'Mapping Resistance': Activism past and present and the New York Young Lords
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Fifty years ago, in 1969, we witnessed the Apollo moon landing. Young people gathered at Woodstock. Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton was assassinated by the police. LBGTQ activists fought back at Stonewall. The Chicago Seven were put on tri'Mapping Resistance': Activism past and present and the New York Young Lords
Fifty years ago, in 1969, we witnessed the Apollo moon landing. Young people gathered at Woodstock. Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton was assassinated by the police. LBGTQ activists fought back at Stonewall. The Chicago Seven were put on trial. That same year, New York's Young Lords were founded. In the midst of the African American liberation struggle, Vietnam War protests, and the women's liberation movement, the Young Lords emerged from Puerto Rican working class communities to demand justice, racial and gender equality, decent living conditions, and an end to the colonial status of Puerto Rico. The Young Lords Organization began in Chicago. The New York chapter established in 1969 also formed branches in Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Newark, Boston, Puerto Rico and united with affiliates in other cities. I’m looking back to a time when many of you who are reading were not even born, when still others may know little or nothing about the Young Lords. I sit here and think about how this group of predominantly Puerto Rican young people, many not yet old enough to vote (our average age was 17) came together to change the political landscape of not only New York City, but of other urban areas where Puerto Ricans live on the mainland. I say, predominantly Puerto Rican, since about a third of the members were African American (like me), or from other Latinx groups. Protests are currently taking place in Puerto Rico under the banner of #RickyRenuncia, as people throughout the Puerto Rican diaspora are demanding Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s resignation while waiting for the next blow to fall with looming cutoffs of Medicaid which will doom over 900,000 people on the island. We must never forget that there are 5.5 million people here on the mainland who identify as Puerto Rican. The history of the Young Lords and our impact has been virtually erased from public memory. Many young people—living in the neighborhoods and communities affected and changed by our resistance, are unaware that we existed. That is being changed by an extraordinary exhibit of the photography from that time in 1969 and the early ‘70s. Photographs that are not in a museum or art gallery. Photographs not in a history book. Photographs that now live on the very streets where we young people fought to change the world around us. This installation by artist Miguel Luciano of the photographs of Hiram Maristany, “Mapping Resistance: The Young Lords in El Barrio” brings history alive on the very streets that birthed a movement. Read more