How did a Chicago-based street gang become one of the most prolific, yet short-lived civil rights organizations of the twentieth century? Dr. Jorge Juan Rodríguez V leads a teach-in on the life and legacy of the Young Lords Party and its relevance to modern Mutual Aid efforts.

Dr. Jorge Juan Rodríguez, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at Union Theological Seminary and the Associate Director for Strategic Programming at the Hispanic Summer Program, specializes in examinations of race, religion, and social movements throughout the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on Black and Brown religious activism and liberation theology. On November 8, 2023, Dr. Rodríguez led an interactive seminar, aptly titled “Mutual Aid and the Young Lords Organization,” offering a history of the rise and fall of the Young Lords as well as discussions of what the trajectory of this notorious civil and human rights organization could mean for modern mutual aid efforts.

The Young Lords originally existed in 1959 as a Chicago-based street gang, serving as the protective body for Chicago communities against police brutality and rival gangs under the leadership of José “Cha Cha” Jimenez. In the summer of 1968, Cha Cha was arrested and held at Maximum Security in Cook County Jail. It was in his solitude that he encountered the works of the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X, noting their calls to nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly as a reaction to police brutality. Thus, the Young Lords, once a street gang, had been irreversibly catapulted into the realm of human rights and radical activism, becoming dedicated to mutual aid and revolutionary calls for systemic change. 

In Chicago, the Young Lords initiated what could only be described as mutual aid: redistributing food to community members, establishing daycare centers for working parents, and organizing residents to push back against gentrification.

Meanwhile, in 1969, student activists from universities across New York City, including Columbia, formed the group Sociedad de Albizu Campos at the SUNY Old Westbury Campus. They closely studied the works of Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon while drawing from the legacies of radical leaders who fought against Puerto Rican colonization and oppression, such as Pedro Albizu Campos, the Father of the Puerto Rican Independence movement, and Lolita Lebrón, a Puerto Rican nationalist who, in 1954, protested the colonization of Puerto Rico by overtaking the United States Capitol. These youths had linked abstract theory to societal context, connecting Puerto Rican history and the radical theory to the tangible needs of poor, working-class Brown and Black communities throughout New York City. By December of 1969, these activists would constitute the branched chapter of the Young Lords Organization in New York City.

One of the most notable efforts organized by these activists soon became known as the Garbage Offensive. According to Dr. Rodríguez, “These youths were fired up, and they were bringing this energy with them as they went to East Harlem, knocking door to door asking aunties and uncles, abuelas and abuelos, what the community needs. To their surprise, and to some, their frustration, the people didn’t ask for the fall of capitalism, they didn’t ask for the abolition of the police. The people said they needed the garbage picked up.” While ostensibly modest in comparison to the radical texts they had studied, the act of picking up garbage off of the streets, of creating a higher standard of living for residents of a neglected East Harlem, made it clear that the Young Lords had become dedicated to addressing the needs of their community and uplifting voices that had been suppressed by the State. Over time, residents began actively contributing to the cleanup, warranting only one problem: there weren’t enough brooms and trash cans. Yet, the New York Sanitation Department blatantly denied any requests for sanitation supplies. 

“It wasn’t just about the brooms. It was about the fact that they were cleaning up their own communities because the City refused to do it. And when they asked for the tools to do it themselves, they were being told no,” Dr. Rodríguez explains, “It was rejection, over rejection, over rejection.” It was then that the Young Lords decided to respond to this blatant demonstration of neglect and disrespect by dumping trash over the streets, blocking off Lexington Avenue, Madison Avenue, 3rd Avenue, 110th, 111th, 115th, 118th, and 120th Streets. Riots ensuing, the Young Lords, now garnering the attention of the mayor, articulated four demands: 

1. The sanitation department must regularly clean up trash in East Harlem.
2. The sanitation department must provide at least 10 brooms and barrels per block.
3. More Puerto Ricans must be hired.
4. Sanitation workers must be provided with higher pay.

The Garbage Offensive became the ethos of what mutual aid meant to the Young Lords, but to Dr. Rodríguez, this act of resistance is also incredibly relevant to mutual aid efforts ensuing today. He elaborates: “[The Young Lords were] empowered with the knowledge that you can care for each other when the State refuses to do so.” To Dr. Rodríguez, mutual aid efforts by the Young Lords exemplify that “theory must be funneled through a people,” and that “the discourse of social change was intimately connected to meeting the immediate needs of the people.”

From the First People’s Church Offensive of 1969 to the liberation of an x-ray truck in June of 1970 to the takeover of Lincoln Hospital in July of the same year, the Young Lords Organization in New York continued to churn out demonstrations that addressed the specific needs of their community while provoking systemic social change. 

Yet, as the Cold War persisted, with the United States government actively surveilling and blacklisting suspected communists, the Young Lords began to decay from the inside out. Lords began “waging struggle” with one another, competing for a fetishized ideological purity and neglecting their former emphasis on applied societal context before abstract notions of radical productivity. The demise of the Young Lords hadn’t transpired of their own doing: surveilled and policed, the Lords bore the imprint of an active element of oppression leading to their dissolution.

Surveillance and factionalism, in combination with the now broken basis of organization in New York, ultimately led to the fall of the Young Lords. By 1976, the Young Lords Party had fizzled in any official capacity.

Yet, like their successes, the fall of the Young Lords is to Dr. Rodríguez, as it is to many ex-Lords today, an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past. Firstly, Dr. Rodríguez asserts that the well-being of individual activists in combination with the well-being of the collective is vital to creating healthy organizations. Next. Dr. Rodríguez cites the Young Lords’ expansion to Puerto Rico, affirming the importance of a centralized, grounded community basis through efficient organizing. Finally, modern organizations must be cautious to avoid demands of ideological purity. The Young Lords had been able to push against surveillance by grounding themselves in their community, but as the organization began to decentralize and as stress took its toll on the activists, they lost the infrastructure that once enabled them to maintain a cohesive force against the FBI’s tactics: “They policed one another,” Dr. Rodríguez explains, “The FBI wrote that the easiest way to undermine a movement is to promote factionalism within an organization.” 

The teach-in concluded with an introduction to The 116th Initiative, Barnard’s student-run, grassroots mutual aid collective, and the FLI Partnership Library. These modern mutual aid initiatives, reminiscent of the community-based efforts of the Young Lords, provide access to textbooks for first-generation/low-income students and “redistribut[ing] wealth and resources to financially struggling and underserved students across our campuses.”

Young Lords Party logo from Wikimedia Commons