clip, but I heard like a tenderness in it, right? Because you say at a certain point, I thought that we had no history and no culture, but I would hear my mother talk about Puerto Rico. So we must have, you know, So that shows that you were getting something from your mother that was a source of pride for you, like a source of understanding. I was getting a lot from my mom, my dad, my aunts. You know, we have a big family, the tías, and very woman-centric families. I was surrounded by women, and I was getting a lot from my mom. You know, my mom, she went to the third grade. And one of my earliest memories, I'm the firstborn, so you can imagine. and she said to me, I will teach you everything that I know how to read and write. She stressed education and she had a difficult life. She was an orphan by the time she was in the third grade. So you were close. I was very close to my mom, although we were very different in a lot of ways. And I think that in my most political period, she didn't understand me. But I was 17 when I left home, so I was young. I just felt very oppressed by the expectations of me as a woman. But she never stopped loving or supporting me. And she didn't try to fight you on what you were doing or say, get out of the street? She didn't really say that. She just said, es una locura. I guess that's the same as saying that. You know, she didn't fully understand what I was doing, but she never closed the door on me. Edie's kept searching for more proof that Puerto Ricans had culture, Puerto Ricans had history, that Puerto Ricans had something. So, you know, there were a few books from a Puerto Rican perspective, let's say. There were more books on African-American history. And so the Black consciousness was awakening my consciousness. About your own identity. About my identity and my history, you know, and the struggle for justice. Remember, the African-American migration from the South to the North was present. And we were growing either in those same communities or adjacent to those communities and certainly going to the schools and the hospitals and all the institutions together. So learning that history, I wanted to know more about my history. Then when I got to college, you know, I was looking to learn, but there were no Puerto Rican history classes at that point. There were no Black history classes, but there were little pockets. Like I remember there was a course called Minority Groups in New York City. I said, oh, for sure, we've got to be in that. No, no. So I said to the professor, well, what about Puerto Ricans? And he says, well, you'll have to write that. I wasn't happy with that answer because I felt it was putting a burden on a student where it should have been part of the official curriculum there. If it was important, it would have been included. Well, there was a sort of ad hoc curriculum that you made in the Young Lords, right? A way to come together and learn about yourselves. Yes, we were hungry. We were hungry, right? And everybody, no matter what your educational level was, whatever we could find, we would share with each other. Oh, I have this great art. Well, make sure you give it back to me. Whatever we could pick up, this book, this will be good for you, or newspaper clippings. So it was a time where, talk about DEI being wiped out, there was no DEI. You were making it. We were creating it. So we had weekly classes and they were mandatory. Wait, mandatory? Mandatory. If you were going to be a member, you had to attend political education classes and general meetings. The Young Lords followed what they called a 13-point program and platform. We start with Puerto Rico, you know, and we move to point 13, which was we want socialism, and then everything in between. The 13 points included demands like liberation for all third world people, opposing capitalism, community control of all institutions and lands, opposition to the U.S. military. Point 10 was originally, we want equality for women. Machismo must be revolutionary, not offensive. That language didn't sit well with Edis and the other women leaders of the Young Lords. They got that rewritten to down with machismo and male chauvinism. But the very first point was self-determination for Puerto Ricans, liberation on the island and inside the United States. And this was the platform that the Young Lords focused their education efforts on. And it could look different ways, different times. It was intuitive. You know, we hadn't studied like teaching methodologies or, you know. Socratic method. Right, right. We just knew like, well, let everybody participate, see where people are at. In other words, it was very fluid and it had to convey a sense of pride. It had to convey a sense of our capacity. The slogan of the Young Lords was Tengo Puerto Rico en mi Corazon. But for some reason, that line just wouldn't stick with me. In our interview, I remembered it as Llevo Puerto Rico en mi Corazon. And Iris corrected me. Tengo Puerto Rico en mi Corazon. Yeah. That came out of Chicago. That was early on. Chicago said, Tengo Puerto Rico en mi Corazon. and we adopted it. And I talk about Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón being part of what was connecting us and also part of what was reflecting our yearning for our homeland. So we heard this from our families and now we were also yearning for our homeland, understanding this essential question that we're colonized people. And we're separated from that home. And we're separated from that home. Spanish speakers would be inclined to say llevo. So Edie says the mistake I'm making of remembering it was llevo, not tengo, is actually a meaningful one. We were using the Spanish that we had learned from our families, you know. So like if you read Palante, for example, we committed to having a bilingual newspaper. In 1970, a year after the Young Lords New York chapter started, they published their first issue of their bilingual newspaper, Palante. But if you read that Spanish, right, so everything was written. It's a little janky. Everything. I was one of the translators, right? And my Spanish is not like up there, but everything was written in English. And then depending on your grade level or your facility with writing, that also reflected in English. And then you had to translate into Spanish. So, I mean, that's a lot of work. And it's all by hand and you have to cut out the letters. I mean, today is very different. We would spend hours, you know, doing that just to produce a newspaper. Palante had color and art. For example, in an issue from the summer of 1971, Uncle Sam appears as an octopus, with one tentacle around Puerto Rico and another around the Dominican Republic. And they covered news from the Bronx to Puerto Rico to all over the world. What do you think a reader of Palante was learning about Puerto Rican-ness through Palante? I think the spark of the Young Lords was that we said, look, we're coming out of living in the United States, living in the diaspora and the poverty, and we need to organize to change that. And also to deal with the issue of Puerto Rico and then understanding that the diaspora was a result of the colonization of Puerto Rico. And that's why we said that colonization was part of our identity. That was core. It also is this object of art. Like, I've seen people with framed pages of Palante in their homes because it is beautiful. Like, it's art. In the first couple of years, it certainly was. And remember, this is the generation that also gave rise to the New Yorican movement of artists. writers, poets. Monday morning, the end of the world returns. The river sends the clouds for a bottle of Bayer aspirins. Flowers become artificial again. Alarm clocks ring. There is no sun, no air. 30-cent subway fare has not... And so that whole generation, everybody was participating. You know, we were selling the newspaper 25 cents, maybe up to 10 or 15,000 copies. You know, which is a lot, you know, and we had a weekly radio show. This is Palante, the radio show of the Young Lords organization. And we had these classes and we had these offensives. And, you know, how could that happen? We weren't thousands strong, really. What it was, was that you had a core group of folks, highly committed. and highly talented in whatever their area was. So everybody was disseminating this moment. It was a short moment, but it was like a spark that brought all of this energy together and all of this commitment and love for the community and love for Puerto Rico. Well, there was urgency. We had the sense of urgency, and we were also in a time, like now, a time that was urgent. It also, what you're describing is the supply, but there's also this intense demand if so many people were so plugged in and so nurtured by what you were doing, right? Because you couldn't have done all of that if nobody was listening. Exactly. But also the other thing is that you have to speak to people where they are. There's a story that somebody tells of a young lord being on a corner speaking and people just walking right past. And then somebody said, you need to put out a Puerto Rican flag. He put a Puerto Rican flag and then he was getting a circle of people and people were listening. You know, there are moments that we have to capture by the time that the Young Lords changed direction. The covers weren't so artistic. They weren't so beautiful. They were more dogmatic, politically dogmatic. And there was less art in the newspaper all indications of you know a removal from the community And what changed over time was the question of what is our relationship to Puerto Rico Where should we be organizing And that was actually the downfall of the Young Lords. In 1971, the Young Lords opened a branch in Puerto Rico and sent members, some who'd never even visited, some who didn't even speak Spanish. It immediately caused a rift within the movement and between Puerto Ricans from and on the island and those in the diaspora. Pablo Guzman and Juan González reflected on this in Edith's own documentary, Palante Siempre Palante. It became, if you are Puerto Rican enough, you know, you will go for this. And it was a way of browbeating the rest of us who disagreed. And this technique of browbeating into submission and to play upon your guilt was used successfully. One of the biggest mistakes, I think, that the Young Lords ever made was trying to think that just because we supported the independence of Puerto Rico, that we could figure out how to organize an independence movement on the island. It was a mission that was doomed from the beginning. Of course we supported the independence of Puerto Rico. There was no doubt about that. But when that decision was made, there were two points of view. One was that, you know, close some of the branches here, shift the organizing, make Puerto Rico a priority and send members there from here. But, you know, the roots of the Young Lords were here and we were filling the vacuum. The other was, if people feel that that is their primary fight, go and live among the people and unite with the revolutionaries there to bring about the independence of Puerto Rico. I get the sense of where you are sitting in this. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That's what banished me to Philadelphia, actually. How were the Young Lords received in Puerto Rico? Not good. You can imagine what the Puerto Rican movement in Puerto Rico said. The nicest thing they called the Young Lords was left-wing infantilism or something like that. They were not happy. Like, you know, who do you think you are? We've been struggling for years. And you think you're going to come from New York and you're going to liberate Puerto Rico? And then, of course, that intersects with the woman question, because at that point, the position that the Women's Caucus had been fighting for in the Women's Union was that women's rights and the liberation of women had to be part of the revolutionary struggle. It couldn't be an afterthought. But with the move to Puerto Rico, it was declared officially a secondary as we'll deal with the women's issues, you know, once Puerto Rico is free. We'd still be waiting. people were asking, why are we going to Puerto Rico? You're talking about reunifying Puerto Ricans. What does that mean? Moreover, you can't have the same strategy and tactics for the struggles in the United States and the struggles in Puerto Rico. The conditions are different. So I felt that it was a mistake. And by the end of 1971, we were trying to course correct and we lost. I wonder if that felt kind of painful for people at the time, yourself included, to want to be a part of Puerto Rico and having that yearning, but also understanding we're not the same. No, for me, by trying to make it all one thing, dishonored both. Did that whole experience complicate for you the idea of Puerto Ricanness and what Puerto Rico meant for you specifically? I felt there was a mistake, a huge mistake that was made. But I never wavered, never, never wavered on that Puerto Rico needs to be decolonized. I did question what some people meant by independence, because there's so many, you know, anti-colonial struggles that result in an independent nation that has the same structures and same oppression that they had with the colonizers, except now it's the Native folks. Is that independence? That's not the independence I wanted. Because one of the things that we used to say in the Women's Caucus is, what kind of a world do we want to create? And I carry that with me still. What kind of a world is it that we want to create? It requires rebel imagination. It requires us to think in ways that maybe we've never thought before. I think that it is very, very important to create unity in the sense of understanding and appreciation. We're part of the same history. You know, we've got different chapters and paragraphs and things like that, but we're part of the same history, which is what makes us connected. I felt that when Maria happened, I came back and I said to people, we need to be learning from what's happening in Puerto Rico. The activists there are way ahead of where we are at. What do you mean by that? They understand the conditions and what it takes for people to come together in order to be able to surpass that and survive that. It's raw. They have learned the lessons that we're still not even imagining. For me, one of the significant things about the Young Lords, or of that generation, was that we understood that Puerto Ricans were a colonized people. And that has shaped who we are. And we're a culture of resistance. We said, who is a Puerto Rican? We said, a Puerto Rican is anyone that is descended from Puerto Rico. whether or not they were born there, whether or not they speak English and Spanish, whether or not they've even visited the island, and whether or not they eat rice and beans on a daily basis. You had the rice and beans thing in the newspaper? I just threw that in. But the point being is that we had a very expansive view, And I just wonder what you think about it. I like the expansive definition of Puerto Ricanness because it's so boring to police how other people identify themselves, you know? Like, I'm half Puerto Rican. My father's English, you know? It also, it punishes people twice, right? First, you force people out of their home. That's like one exile. And then to exile them again is mean, you know, like how much more fulfilling it is to see more of us than fewer of us. Exactly. How much more part of that rebel imagination of the expansiveness of who we are as a people and what different peoples contribute. And I felt, you know, Puerto Ricans, like, we like go everywhere, but we maintain a certain essence. Do you see the Young Lords as champions of Puerto Rican-ness? I would say yes. You know, it's amazing how people still contacting us to talk to them. So what is it that attracts young people to this history, you know, 50 years plus later? And I think it's that sense one of an affirmation of Puerto Rican-ness for those that are Puerto Rican. But not only Puerto Ricans, young people. I think it's also the defiance of saying to oppressive systems, we're not going to tolerate it. We believe another world is possible. And I think that really attracts. And then some of the tactics, because our response was direct action, you know, and fearlessness. And so that also is attractive. And also, you guys were all really hot. How to say. That's what people say. You know, I said that's because they're out there exercising and they have good values. Yeah, but also the leather jacket, you know, the beret. But, you know, it all depends on the eye of the beholder, because I was speaking to a fourth grade class and one of the young students said, why don't you wear those funny hats? And I said, good question. iris thank you so much thank you thank you thank you for having me this episode was written and produced by our senior producer nicole rothwell with reporting from me and ezequiel rodriguez andino it was edited by maria garcia and laura Perez. Additional editorial support from Marlon Bishop. Original art for this episode is by Raiza Rodríguez-García of Colectivo Moribibi. Special thanks this week to JT Takagi, Shu Wong, and Roseli Torres of Third World Newsreel, Yasmine Ramírez, and of course, to Iris Morales. The Labrega team includes Nicole Rothwell, Ezequiel Rodriguez-Andino, Laura Perez, Liliana Ruiz, Roxana Aguirre, Maria Garcia, and Marlon Bishop. Fact-checking this season is by Laura Moscoso and Tatiana Díaz-Ramos. Sound design by Jacob Rosati. Mixing by Stephanie Lebeau, Julia Caruso, Jacob Rosati, and JJ Karubin. Scoring and musical curation by Jacob Rosati and Stephanie Lebeau. Our theme song is by Ife. Original music is by Baloon. Our executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia and me, Alana Casanova Burgess. Legal review by ProJorn and clearance counsel by Fisher Legal Arts, Jonathan Fisher. Futuro Media was founded by Maria Hinojosa. La Brega is a production of Futuro Studios. This season of La Brega was made possible by the Mellon Foundation. Check out our website, labregapodcast.org for transcripts and more information about this episode. Talk to you soon. Bye. We are home.