It wouldn’t be unreasonable to state that racial minority groups are often handed the short end of the stick when it comes to being served by the very government that is meant to help them. To these groups, there came a time when they looked at themselves and their communities and realized that they simply could not wait any longer for change to come. Party politics and the electoral process wasn’t satisfactory; they had to take control of their own livelihoods for a change, and make progress on their own terms. This is the strategy that many Puerto Ricans and Asian-Americans living in New York decided to undertake.
In the year 1969, the Young Lords Organization was formed by Puerto Rican New Yorkers, many of them students, activists, or members of other neighborhood organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Urban Planning Studio. In their first act to draw major attention, frustrated with normal political avenues and skeptical of then Mayor Lindsay’s promises, the Young Lords launched their “garbage offensive” that year, sweeping garbage into the streets and disrupting daily life in order to prove to the residents that “bold action that disrupted business as usual was needed to force the city to act on just demands” (Muzio 25).
Young Latinos in the mid-to-late 60s were frustrated with President LBJ’s War on Poverty, which failed to change the terrible economic and social conditions that severely affected the nation’s inner cities dominated by blacks and Latinos. Not only that, but with the evolution of the civil rights movement into a movement focused on black empowerment rather than integration led to another movement in the city led by black, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American parents to control their local public school, pitting activists against the city’s majority-white teachers’ union.
The Young Lords were motivated mainly by the vision of socialist revolution. They sought to eliminate poverty and racism. They were disillusioned by the failure of ‘Nueva York’ to provide jobs and economic security for their families. In response, they desired control of their own communities, creating the 13 Point Program and Platform to outline their goals. Additionally, they also sought out the self-determination of all Puerto Ricans, both on the island and off of it. While some more moderate Puerto Ricans on the island and in New York wanted it to achieve statehood, many – including the Young Lords – preferred that it would become completely independent.
Despite the leaps and bounds that the Young Lords made in the lives of Puerto Ricans, even the most far left of groups can be faced with internal issues that form as a result of their own biases. For example, male chauvinism was a pressing issue in the organization that many of the female members felt needed to be addressed. “Machismo”, a Latino cultural concept that expected women to be basically subservient to men, still influenced the way of thinking for many of the male members of the group. A Women’s Caucus in the group was eventually formed to overcome the sexism they faced there, with many of the members achieving positions of power alongside the men; eventually the 13 Point Program and Platform was edited to state “DOWN WITH MACHISMO AND MALE CHAUVINISM” (Jaffe 236). Furthermore, the group’s straight male members worked through letting go of their existent homophobia that stemmed from machismo. The YLO would welcome new members like transgender activist Sylvia Rivera in 1970 during this time.
Asian-Americans, despite often being viewed as the perfect ‘model minority’, engaged in activism of their own during the 60s and 70s as they experienced injustice and inequality themselves. Community groups mobilized protests against the beating of a young Chinese American engineer by police in the 70s. Asian-Americans were distressed by intensifying poverty, illness, and overcrowding as Chinatown’s populations surged; younger Asians also were angered by “racist stereotypes and political powerlessness” (Jaffe 243). This is the time when Yellow Power came about on the West Coast, and New York Asians who participated in the anti-war movement began to fight for Asian-American issues as well. I Wor Kuen, a Maoist group, opened a health clinic in Chinatown to combat tuberculosis in 1969; Concerned Asian Students succeeded in getting an AA studies program at City College in 1971. The legacy of many of these Asian-American activist groups can still be felt in the city now, with groups to this day fighting against a multitude of issues.
The idealistic aspirations of the Puerto Rican and Asian activists did a lot to change the status quo at the time, where instead of simply waiting for change, people went out and made change themselves. It is important to remember that groups like the Young Lords, while facing internal dissent and slowing radical momentum, were also actively being infiltrated by the NYPD and the FBI through COINTELPRO. In that way, the government succeeded in suppressing those they saw as a threat, as they have done many times before and continue to do. Despite this, their legacy still lives on in the work they did and the lives they changed.
-A.H.
