Professor Johanna Fernandez’s recent book,  The Young Lords:  A Radical History tells the story about how how the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panther Party, redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.

Watch:  The Young Lords:  Exploring the Legacy of the Radical Puerto Rican Activist Group 50 Years Later (Democracy Now, 2019)

In his essay, “The Roots of Organizing,” about Professor Hernandez’s incredible book, Ed Morales writes, “Hitting their stride relatively late in the 1960s, the Lords were able to react in real time to the radical experiments of the era and create some of the most forward-thinking analyses of the left’s weaknesses. They took a measured position on the use of violence, they incorporated the emerging feminist and gay rights movements into their political platform, and they offered a critique not only of American racism but also of the tension between darker-skinned mainland Puerto Ricans and the island’s lighter-skinned elites.

The Young Lords’ racial analysis of Latinx identity reached an interested public well before the subject became a significant focus of academics in ethnic and Latino studies. It was, in fact, the activism of groups like the Young Lords that forced the creation of Puerto Rican, Latino, and ethnic studies departments in places like the City University of New York and Columbia. According to Fernández, the Young Lords’ use of “Latino” was “one of the first public uses of the term.” It was always linked to a vision of “self-determination”; for them, Puerto Rico’s fight to become independent was part of a larger struggle that included the rights of “Chicano people [who] built the Southwest…to control their land,” as well as support for the people of the Dominican Republic in their “fight against gringo domination and its puppet generals” and for “the armed liberation struggles in Latin America.” “