Past is Present: The Young Lords Party Revisited
This image captures a 1969 rally that the Black Panthers and Young Lords organized to protest an array of unjust arrests and jail sentences amongst the two groups, namely those of Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, the Panther 21, and Young Lords Party member, Rafael Viera. H x W (Image): 15 3/4 × 19 5/16 in. (40 × 49.1 cm). Silver and gelatin on photographic paper. Photo by Hiram Maristany. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
But whether it be dream or truth, to do well is what matters.
If it be truth, for truth’s sake. If not, then to gain friends for the time when we awaken.
–Calderón de la Barca, La Vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), 1636
Whether you know his name or not, you owe something to Miguel Ernesto “Mickey” Melendez, born in El Barrio, New York City in 1947: activist, memoirist, first-generation Cuban-Rican, and co-founder of the Young Lords Party.
Despite growing up in the epicenter of wealth and power, Mickey and other Young Lords emerged to call out and confront the root causes of inequality and discrimination with incredible bravado. Effectively, they staged occupations and takeovers drawing attention to social injustice through savvy media coverage, and more. Mickey and the Young Lords went on to dedicate themselves to a lifetime of service. Most Young Lords remain lifelong friends, from ages 14, well into their 70’s. Their deep bonds were forged in childhood, in neighborhoods, in the streets, and in their actions.
Today Mickey Melendez looks back on the early 1970’s as completely formative. “Being a member of the Young Lords gave me a purpose and an opportunity through collective struggle to give back. What I gained, however, was a profound fulfillment and personal liberation. It’s been the most consequential and influential movement I have been a part of in my entire life.”
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At 74, Mickey Melendez has a modest and calm demeanor, an aura of peace and equanimity. Yet, he’s intensely troubled by the resurfacing of all that he spent his youth fighting: worsened inequality; an emboldened far-right; the continuing deadlock surrounding health care; the fatal police shootings of unarmed Black persons including children; the January 6th attack by pro-Trump rioters on the nation’s capital; the death threats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has endured, and more. Mickey and other Young Lords recognize that together with younger generations they still have enemies to fight. The principles and values the Young Lords put forth are more relevant than ever.
The experiences that shaped Mickey are enduring ones. His father was a Puerto Rican sailor and card-carrying member of the National Maritime Union, but his greatest influence was the example of his Cuban mother, Celia. A devotee of the Cuban patron saint, La Caridad del Cobre, Celia enshrined the custom of surrounding La Caridad’s altar in her home with copper pennies. Whenever times got rough, family members would borrow from La Caridad to buy white rice, eggs and tuna, promising to replenish her as soon as some money or a paycheck made it back into their hands. “This was my first lesson in humility and faith,” recalls Mickey. Influenced by the teachings of his Catholic upbringing as a child, Mickey considered the priesthood. He also witnessed his mother, who spoke both English and Spanish, graciously translate for others in need, especially at hospitals. She cared about others and always stepped up to help in whatever small way she could, modeling a sense of everyday justice, inspiring him to resist bullies. Ultimately Celia’s instinct for protecting others was the primary influence behind the direction his life would take.
Mickey visited Puerto Rico only once as a child when he was four years old. Soon after, his mom moved the family to the South Bronx, on Tiffany Street. Before redlining and urban renewal policies saw an influx of Puerto Ricans to the borough, the Melendez’ were only one of two Puerto Rican families in the vicinity. Childhood friends were also first generation Italian, Irish, Polish and Jewish. They played stickball in the summer and had snowball fights in the winter. The matriarchs reared them the only way they knew how, but out in the world beyond home these kids had to learn to become Americans.
As a child, Mickey and his mother visited Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida where he had his first encounter with overt racism and discrimination. His cousin's nonchalant disdain of Black people shocked Mickey. He was even more disturbed when he realized that African Americans were only allowed at the local pool only one day a week. The awfulness stayed with him and helped him understand the larger struggle he had begun hearing about in the wider world.
The Civil Rights Movement was by now in full force, and Mickey soon found refuge in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK), Malcolm X, Don Pedro Albizu Campos and Cesar Chavez. From their teachings, he learned that the natural order of things in America was being challenged. Mickey came of age at a time when intolerable conditions in the nation's inner cities were protested. He absorbed the meaning behind these uprisings, what MLK famously referred to as “the language of the unheard.” The war in Vietnam was unsettling, the fear of being drafted was real. While his friends joined various branches of the U.S. armed forces seeking a way out of poverty, he never forgot how one of his neighbors came home in a body bag.
Acceptance into college provided the solution to avoiding Vietnam and he enrolled in the “lily white” Queens College, the least integrated of the City University of New York institutions. Coming back to East Harlem, during the summer of 1967 when he was 20, was a turning point in his political consciousness. A New York Times headline caught his attention: “Disorders Erupt in East Harlem; Mobs Dispersed.” In We Took The Streets, Mickey shares, “As I read accounts of the riot along with the shocking state of the living conditions people were forced to endure in El Barrio, I took it very personally. I felt that I had been lied to for years.” Uprisings shook El Barrio following two wrongful deaths at the hands of the police. After years of frustration and disenfranchisement, the residents of El Barrio took to the streets.
Earlier in the decade, in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed into law the contentious Civil Rights Act, resulting in a set of programs designed to address poverty and discrimination, or in his words “to create the Great Society.” This led to Mickey finding a role for himself as a community peacemaker through a municipally funded summer program. Mickey got to know the East Harlem Tenants Council and members of the “University of the Streets,” or Real Great Society on East 110th Street, the most progressive community-based organization in El Barrio. During the same summer, he attended the first East Harlem Youth Council at Columbia University. It was the beginning of his political awakening and also the life-changing moment he met Juan Gonzalez, now co-host of the progressive news program Democracy Now!, helmed by Amy Goodman.
The era of Black Pride and Power to the People was politicizing a generation. Immersed in revolutionary dialogues, Mickey and Juan explored taking action to better the adverse conditions Puerto Ricans faced: unemployment and poverty, racism and discrimination. They also discussed the hypocrisy of the U.S. empire holding Puerto Rico as a colony while touting—and supposedly fighting for—peace and democracy at home and abroad. The ethos of the Black Panther Party, seeking freedom and the power to determine their own community’s destiny, shaped their emergent ideas.
(L-R) “Cha Cha” Jimenez, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, and Juan Gonzalez at a protest, 1969. Photo: Getty.
On June 7, 1969, they noticed a Black Panther paper mentioned a Puerto Rican organization in Chicago called the Young Lords. They immediately drove to Chicago to meet with its founder, José “Cha-Cha” Jimenez. Influenced by the example of Fred Hampton, Chicago’s Black Panther Party head, Jimenez and the Young Lords joined the Rainbow Coalition; a street gang was transformed into a politicized youth-based, human rights organization. Cha-Cha gave Mickey, Juan and the others the go ahead to start their own East Coast chapter, which they would rename “the Young Lords Party. “ As historian and scholar of the movement, Professor Johanna Fernández shares:
“From the very start, the New York chapter of the Young Lords Party was a political organization. Led by first generation Puerto Rican, college-educated youth they worked alongside other kids and high-school dropouts from El Barrio … engaged in education and anti-poverty programs. Together, they rose to confront the racism of institutions from government to religion.”
A movement was born; Mickey had found his calling.
Denise Oliver marching at a protest. Photo: Bev Grant, December 1969.
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization.
A civilization that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilization.
–Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, (1972)
Sometimes obscured in accounts of the genesis of the New York-based Young Lords Party (YLP) is the intergenerational guidance and role of women challenging male-dominated hierarchies. Older activist organizers, such as the late Evelina Antonetty, who founded United Bronx Parents in 1965, was a mentor and friend to the YLP. Her sister, Elba Cabrera, recollects vividly: “Yes! Evelina was more than a madrina to the Young Lords, especially their leadership. In fact, she was more like a mother sharing insight, strategic counsel, and even resources to help them obtain a storefront space in the South Bronx.”
A grassroots ethos impelled a new generation of organizers to go door to door—listening and learning from frontline communities. The Young Lords absorbed the lesson that the work of dedicated activism is not glamorous nor is it about garnering prestigious awards or public recognition. It is about being of service; caring for your neighbor; building trust relationships and goodwill until enough people believe in the cause and participate in collective action. In other words, people are only ready to seize power once this foundation is established. The Young Lords’ empathetic approach entailed being aware of and present to people’s real day-to-day challenges.
The Young Lords Party has never gained the mainstream visibility it deserves largely because of anti-communist and anti-socialist leanings on the part of the U.S. government. In the same way that other successful, highly cooperative anti-poverty empowerment movements have been eclipsed, and left out of schools’ history curriculum, later generations would not be taught about their goals, achievements and legacy. In more specialist circles, however, the YLP are recognized as groundbreaking and exceptional, and their work is studied. Yasmin Ramirez, Ph.D. calls YLP “a point of origin for Latinx activism in the U.S.”
Accessing scholarship about the Young Lords Party requires intentional digging into the alternative movements that are part of U.S. history yet remain obscured. Iris Morales’ documentary film ¡Pa’lante, Siempre Pa’lante! (1996) engaged a broad public on the PBS series POV. In 2015 Dr. Yasmin Ramirez curated. ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, and in 2019, Pasado y Presente: Art after the Young Lords; Universes staged a musical theater piece, Party People; and Miguel Luciano’s public art intervention, Mapping Resistance (2019), centered the photography of Hiram Maristany, a lifelong resident of East Harlem, who was an original member of the Young Lords Party. Anyone interested in learning more about YLP should be aware of the award-winning study by Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2019).
Amidst the global movement for Black Lives and persistent and rising inequality, momentum gathers for a historical re-examination and reckoning. The most pressing civil rights issues of today such as health care, public education, housing and kitchen-table economics were the same issues the YLP and allies sought to address. As Audre Lorde has written, “There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Therefore, engagement with political education, civics and civil-rights advocacy movements is critical.
The YLP rightly recognized the power of historical education as subject to state control, with school boards able to deny certain histories while promoting others. In his role as YLP Minister of Health and Political Education, Juan Gonzalez was intentional about decolonizing minds of all ages. Equally important, having observed and listened to the community’s needs, the YLP designed creative interventions to command the attention of media and government officials thereby boldly inserting themselves into an unfolding news narrative. Examples include the YLP’s occupation of the First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem (renaming it The People’s Church) and public health-related campaigns such as the Garbage Offensive, the Lead Poison Detection Program, The Tuberculosis Offensive and X-ray Truck Takeover, and the YLP Inmate Liberation Front in Attica.
Members of the Young Lords stand watch by the liberated TB truck while doctors administer X-rays to members in the community, 1970. Photo: Meyer Liebowitz, Getty.
Of all these actions, one of the most salient and prescient was the takeover of Lincoln Hospital, a South Bronx facility and institution that had long been condemned by the City. On July 14, 1970, 50 members of the YLP stormed Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, known in the streets as “the butcher shop.” YLP members drove out the hospital’s administrative staff, barricaded entrances and windows, and raised the Puerto Rican flag atop the building, along with a banner proclaiming “The People’s Hospital,” a nom de guerre still used today. Among their demands—accessible, quality health care for all.
This historic event is the subject of an acclaimed documentary, TAKEOVER, by Emma Francis-Snyder, distributed by The New York Times Op-Docs series. Significantly, the film’s release in early October commemorated the second ratification of the Patient Bill of Rights, a direct outcome of the Young Lords' bold occupation. The film dramatically recounts the YLP’s direct action protesting the horrific standards of care meted out to their community and raising awareness—way ahead of its time—of underlying social determinants of health, what they called “diseases of poverty,” (for example, lead poisoning, tuberculosis, drug addiction, and so on). Their radical analysis pointed to the racist, structural injustices and urban policies to blame while proposing extremely progressive alternative health care modalities even by today’s measure for addiction and holistic detox provision. The YLP’s contribution to U.S. civil rights is lifted in a spellbinding true story that would otherwise have remained largely unknown. The film’s subject matter is anything but past history.
The film serves to remind us of our troubling present. Health care is now one of the largest industries in the U.S., with the CDC reporting that total national health expenditures, as a percentage of GDP, was 17.7 percent in 2018 (and is probably closer to 20 percent today). “The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, it is far from the healthiest,” according to the National Institute of Health , meanwhile COVID-19 exposes exactly the kinds of structural injustices that the YLP had identified decades earlier.
New Yorker Emma Francis-Snyder’s own roots in activism give her a strong connection to her subject matter and she consciously prioritizes what she calls “an example of direct action that worked.” The YLP activists in her film are members of the working class poor, disciplined and highly organized—most of them under 20 years of age—teenagers who changed the course of health care in this country. That such an event could have been forgotten is remarkable.
Rather than present the story as a dry history lesson, TAKEOVER’s nod to the Third World cinema-verite movement renders thrilling, “in the moment,” period reenactments. By the end of the film many audience members will be wondering why similar actions are not taking place today. In September 2020, the Pew Research Center reported that a majority of Americans hold the belief that the federal government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care coverage. Yet, year after year, and despite the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been no mass protests demanding an overhaul of the system. The U.S. remains an international outlier, with many countries having nationalized health care. Conservative narratives blame individuals for systemic, structural problems. The system is upheld by the special interests of predatory and extractive capitalism, among them the food, big pharma and insurance industries, who buy-off elected representatives co-opting our democracy. Is this a democracy?
By claiming space for one of the United States’ most pressing civil rights issues today, TAKEOVER jolts our imaginations. But a film 38 minutes long cannot do justice to the intricacy and in-depth level of organizing that led up to the Lincoln Hospital occupation. For example, Cleo Silvers, who started working at Lincoln Hospital in 1967, was a member of both the Black Panther Party and the YLP. She recalls more than a year of organizing and collaboration leading up to the takeover, intersecting socio-economic and racial lines. Radical and progressive hospital workers formed the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM), patterned after Black worker organizer models such as Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) in Detroit. Black and Latino community and workers led, nurses and doctors followed. Silvers points out that “The Lincoln Hospital takeover was not a dramatic event that simply sprung up overnight. The YLP had put in hours of labor, set up a 24-hour complaint table in the emergency room for months, logged more than 4,000 community concerns, and built relationships with workers from hospital administration, doctors, and nurses.”
With this story Francis-Snyder challenges the shortcomings of her own generation’s education system that continues to uphold white supremacist narratives and exclusionary structures while suppressing U.S. history’s most important chapters. Francis-Snyder has shared that she was dismayed that she had never learned about the Black Panthers and the Young Lords at school and that her knowledge of them did not come until her mid 20s through the advice of an academic mentor. She subsequently chose to focus on the YLP for her master's thesis. After sharing her work with Juan Gonzalez, he suggested she reach out to Mickey Melendez. And, little by little, her objective to make a film that would draw in a wider audience grew one step closer to becoming a reality.
All those steeped in scholarship about mid-century solidarity movements and concerned about the discussion of new laws to prevent the teaching of our truth and radical histories welcome the availability of this story in the video portal of the nation’s paper of record. Its short format, suitable for teaching, particularly in schools, could also help promote greater awareness of how many former YLP members are among us in prominent positions of leadership and professional responsibility. Along with Founding Members Miguel “Mickey” Meléndez and Juan Gonzalez, (also YLP’s Minister of Education and Health) are charismatic Afro-Puerto Rican poet, Felipe Luciano, who was YLP Chairman; and reporter Pablo ”Yoruba” Guzmán, who was Minister of Information. Others who cut their teeth in the movement include the founders of the Women’s Caucus of the Young Lords Party: Iris Morales, attorney, educator, filmmaker, was YLP’s Deputy Minister of Education; Denise Oliver-Vélez, feminist, activist, and applied cultural anthropologist was the first woman on the central committee of the YLP and Minister of Finance and Economic Development. YLP cadres include a long list of luminaries such as Micky Agret, Vicente “Panama” Alba, Walter Bosque, Gilbert Colón, Gloria Colón, Jose Pai Diaz, Sonia Ivony, Gloria Rodriguez, Hiram Maristany, Myrna Martinez, Olguie Robles, Gloria Santiago, Cleo Silvers, Minerva Solla, and many more.
(L-R) David Perez, Juan Gonzalez, and Felipe Luciano occupy “The People’s Church,”1969. Photo: Hiram Maristany.
(L-R) Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, David Perez, Felipe Luciano, and Ramon Rivera, outside the entrance of the occupied Lincoln Hospital, July 14, 1970. Photo: Getty.
As interest in the YLP seems likely to grow, forums that are publicly accessible could help to evaluate YLP’s place in history with lessons for today’s organizers and movements. Politics Professor Deva Woodly of The New School continues to be fascinated by “how they developed themselves into a political force, not a static one but an evolving one, and how to meet challenges as they arose.” Through their community based approach to their work, actions and interventions, the YLP advanced and modeled what political transformation through active solidarity and democratic inclusion looks like in practice. Woodly notes, “Their whole process was deeply democratic and their use of power, politics and organizing codified knowledge for future generations.” Civil rights advocate and environmental justice activist, Vernice Miller-Travis grew up enamored by the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. “I was too young at the time to join them, but if I could have, I would.” She credits her dedication to the needs of historically disenfranchised and under-resourced Black and Brown communities to the YLP’s powerful vision for a new world that inspired her own dreams of service to effect social change and justice. As she puts it, “The Young Lords were large and in-charge and gave me the sense that you can change things you do not accept.”
Francis-Snyder spent a decade making her film because she could not accept the injustice of the YLP’s growing obscurity. Mickey Melendez salutes her as a “modern day abolitionist,” an ally willing to use her white privilege to “have those conversations with my white brothers and sisters who don’t want to listen.” Whether movements are infiltrated, destroyed, imploded from within or simply wither away over time, the job is to move forward. And as a society, we need positive examples of resistance to teach and inspire us how to confront injustice and how to create leaderful communities committed to movement building. As Francis-Snyder puts it: “It is my hope that TAKEOVER will foster reflection and discussion around how we can unite to make change. It is also a love letter to the activists I so admire. Working on this film, in collaboration with the Young Lords, and especially Mickey, has been one of my life’s greatest gifts.” By amplifying the work of the YLP, Francis-Snyder hopes to inspire today’s emerging organizers.
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In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, still only in his mid-20s, U.S. born, Mexican American activist/organizer, Brian Garita is a co-founder and part of a nascent movement called Mexicanos Unidos. Much as the Young Lords questioned their own relationship to gender equality, Brian recognizes that being a U.S. citizen along with his male gender affords him a set of distinct privileges. Armed with education and the masters degree he is pursuing at Baruch College in public administration, Brian is determined to use his privilege in service of others.
What’s striking about the era in which Garita is coming of age as an activist is the stubborn persistence of inequality. For example, compared to the 1970’s when the Young Lords were active and the national poverty rate hovered at 11 percent, today 13.4 percent of the national population lives below the poverty line, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Like Mickey Melendez, Garita grew up Catholic, and is disappointed that “rhetoric doesn’t match action and that in many ways, things have gotten worse.” Among his primary concerns are housing justice and gentrification; preventative and access to quality health care; inescapable poverty and the plight of the unhoused and the poor; education; worker power; women’s rights; the impact of COVID on essential workers; and much more. He has seen how his mother has been mistreated, how the undocumented are abused and wonders as a society why there is such a lack of compassion.
Starting out with less than 10 members, Mexicanos Unidos is just beginning a program of decolonization education having formed a study group this past winter. The same age Mickey was when he began as an activist, Garita’s intentions are local and internationalist, connecting Mexicanos Unidos to Yemen, Palestine and to Boricuas here and on the island. He is using political education to inspire activism, conducting study circles with titles such as Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire and The Activist Study, “ARAK” (or Araling Aktibista, part of the required study for activists in the Filipino revolutionary movement).
Like Francis-Snyder, Garita never once encountered the YLP in his pre-college years education, despite growing up in New York City. Only a few years ago and altogether randomly, Garita managed to obtain a copy of the Young Lords Pa’lante paper—entirely his own journey to access this material. An example of a working class youth for whom the concerns of the YLP still resonate, in the very same city, Garita represents another point of continuity in an ongoing struggle for liberation and justice—a new incarnation of old struggles that endure because the need is still great, if not greater.
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On December 10, 2021, Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued this statement marking the 73rd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948:
“Seventy-three years ago today, the international community came together to declare its firm, united and enduring commitment to human rights, stating, ‘Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.
La lucha continúa.
Pa’lante.
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Joanna Rabiger for editing and additional research, and to Tania Lambert for copy editing.
TAKEOVER can be streamed free via New York Times Op Docs (38 min., USA). The short documentary was directed by Emma Francis-Snyder, produced by Tony Gerber and written by Francisco Bello and Emma Francis-Snyder with executive producers Market Road Films, Luis Miranda Jr. and playwright Lynn Nottage. The film features period photography by Hiram Maristany, the official photographer of the Young Lords Party in New York; music by Paul Brill; and was edited by Francisco Bello and Sebastián Diaz. Consulting producers are Miguel “Mickey” Melendez and Iris Morales who are former members of the Young Lords Party. The documentary is set to be adapted into a narrative feature from Sister and Market Road Films.
Neyda Martinez, an Associate Professor and Interim Program Director in The New School’s Media Management Graduate Program within the School of Media Studies, is producer of the documentary films LUCKY and Decade of Fire, winner of the 2019-2020 PBS Independent Lens Audience Award.