Cool Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week I'm traveling and instead of doing the thing, I'm doing a different thing where I play a rerun, and in this case, I'm playing a rerun that I thought would tie in really well with last week's episode. Last week we talked about the first Paramedics, So this week we're gonna revisit
the Young Lords. We're going to talk about the group of radicals who completely changed the way that healthcare works in this country by taking direct action and doing all kinds of cool stuff.
I hope you enjoy it.
Hello and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're a podcast about Wait a second, Sophie's not here. We can do anything we want. Hello and welcome to Hollywood. Let's talk about Hollywood. That's a real place and we care about the people there. Sreen, do you think that's a good podcast? I feel like will be the first people to come up with that kind of podcast.
Yeah, it's gonna be a big hit, smash hit.
Yeah, we're gonna get some podcast money. Hell yeah, or okay, actually maybe we should just we'll do that later. First, we'll do a cool people did cool stuff.
Okay, yay, I guess we have to get that out of the way first.
Yeah, okay, great, we'll jump in. Yeah, because I'm really excited about today's guest and topic. My guest today is a Linda Sagata and the principal songwriter. I guess is the maybe a way to say it, but I'm not entirely certain of one of the best bands out there. Hooray for the riff raff Melinda, how are you?
I'm good.
I'm on a wild journey of life, but I'm really happy to be here and I've missed you.
Yay. Yeah.
I keep finding my guests are like my old friends from back in the day in a nice way. And Alinda and I know each other from New York many many years ago.
Yeah, it's beautiful, Linda.
I was going to describe your music, and then I realized, I don't know how to. Is there like a catchy one sentence version that you use?
I guess like sometimes I say folk rock because I feel like people not when I say that.
Okay, you know, I will go out, go ahead, Sorry, there's rock in it, but it's also folk. Yeah, I will say to anyone who I don't usually like folk rock as its described, and I really like her ray for the riff raff, So if anyone, yeah.
Wun't you call it?
Also, one time somebody called it folk punk and I was like, whoa. I felt like younger me was really excited, but only younger me.
I used to distinguish between folk punk and punk's playing folk mmm, because folk punk is when you take the punk vocals and put them over folk instrumentation exactly, and then punk's playing folk is when punks play folk music. Yes, and I like that one more. I gotta yeah, I want some I want to stop playing shows because I was playing with an accordion and I told this other person I played with. I was like, oh, I don't usually like folk punk, but I really like your set.
And he got really offended and he was like, which is fair. It was a dumb thing for me to have said, and he was like, what do you call what you do? And then I stopped playing shows. Anyway, That's not what we're talking about today. We are not talking about folk punk today. Okay. Well, first, as people might have noticed, our our producer Sophie is not with us. Instead, we have Sharen at least partly, but otherwise we're flying solo. I believe in you, Thank you. That's all claim that
I do too, so that everyone feels safe. Our audio engineers Ian Hi Ian, and our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And our topic today Alanda. People talk a lot about like getting shit done, but usually they don't get shit done. They talk about getting shit done. Today we're gonna talk about the people who got shit done. This was the thing that I kept running over and over again, was just like getting shit done, be out of They got so much done that this is our
second four partner. There's two weeks that we're going to be talking about a street gang that turned into revolutionary socialists who fought for change, and they only got the tiniest portion of what they wanted, and they still got more than almost anyone I ever read about. In case anyone's wondering, anyone who's listening, if you were wondering, huh, I wonder if the reason that the trash gets picked
up is because of people rioting. I wonder if the reason that people don't use lead paint anymore is because of militant demonstrators who were threatening to overthrow capitalism, and was it people committed to the destruction of capitalism who brought us the patient's Bill of Rights and the fact that some of times were treated okay at hospitals. The answer is yes, because today we're gonna talk about the Young Lords. Alynda, have you heard of the Young Lords?
I have learned. I heard of the Young Lords.
I was very deeply affected by learning about them some years ago, and it like really changed my music and it changed my life.
That's cool. The reason Alinda is the guest for this is that I started writing a script for someone else and then I was name dropping Alinda and one of one of their songs in the script, and then I was like, Elinda should be the guest for this, and then Alinda said, yes, I'm.
Really excited to learn about them. You know, like I've had the emotional experience of learning some about the Young Lords, but I am ready to deep dive.
Fuck yeah. Okay, So today we're going to talk about this week and next week we're going to talk about some of the amazing stuff done by the Puerto Rican radicals in the continental the United States. And that means we should at least briefly talk about Puerto Rico itself. Puerto Rico is an American colony. The US doesn't like to use that word. They used the word unincorporated territory. Whoa, yeah, it means.
I've heard commonwealth my whole life.
Oh okay, I think.
That which is well, I just think it's a very silly term when it's like there is no common wealth.
Yeah, well, the that's white people in the United States have the commonwealth. It was all extracted.
Yeah. Yeah.
So the US got this colony in eighteen ninety eight by the usual means of colony, getting colonies through war, and in this case, they stole it from Spain as the result of the Spanish American War. Spain, of course, had stolen it in the first place. They stole it from the indigenous people the island back in fifteen oh eight Puerto Rico, so it becomes a colony of the US instead of Spain. And then in nineteen seventeen, Puerto Ricans were suddenly granted US citizenship, which was so benevolent.
It was just a strange coincidence that this was just
in time for all the Puerto Rican men to get drafted. Yes, yeah, yes, So the US gave Puerto Rican's US citizenship because they wanted to throw them into the meat grinder of World War One, and the entire Puerto Rican House of Delegates, like the local governance in Puerto Rico, voted against getting US citizenship because they were like, oh, whoa, yeah, that part actually a little bit surprised me because a lot of you know, US statehood is a big part of
a lot of Puerto Rican movement stuff now right when we talk a little bit about that, But they knew it was a fucking trick as far as I can tell. They were just like, yeah, no, why would we go off and do this. So Ever since Puerto Rican folks have been fighting for and this depends on who you ask. Some people are fighting from independence from the US, some people are fighting for statehood. Either way, people are fighting.
I'm kind of.
Curious whether, like in your family, whether like there was a strong sense of statehood, independence, that kind of thing, Like.
It really depends.
It's like, I think there's definitely an exhaustion that my family has, I think is pretty common to Puerto Ricans, who, you know, I don't really have a lot of family in the island. Anymore, And it seems like my family is very much like, well, how would the island survive if we weren't owned by the US at this point, like an exhaustion of this idea of independence even being possible.
But then there are certain people, like, you know, there's like some more radically leaning people in my family that are just like the point is to try, the point is to figure it out, you know.
Yeah, And I feel like it's like useful to understand and be sympathetic to both of those positions. Yeah, for me, as someone who's not Puerto Rican, as just being like, all right, like independence, the more radical thing sounds always cooler to me. But I'm like I could get people just trying for what they can, you know.
Yeah, And I feel that too, even being like a Puerto Rican person that wasn't brought up on the island.
I'm like, what right do.
I have to tell people how to like to make a decision that really it affects them. It doesn't affect me, you know, it affects their daily life. So I definitely try to be aware of that, especially with like having a band and being sometimes the only Puerto Rican person that someone's ever talked.
To right, you know. Yeah, well part four of this episode will be particularly interesting as relates to not the band part, but the mainland US Puerto Ricans. And well we'll talk about that later. Everyone's gonunt to wait a lot. But so the US, they want Puerto Rico still, and it is part of the US exercising power across the globe. It's not like some benevolence thing that we have this fucking colony. The majority of US interventions in Latin America are staged on the island of Puerto Rico.
Oh wow.
And since Perto Rico is a colony, it means the US is out to extract whatever value it can from the island, which in nineteen seventeen met Grist for the mill post World War Two. It was something different, but something related. It was needed workers. We need workers because so many of ours just died because we just fought World War two. So please everyone come over. And so between nineteen forty seven and nineteen seventy a third of the population of Puerto Rico moved to the United States
looking for something like stability in a decent life. Disproportionately, this was youth who came and ninety percent of them went at least to begin with, to New York City. This mass immigration started because of a US project called Operation Bootstrap, which was this massive spike in industrialization that displaced people even as it put in power line So it was like kind of like, oh, we're doing all this nice stuff. We're bringing in power lines and industry
and infrastructure, but it just fucked everything up. It was openly an attempt to stabilize the political situation in the colony and make it more useful for US interests. The sugar economy, which was also bad, but it was like what Spain was mostly up to, was replaced by industrialization, also bad, and US investment in capitalism just like poured
into Puerto Rico. So Puerto Rico folk, Puerto Rican folks led the fucking up of their country and moved to the US, where they were welcomed with open arms, economic opportunity, good living conditions, the American dream and no, no, wait no, it's the opposite of that. Puerto Rican immigrants was even immigrants the right word. I mean, you know, people coming from.
Puerto Rico to them, yeah.
Met with violence, nativism, bigotry, racism, classism. Instead Puerto Ricans in the US were immediately slandered as junkies and thugs and welfare dependents, the same as marginalized people always are. They're treated like illegal immigrants, which of course is not true, and obviously documented people should also be treated well on borders. But in this case, literally it's us since moving to another part of the US, and they'd come over basically
at the behest of the US government to work. But the piece of shit racists didn't like thinking period.
Yeah, this is actually when my family came over, is like around nineteen forty seven.
Oh okay, oh damn, so like kind of like first wave of all this stuff.
Yeah, my dad came over when he was a kid, and he asked this story about being on a plane, that.
The chairs were actually like.
Lawn chairs, and that my grandmother came with like her three kids because my grandfather was already over in New York working and like it just being like okay, every you know, I'm sure they were like some somehouse that bolted down, but just like this totally crazy yeah experience of like let's get as many of these people over as we can, you.
Know, fucking I mean, it doesn't surprise me. But I just had never even imagined that kind of like, yeah, like I wonder how I thought. I never really thought about how folks came over, you know. Yeah, yeah, Operation Boostrap had another impact. It showed the world that the
quote unquote third world was open for business. And I think it was like one of the things that kind of started the industrial economy disappearing from the United States, as industrialization is moved out to the colonies and to the sort of you know, in a neoliberal sense, you can kind of claim that most of the quote unquote developing world is colonies for the rich nations, you know.
So there's a weird, awful downside to this. Millions of people are showing up for looking for work in the cities because they've been told to come over and get work in the cities, just as the US is like starting to eradicate industrialization within in the continental United States, and so there's not a lot of work. In nineteen sixty six, a study found that the unemployment or underemployment of Puerto Rican men in East Harlem or what's called
Spanish Harlem or Albodio was forty seven percent. Half the Puerto Rican families in New York lived worse than immigrant families in New York during the fucking Great Depression. So by nineteen sixty six, twenty percent of the students in New York City where Puerto Rican and thirty percent were black, which means it's the first time that white people weren't the majority in New York City in the schools. Whoa wow, And I don't know if you knew this, but white people don't historically like that.
They don't. Yeah, it's not a not a cool look. Yeah.
Yeah, they haven't figured out that. They're like, they don't want to get treated like they've been treating people, you know. Yeah, So two thousand white parents picketed City Hall over school integration in nineteen sixty four, almost half a million white students stayed home in a boycott protest organized by their racist, fucking parents in New York City.
Wow.
Yeah, like half a million fucking kids didn't go to school and protest of there being people of color in their schools. And like white Northerners have this attitude that like white Southerners are the only racist people.
Seriously. Yeah, wow.
So we'll come back to New York later. Our story winds up in New York, but it starts in Chicago. Yeah, in Chicago, nineteen fifty four, some white assholes firebombed to Puerto Rican bar and an apartment, which led to a week of fighting, and it led to non white gangs forming for self defense, specifically Puerto Rican, Mexican and Black gang started forming in Chicago in the nineteen fifties. And you've got a bunch of capitalists exploiting this racist fear.
White people started fleeing cargo in the fifties out to the suburbs, the classic white flight. The white people who stayed in Chicago were like really paranoid about black people driving down their property values or whatever. So these real estate assholes who created the racist panic in the first place would get white people to sell out a loss and basically like stoke these fears in order to make
money and flip houses. And it was kind of like Domino's style, and so like the white flight was like both racist cowards and also racist capitalists were looking to exploit the fear of the racist capitalists racist cowards. And that's the condition into which are very young heroes or
lords as we might call them, and to our story. Yeah, but first we're going to talk about some other heroes, capitalism and products and services that support our show because were ads sponsored and now you can listen to those ads. And we're back and we are talking about the beginning of the Young Lords. They formed as a street gang in nineteen fifty nine in Lincoln Park in Chicago. They were formed by seven kids. Six of them were Puerto Rican, one of them was Mexican. And this part I didn't
know what I mean it when I say kids. How old do you think these kids were?
I mean I always imagined like mid twenties, but I know that's wrong.
Yeah, like half that some of them are like eleven what yeah, in.
Fact, well like actual children.
Yeah, the kind of like main founder of the we'll get to this, like one of our like heroes that we're going to talk about, Jose Cha Cha Yumenez.
Uh huh.
He was eleven years old in nineteen fifty nine when he was a founding member of this gang. Yeah.
Actually, okay, that reminds me though. Have you heard there is a story about kids in Puerto Rico talking about kids not going to school, about kids in Puerto Rico like not going to school, in protest of this time when they were trying to make when the US was trying to force like English to be the official language of the school system.
Oh no, this is cool.
No. Yeah, so there is I don't know.
A lot about it, but this there is like a history of Puerto.
Rican children being like, yeah, fuck you.
But we're just not going to go, which is the opposite of blood. Sorry, go ahead, it's in the blood.
Yeah.
And it's the opposite of those half a million white kids who are like, we don't want to go to school because there might someone at school speaking Spanish. I can't handle it. Yeah, God forbid.
Wow.
Eleven Yeah, hose chau Cha Yumenez. He was a founding member. He's eleven years old. By the time he was fourteen, he was a petty crook. He got caught up bunch, going in and out of facilities all the time. His Catholic parents had come over from Puerto Rico with him when he was two. His mom passed when they moved to Chicago. His mom packed Christmas cards for a living, and his dad worked in a meat packing plant. As the city redeveloped and tore down everything and like fucked
over all the poor people. They moved nine times in the first six years they lived in Chicago.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where they wound up in Lincoln Park was like diverse quote quote unquote, but it was segregated block by block. His mom pulled a bunch of strings to get him put into a Catholic school because he'd been she'd been raised in a Catholic poorhouse and had connections. But this will be shocking to you. So the priest at this school not so cool. They were all a bunch of racists.
They used the N word constantly. They just fucking hated these like as best as I can tell, it was like white Catholics and they were like, fuck, go why did And it's like, honey, that's on you. Your missionaries went and turned on these people of color into you.
Know, My family had so many stories about like nuns, like hitting them with rulers and shit. Like Luckily I was able to grow up. Not like we went to Mass like for Christmas, but I was raised so I was raised by a bunch of like hippies basically that got hit by nuns.
We're just yeah, yeah, so I'm very lucky. Yeah that.
Yeah. My dad went to Catholic school, so I didn't have to exactly. Yeah, so this is what he's getting raised, how he was getting raised. His dad had actually been in a gang himself, Lacho Vieha the Old Hatchet, which is the oldest known Puerto Rican street gang and at least Chicago. I'm unsure if there's older older Puerto Rican street gangs in the United States. I tried looking and like it would come back being like nineteen seventy and I'm like, no, no, that's not the oldest one.
Well, cool name though, I know, right.
Name, Okay, but you're breaking my rule I have, like if there's like Margaret's Law, it's that everyone who says that would be a cool band name is wrong, but this actually would be a good band name, Like hey, I want yeah, you broke the law, band jail you have to go to Yeah, I know. And especially because the Old Hatchet was probably a bunch of teenagers, right.
Like yeah, the only uh like Puerto Rican streaking I know about is the Ghetto.
Brothers, okay, and I don't know about but I think.
That was I think that was later on. Okay, they eventually became a band.
Oh word, yeah, so different than the ghetto boys. Yes, great, I was like, okay, so the history I feel like it's worth pointing out if I'm talking about this streak gang, right, and people have like various impressions about street gangs depending on where you live and all of these things, but it's like really worth understanding why people are forming a street gang. There is a long history of ethnic gangs
in Chicago. This is not a nice history. It goes back into the late nineteenth century when German and Irish youth crewed up not with each other, but with other German and the Germans, with the Germans the Irish of the Irish because everyone's fucking bullshit in order to be shitty to more recent immigrants. That's where ethnic gangs come from in Chicago. And this tied very happily and easily
into the city's politics. The city gave the gang's resources, and the kids would grow up and join the more formal political structure. They all became cops and firefighters. Oh wow, Yeah, there's this this criminal justice professor guy, his names John M. Haggerdorn and his quote is the Irish gang in effect was reinvented as the Chicago Police Department.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, corruption and Chicago go the long history together. Yeah, so the white ethnic gangs continue to be fucked up, whether before joining the cops or after joining the cops. And they did a bunch of racist shit time and
time again as black labor moved into the city. And so I feel like this is important to understand when we talk about the development of non white gangs in the US more broadly, right, because like a huge part of racism is like being like, but the gangs or whatever, you know, totally and it's like, Okay, they came from defending themselves against you, yeah for real, which isn't to say whatever, We'll talk about someone what they got up to,
and you know it's complicated. Right. So Chasha starts a gang when he's eleven because white gangs have been fucking with him for a year already, since he's ten years old. He's used to white gangs, like because the white kids in the area outnumbered everyone else seventeen to one at that point demographically. Yeah, and he guess his nickname because racist kids keep saying chah cha cha every time they see him. Oh wow, And he's like, all right, fuck it, that's my name. I'm Cha Cha.
He just becomes a badass.
I know. And it like be like a scary name to run into someone who's like fucking with you.
Chacha Definitely.
It's like you go and like someone's like maybe picking a fight with you, and you're like, what's your name? They're like Tiddley Winks and you're like, I gotta go.
I hear my mom, Colin, like you've seen some shit.
Yeah. They met up at a junior high school, the Young Lords. Their founder was this darker skin Puerto Rican kid, Orlando da Villa, who was red as black and got even more shit from people from which he learned to defend himself. And I'm kind of curious your take on this part because it's like, this is something I can read about, but there's this, Yeah, there's this interesting writing
about race relations into Puerto Rican immigrants. At the time, for most immigrants, the Puerto Rican ethnicity was far more important than their race is viewed by other people in the continental US. So like Chacha had green eyes and
light skin, Orlando was red as black. But for the second generation American views like mainland American group views, crept in more and more younger Puerto Ricans identified with black struggle, and their parents were largely trying to distinguish themselves from black struggle.
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean I have like, especially in my family, it's like I have so much white privilege, you know, and I feel like, definitely I witnessed a lot of racism get just like crammed into my family's minds.
I think, like what I've experienced is also.
Like a lot of pride about like not being considered immigrants, right, even though they have this immigrant experience. It's like the classic American thing where it's like, well, we are one step closer to this pyramid, the top of the pyramid than people who are dealing with immigrations staff.
We don't have to deal with that.
Yeah, And racism and colorism definitely was something that I saw all the time.
Okay, And yeah, that makes sense, Like one of the things I have the hardest time because again I'm mostly just reading about this stuff, and everyone who's writing has different, you know, things that they're trying to say or not say right, and like so like sometimes I read about like all of the awful interfighting but horizontal conflict between black New Yorkers and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, right, And then other places I read, I'll read about all of
these like moments of solidarity, and people will be like, oh, we all got along, and like, yeah, I have a feeling the answer is both maybe, you know.
I think so.
I mean also, like I said, there was a generation like who was radicalized and then after you know, not to jump ahead, but then they experienced the fucking eighties and it's like such disillusionment, and then my generation comes. I feel like it's only now that I'm seeing kids like get radicalized in the same way.
You know, I feel like, so, I don't know.
I think I think there is more like solidarity now, but I also feel like a white kid looking in right.
You know.
Also, an interesting thing in New York at least is the fighting between Dominican and.
Puerto Rican Oh okay people.
That was something I witnessed a lot because of like immigration status and also racism.
Yeah, for sure, Yeah, it's I love. Love is not the right word, But I'm so interested in all these things that like complicate the mainstream conception of like the racial hierarchy, right, and like, you know, the fact that Puerto Rican immigrants would be coming from different ethnic backgrounds with or different racial backgrounds. I guess you would say from Puerto Rico, whereas like to like the people who live in the US, maybe it was like whatever, you're
all fucking Puerto Ricans. Fuck you, you know, as compared to like white Puerto Ricans and black Puerto Ricans. And I don't know enough about race relations within Puerto Rico. I've only read about them and how they relate to the mainland.
Yeah, I feel like I've definitely experienced, like, you know, I get this like platform and because I feel like I just make people feel more comfortable, They're like, oh, I understand you more, Like I don't have to experience that racism. So I think certain Puerto Ricans that are
super light skin it's not I think. I know, like we get these you know, platforms and experience you know, these opportunities and shit, and Jlo becomes like the idea of what being Puerto Rican is instead of a super complex identity.
Yeah.
I had no idea that Jayla was Puerto Rican. But I also really okay, this is the like main running in joke is that I don't know anything about pop culture.
Oh my god. Yeah, Ricky Martin and Martin.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Mean I grew up thinking that was what being Puerto Rican was.
So then to find out about the Young.
Lords is like a mind altering moment where I'm like, wait, what We're like revolutionary fucking fighters?
Is this crazy?
Yeah?
I thought we were just.
Like popa, you know, like I was just raised with this idea of what it was.
Yeah, I mean that, well, I guess we'll get to it. Yeah, the death nel of everything in the eighties and all that. This is the kind of sad thing about like cool people in history, and they're like, well, if you tell the story long enough, but there's amazing stuff along the way, which is all any of us have is our lives anyway, right,
like all of them. So they're a gang now to come back to Chicago nineteen fifties, and they immediately set out and they're like eleven to fourteen, and I think May someone were like sixteen or whatever, and they immediately set out to do gang shit. They're really into stealing cars. You gotta have a nice car, and selling stolen car parts is good money. Cha Cha had white passing privilege, so he was the kid who would do the initial stealing. Also probably the fact that he's like a white passing
eleven year old is probably part of that. We got away with us, you know, Oh my god. Yeah. And then the Young Lords immediately got to fighting anyone who fucked with them, and they immediately started getting arrested for weapons possession, assault, petty theft, and drugs. Most of the fighting they did this is like where they was. They would forcefully integrate places that were informally whites only.
Oh wow.
Yeah, when older folks would get pushed around, like older Puerto Rican folks and would get pushed around or slapped for being in the wrong place. There's like the Lake Shore Drive beach. The Young Lords would just show up and be like, no, that's cool, We're allowed to be here, Like wow, that beach in particular, they fought with broken bottles and knives for the right to swim there.
Holy shit.
Yeah yeah, really little badasses.
Yeah, I know.
I like my friend who turned me on to I'd heard some about the Young Lords but not like a ton right, and my friends like, you really need to do an episode on them. And it ties into there's like some stuff that keeps coming up over over and over again. We're going to talk about tuberculosis in this episode. For some reason, tuberculosi is this running theme throughout all these things, and it's going to come up, but not yet.
But yeah, so and the white gangs would fight back, right, you know, the I presume German, German and Irish gangs would fight back and try and fight the young Lords and be like, no, we want our whites only beach or whatever. But eventually the white gangs relented. And I'm under the impression this isn't less because the Young Lord's always won and more because they always fought. And I
think that this is how oppressive power works. You don't even need to always win, You just need to keep fighting, and they'll back off first because they have more to lose, right, they're more privileged.
Wow, what a great lesson to like keep in mind.
Yeah. Yeah, When Joshaw was fifteen, he found himself increasingly in charge of their gang because he was willing to do the paperwork for the gang.
What did like paperwork entail?
So he was the business manager and he would raise money to get everyone in the gang black and purple sweaters and yeah, and they would throw soul dance parties and that's how they would raise the money, and so he was this fundraiser. Yeah, and he was like he wasn't afraid to throw down, but he was always also trying to figure out non violent solutions to most problems. He still thought a lot. He got arrested twenty times over the course of his young life, like only a
couple of years. So I really like this, like this is my favorite version of non violence, is the like, our preference is non violence, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, We're gonna swim at this beach non violently ideally, yeah, yeah, I do it all right. So then he's sixteen, and he might be fifteen or something. I get the year something happened and not the age of the person. So I do rough math and he gets sentenced too. I
don't remember. We get caught for this time. He gets sentenced to go live in Puerto Rico for a year. The judge is like, WHOA, yeah, I didn't know this was a thing. It was an assault that would have had him in prison for years. And I think that the judge was just actually like, you dumb fucking kid, go get out of here, you know, like wow, Yeah, So he goes to Puerto Rico, and while he's there he tries to get up to all his usual shit.
At one point he steals a horse to ride off to go hot wire a priest's car in order to go see a girl he likes.
Wow, yeah exactly, I know.
But they catch him and they don't throw him in jail when he's in Puerto Rico. Instead, they chew him out in public like I think, in like the town square, basically a priest and then an older woman just like yell at him for being a fuck up in front of everyone.
Oh my god.
And this works. I mean he does like one eighty, but it's way more effective than getting sent to jail totally, and going to Puerto Rico is like a sea change. His two main sea change moments about how he becomes who he becomes, and going to Puerto Rico is one of them. He did come back in a week later, go to jail for stealing a toaster. Okay, so he's
not one eighty. New habits they take a little while to catch on, much like what also takes a while to catch on our products and services, And that's why you have to hear about them over and over again before they stick in your mind. And you know that we've had really bad sponsors lately. The main bad one is Reagan Gold, So go buy gold. That'll teach him. And we're back. Oh we should have thought of. Now that we're back from a break, I want to go
back to being sponsored by really nice stuff. Historically some of the things that we got sponsored by. For a long time, we were sponsored by the Concept of Potatoes. We've also been sponsored well not officially, but our unofficial sponsors the concept of potatoes, okay, And we've also been sponsored by like a nice comb. The Happy Sleeping Dogs is a good sponsor for the show. So I'm wondering
if you have any sponsors you'd like us. When Sophie is back, Sophie will get us sponsored by by whatever you want.
You know, lately, I've been really into baby elephants in general, especially baby elephants bathing.
Okay, okay, so if that's if that's a possibility.
We can do it. Sophie is really good at shit, and this show is brought to you by baby elephants bathing. Go wash videos of baby elephants and see them be cute, and that is substantially better than buying a wrecking gold. In nineteen sixty six in Chicago, you have the Division Street riots. Chicago declared Puerto Rican Week, which included the city's first Puerto Rican parade. Cops were there, yeah, and the cops were super respect No, the cops were being cops.
So they shot someone. They shot someone in the leg during the celebrations, and so a crowd showed up, and then cops sicked a dog on someone and the crowd went wild, and the rioting went on for three days, destroying fifty white owned businesses that ran through a Puerto Rican neighborhood.
Holy shit.
And Shasha was sitting in jail during this, and he was just like for something else, maybe the toaster, I'm not sure. And so he's just cheering it on, right, He's like, go, kids, go, this rules, you know.
Yeah.
Other young lords are involved in the organizing in the wake of it for structural change. And a bunch of new groups pop up in the wake of this. And the most influential one, or the one that I keep writing about in the books that I was reading about this is the Latin American Defense Organization or LEDO latdo oh wow. And they rule. They spread across the country. They bring together working class Latin Americans. But the Young Lords they're not ready to be a socialist organization quite yet.
In fact, they're starting to drift apart. Members grew up, they get married, they joined the military, They co to prison for a long time because they keep doing crime. In nineteen sixty eight, Cha Cha is in prison again. I think he's doing a sixty day stint for heroin possession. This is another thing no one likes talking about in all the history. Everyone who's listening has heard me go on about this before. But like, they always cut so
much shit out of history books. They never talk about how a bunch of our heroes were drug users, how a bunch of our heroes were sex workers, a bunch of our heroes were like had specific political ideologies. There's all this stuff that gets cut out. And so I don't know much about Chasha's drug use. I do know a lot about how the Young Lords dealt with heroin use in New York, and we'll talk about that later.
Oh really interested him?
Cool, It's really interesting. Yeah, like I'm I kept whatever. I'm really excited about this. Everyone knows this. So he's only a sixty day stint for heroin possession and in prison. This is his second Sea change moment. A bunch of shit that happens solidifies his future politics. First, he's in
prison when MLK is assassinated. Second, a bunch of Spanish speaking prisoners, including him, get thrown into solitary for basically no reason, and a guard tries to call him white in order to get black prisoners to beat him up to like race bait people against each other. But a black prisoner stood up for him, and that black prisoner said a few simple words that everyone needs to shout from time to time. Shut the fuck up, you pig.
Wow.
And so cha Chaz like, oh cross, racial solidarity is real, right, And while he's in solitary, he likes to read. And the Nation of Islam has prison is in prisons because we get arrested a lot, and they would get themselves jobs in prison libraries in order to provide radical books to people, which is fucking rad. And so he started
reading Martin Luther King. He starts reading Malcolm X. He also started reading a book called The Seven Story Mountain, written by a radical Catholic monk named Thomas Merton.
Oh kind of look that up immediately.
Yeah, he was. He was super social justice in his faith. He was really into inter faith understandings. Like all of his like theological books are about like why Catholicism isn't the only way even though it's his way or whatever, how different people from different religions can get along and understand each other and like including not just like the monotheistic religions, but like he writes a lot about I didn't write this in my script, but I think it
was Buddhism, but I don't remember. And he's really into writing fight racism in war, and he has this quote, I really like, the world is full of great criminals with enormous power and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as they're front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies.
Wow.
Yeah, so yeah, what is his name again? His name is Thomas Merton. I haven't read his books yet, but I really like this weird like, yeah, he reads them, Okay, he reads Malcolm as he reads Thomas Merton. And then he gets out of prison and he's like you know we need something like the Black Panthers. Good thing, I'm the leader of a gang. Nice what will he do? Who is to say you certainly can't go read a
book or some article on some website. You have to wait until Wednesday for part two of this epic four part series on the Young Lords. But first, before people wait until Wednesday, they should hear more about you and what you've been working on and how people can find you.
Well.
I actually am working on a new album, so that's really exciting. I just put out an album last year called Life on Earth. My band's called Hooray for the riff Raff. And you can find me on all the social media's, even though Twitter scares the fuck out of me, so I don't really hang out there. I'm like trying to figure out how to exist on the internet without it severely damaging me.
I think we all are.
Yeah, but Instagram, you know all those places you could probably see me on tour.
You should do that definitely.
When are you going on tour?
I'll be on.
Tour in May on the West Coast. I don't know when this will come out, come on in July then, oh cool, So I'll be on tour in May on the West coast and in July, I'll be like through the Midwest, cool and some other places.
Yeah yeah, and you seriously owe it to yourself to go check out Hooray for the riff Raff if you haven't heard it before, or if you came here to listen to this because you like Alinda. Thanks for listening, and I hope you stick around for Wednesday. And you can follow me on the internet at Magpie kill Joy on Twitter, which I also hate, but I'm there.
You're so good at it though, thank you.
All I do is get really sad about it at least once a week, and Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy, where I mostly post pictures of.
My dog as I go hiking. Really cute dog.
Thanks, I like him. And I will see everyone on Wednesday. Farewell, hello, and welcome to wha Acually, Sophie's not here so we can name it whatever we want. Welcome to Sophie Town, the only podcast where all of us are named Sophie and pretend like we live in a town called Sophie Town where only good things happen. No, I love, Yeah that's true. Yeah, Sophie, You've done a really good. I like what you've done with the place. And our audio
editor is Sophie or this is cool. People did cool stuff which you probably knew because this is part two of a series for which I'll be your host, Margaret Sophie Killjoy and with me today is my guest Alinda Sophie Sagata, the one a. Yeah, are you doing a Linda on this day? That's totally different day than last day.
Oh, I'm doing good. I had a snack a slig bar, so I'm feeling great.
I'm here in New Orleans. You know New Orleans also known as Sophie Town, right and yeah, yeah, doing good?
Yeah, excited to talk about one of my favorite topics.
Hell yeah, Sophie, I mean the Young Lord.
Yeah.
Our producer is Ian Sophie. Our theme music was written for us by un woman, and I'm going to drop that bit now. This is part two of our extra cool four parterer on the Young Lord's only the second topic to end up four parter and where we last left our heroes. You've got this guy named Cha Cha who's just been politicized in jail and then he gets out and he's the leader of a gang called the Young Lords. So he puts two to two together and decides to get some shit done. First, he tries to
get shitpedne the normal way. He doesn't immediately be like, hey, the Young Lords now were radical socialists. He forms an activist group. He forms an activist group called the Puerto Rican Progressive Movement. Oh wow, it doesn't get off the ground. No, he's like, this doesn't really work. No one's like really excited to go join. I think this is an important lesson. No one's really going excited to go join the like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah thing that.
And then he's like, do you want to be a become a Young Lord? And people are like absolute.
Yeah, totally yeah, Like our background is crime and our future is the overthrow of capitalism.
Yeah yeah, you were like sign me up. Yeah.
So yeah, he's like, all right, well, I'm a gang leader and I need a bunch of people to try and get some stuff done, and we exist to defend ourselves from white racists. So fuck it. And I will say best as I can tell. Most of the history center on him a little bit too much. He's really great, he's cool, but in all of this, He's not alone.
A few of the other Young Lords are with him from the start of all this change and like are part of all the radicalization and are largely left out of the histories because people kind of they pick a guy, right, and he seems like a great guy to have picked. I got no. You know, it's always worth pointing out the first thing that they did as the new well, they didn't change their name yet. Eventually they're the Young Lord's organization. But twenty of them show up to a meeting.
There's a neighborhood meeting where a bunch of people are talking about gentrifying the neighborhood and like literally those huge trunks of it. So the Young Lords are very polite and calm, they said, politely through the whole thing, and then they point out the lack of Puerto Rican representation in the group making these decisions. And then they trashed the place after sitting very politely. Yeah, they like threw
chairs around. Yeah. I feel like it just like emphasizes the sort of intimidation factor if they're like, oh, interesting, yes, and then smash it up. Then they went home and they studied. They just like sat down and fucking read and they talked to people, and they studied leftist movements and they like did their homework, and in the end they were like, all right, Black Panther Party, that's our model.
And I think that the Black Panther Party, who again I haven't even done episode on yet, but they're like in the center of almost everything we're talking about. So many groups exist because of them, right, And so the Young Lords they put together a ten point program. And if Chascha had been a target for harassment from cops before when he was, you know, a gang leader with a long record, he has twice as much of one. Now he gets stopped and arrested like twice a week.
Oh Jesus.
Everywhere the Young Lords go, the cops are there usually like already, I think, and this is really telling. Anti gang enforcement in the city of Chicago, including a new intelligence unit, started because gangs went political. It was fine when you had racist gangs of Irish and German youth, and then it was like they actually literally all just get city jobs. And then it was like fine ish when you have the newer non white gangs who just do crime. But once they go political.
Then we can arrest you and like you can all fight each.
Other and yeah, yeah, it's like you're staying busy fighting each other.
Yeah. Now when they're politicized, they're fucking scared. Yeah, and the oppression doesn't stop them. They went some of the things that they did in their early days. They defended welfare activist mothers who did a sit in to demand their back payments, like because they weren't getting paid, and so they went to security for them. They formally integrated. There was always apparently a not I don't know I always, but there was a women's auxiliary to the young lords
called the lord Nets. And the women's role in this movement is going to increase over time, and we'll talk about that and when they go tal yeah yeah, and going political is a huge part of it, right. So they formally integrate the women's auxiliary into the main group and then everyone, I believe, including the men, start starts working on offering childcare to their community. They also get together with a black gang to fundraise through community picnics,
teach people about drug safety. They get toys for Christmas for kids, and like food for people's tables, and they're doing mutual aid and they're doing community defense and they're just like doing the shit that makes sixties groups so fucking cool.
And meanwhile the city is like, we have to destroy this violent gang. Yeah exactly who were giving Christmas presents two children?
Yeah, when they were stabbing people in the beach, the cops were like, you know boys. Yeah, there was a there was a community council meeting at a police station about what to do with the Young Lords or whatever. And so three to five hundred people, made many in purple berets, showed up to this community council meeting and then they disrupted it. They hung up signs on the walls with slogans like city law does not allow pigs on the street, and pigs need support centers to keep
them off the street. They started pushing for what gets called or what they called Third World unity, welcoming in black and white members as well if they were working class. So working class people of all races were a to join the Young Lords.
Oh wow, they didn't know that.
Yeah, it's interesting, and when we talk the New York one will have even more information, or I have even more information about the multiracial makeup of the Young Lords. They threw a conference on the matter with Chicago Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton is the keynote speaker for this third world unity concept and trying to get everyone together. And then they joined up with this group. Have you ever I hadn't. Have you ever heard of a group called the Young Patriots?
No?
All right, imagine okay, well, first I'm gonna say, okay, so they form the Rainbow Coalition, that's what they because there's all the different you know, colors of people or whatever. And one of the groups is the Young Patriots, who are a leftist socialist street gang in Chicago who are white Appalachians who use the Confederate battle flag as the flag of their socialist movement. Anyway, can't see a Linda's eyes are like staring.
Just like wait, my brain is bending, you know, and.
I like laughing at them. I'm laughing at how incredibly this doesn't translate to modern politics.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah.
Also I'm just like I was first even like, whoa Appalachian folks in Chicago?
Like that was interesting to me? Yeah.
Well, And that's actually the thing is that they were facing. It's not ethnic oppression, right, but they're facing a specific class oppression that is based on where they're from, right, because they're not just poor white people, but they're poor white Appalachians, and it's a different type of classism that still exists to this day, right, Like, and so they get called Hillbillies. They're poor as fuck, they're iced out of proper white society, and so they're like, all right,
fuck you, Yankee pieces of wasps. Were doing our own thing or whatever. And they work to start interracial working class organizations, to get medical care to children and to end the draft. They tied in their struggle with poor oppressed people everywhere as part of the uprisings around the world. Their party platform specifically spoke out against cultural nationalism, which makes sense, right because they're white people, right, So yeah, you kind of just like can't do a nationalism if
you're white, right in any given context. I mean, if you're Ireland trying to decolonize, as complicated, but that's like literally in Ireland, not some fucking Irish racist gang in Chicago, and like, yeah, they're just like doing all of the right stuffy. They first met the Panthers when they and the Panthers accidentally double booked a church in Lincoln Park to do a talk.
That's really that's like a cute meeting minds, I know.
And so then they just talked about their mutual class interests and anti war interests, right, because this is another thing that's like part of all of us too. You have the Vietnam War going on and right all of us.
I was just thinking that, like we have the draft going on.
My father actually went to Vietnam, so that was like a huge part of my growing.
Up was learning.
It was just learning through his eyes and like his experience as a marine, a Puerto Rican marine in Vietnam when he was super young, and it just like radicalized him, yeah, so much when he was able to make it home, you know.
Yeah, yeah, when I.
Was young, Like my father was very clear with me, you know, elementary school age, just like they put people of color, they put black people and Puerto Ricans on the front lines because they expected us to die and we were totally disposable. Just like that's what I was raised with, you know, was from that perspective.
When I say that rules, I mean that rules that your dad knew that and passed that along, not that it rules that they did that.
Yeah, he was a total dad ass.
But that is like such a big part of like the background of this story that is hard for me to remember. I forget, like, oh yeah, at the same time, you guys were being fucking drafted.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't. There's so many different things that are happening in the late sixties, yeah, that it's hard to keep them all in your head at once and hard to realize that they're all absolutely part of each other. Right, And like you have the young Patriots with their Confederate battle flag, which it only makes sense as a like fuck you to Northerners, right, I mean it does not.
I am not advocating that anyone call themselves patriots or flight. Yeah, the American either the North or the South flag not a good idea, but like yeah, yeah, And and so they they they meet up, right, and they're talking about anti warshit with the Panthers, And from then on, while they continue to fight for white working class, the white working class, they almost never appear in public to speak without Panthers or young Lords around to support them and
to show into racial solidarity. And I suspect that this was like specifically a move if you're a white organizer to be like it's a little bit weird because it's a little bit tokenizing, but it's also a way of being like, you need to know, we are not organizing white people in contrast and against people of color, you know, like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And uh, let's see some of the shit they did by nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy. I'm must skip ahead for them just because I'm doing a little side on the young Patriots. They're taking pages out of the Panther playbook. They organized free breakfast programs, they ran medical clinics, they organized clothing drives, they cop watched, and one of the main things that they did that they got remembered for is they took patient advocacy. And this is gonna time
into young lords later too. They took patient advocacy. Seriously, people who had to go to the doctor in the communities at this like street gang of socialists, like we're taken care of. They would get a Patriot at their door to advocate for them and to come with them to their appointments and shit, whoa yeah, incredible. Yeah, you're like trying to be a shitty classes doctor. And there's this like angry hillbilly who's just.
Like berat Yeah, it's socialists.
Just like you're gonna you're gonna treat him right.
Yeah, wow, especially for like older folks or just like I mean, that's something I always I always knew about, like the Young Lords at least was just like yeah, like very much connection with like older generation.
You know totally and and and a lot of medical work that is like a huge thing that you, particularly in New York, are gonna do. We're gonna be talking about mostly next week.
Yeah.
They ran a medical clinic, the Young Patriots. They ran a medical clinic. This ends up the most famous of all their activities. It started off serving one hundred and fifty people at dental and medical care. Cops fucked with it constantly. They arrested Patriots for trespassing on their own property.
Like.
They fought it all in court. It took forever. Eventually they won and their clinic was back open and it served two thousand people for years, four years. It kept
it up until nineteen seventy three. The Feds fucked with them, basically, and it also fucked with all of the churches that supported both them and the Young Lords, and the whole thing fell apart because of federal oppression, and anyone who's curious can listen to probably last week by the time you all are listening to this episode about the religious radicals and the movement of pacifists that brought down co intel Pro, or at least revealed it. Yeah, they're cool.
There was a I went to the Bronx Museum years ago when I was first learning about the because there was a big exhibit about them, and one wall was just printed out papers of like co intil Pro findings. Yeah, that makes and just like phone recordings, just like spying on people, just like covered an entire.
Wall, which is like a whole other like we're talking about. The draft is a big part of the background of this. It's like constant infiltration, constant more than just infiltration and monitoring, constant fucking with right, you know. Yeah. And so yeah, that's the Young Lords. Sorry, that's the Young Patriots.
Uh.
And that's the Rainbow Coalition. Yeah, the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots. And then there's another Whitish group called Rising Up Angry, who are some of the more radical chunks of the Students for Democratic Society, who are mostly working class greasers from union families.
Cool.
I know, like I want them to show up on scooters or something.
I don't know.
I don't know, but they look cool, and it's funny because I'm not. Again, I haven't like covered the Black Panthers deeply, but for anyone who doesn't have a basic understanding, they're a black power organization that I'm certain we'll talk about more or later. They scared the ever living fuck out of the US government. They were violently repressed through
direct application of force and through cointel. Pro Black Panthers were into black power, by which I mean a declaration of self determination for black people, and it included such ideas as to quote quote from this book The Young Lords by Johanna Fernandez, which is the main source, the best book that I'm able to find about the Young Lords, she says that black panther black power is quote the right to arm self defense against white racist violence, black pride,
and the development of independent black political leadership free from pressures to accommodate the interests of northern white liberals. That's the Rainbow Coalition. Let's talk more about the Lords. By nineteen sixty nine, the Young Lords had their own newspaper which covered all the protests they were up to. It talked about imperialism, It talked about what connected, It connected everything to what was happening in Puerto Rico to what was happening in Vietnam and Africa. It had kind of
an unoriginal name. It was called why l Ylo or Young Lord's Organization. It's to the point, you know.
Yeah, I bet it had great graphic design, I think.
So, I know the New York one. Did I know more about the New York one, which is named after one of your songs, But we'll talk about that later.
Oh yeah.
The paper covered a ton of stuff, including what was going on and their sister struggles like the Panthers. It had a Pig of the Month feature covering a local cop.
Incredible.
I can't figure out why the cops get fucking with him, but you know whatever.
Wow.
And they were all organizing, and there were other organizations they were buds with, like LATTO, the Latin American Defense Organization, and so they provided security for LADDO. It didn't they didn't just like perfectly overnight stop being the doing usual gang shit. It took a while, but their connections in the gang world were really useful to them. One of their own was killed by a cop at a birthday party.
I can't remember the details, but he like like, walks out on this walks out of the house, and CoP's murder him. Right the cop was acquitted. This is going to be shocking to anyone living in twenty twenty three. A cop got away with murdering someone because so much has changed since. Oh god, that's depressing sarcasm.
Uh.
The cop was acquitted. There was a march of thousands, including members of a ton of other gangs with names like the Cannibals and the Health Stompers, and this gang that was Irish, Black and Puerto Rican called the Almighty Harrison Gents, who I believe are still around. Oh really yeah, And I can't like again, I'm not like I tried doing research about the Almighty Harrison Johnsen. It's like I don't have enough context to make useful declarations about what
gangs are up to. I'm not trying to ye. The Young Lords are an example of gangs do good many times, you know, but power power structures are complicated, you know. And this gang unity at this march scared the ever loving piss out of the cops. And I don't know if this is like where the Warriors comes from, right, but like, oh it's true, but the whole like there's more of us than there are cops, can you dig it?
Thing like this is what fucking scares like when the working class realizes that they not only do we have the numbers, but we even literally already sometimes have the organizations and the fighting spirit if it could be pointed in the right direction. Yeah, it's the United It didn't last, but what does last is the cuteness of baby elephants bathing themselves.
Our sponsor, our sponsor.
Yeah, and anything that you hear during this ad break that isn't about baby elephants was a mistake. And you should write to complain to Sophie on Twitter because she loves to hear about how the ads suck and you should tell her. Or you can just press the forward fifteen seconds button a couple of times. It's up to you your choice. Here's some ads, so we're back. I for one, particularly enjoyed the one where it was four
baby elephants and they were bathing each other. That was the best of the ads that I what was your favorite of the ads that we just listened to that were all about baby elephants.
Now, I always love when a mom walks in and starts teaching the ways of elephant nature.
That's like one of them's. Sure if I were to make me cry.
Yeah, that was that may have been the best of the odds that you all just listened to. Yeah, yeah, it'd be really I hope that someday we can just have Well, I guess it's not a visual medium, all right, so the young line.
I was so stoked that wasn't a visual medium. By the way, anything to not be perceived, Yeah.
I know, I understand. Trans Day of Visibility was the other day. I used a picture from two years ago because I was like, I'm not fucking brushing my hair, my god, makeup?
Fuck that you mothers.
Absolutely yeah, trans day of talking to a microphone queer day of Yeah, microphones are great be observed by non strangers. That's always my favorite. But what was very visible was the May fourteenth, nineteen sixty nine, occupation of the McCormick Theological Seminary by the Young Lords in Chicago. This will not be the first time the Young Lord's the last time that the Young Lords take over at church. Basically, just spontaneously during one of the marches for their dead friend.
The McCormick Theological Seminary is part of this urban renewal campaign to bulldoze everyone's houses and so people who don't like that, and I don't know if it's actually related, but I think it's really cute that the other main story I've talked on the show that takes place in
Chicago also centers around a McCormick. It was the McCormick factory in eighteen eighty six that gave us the strike that led to the Haymarket affair, which we talked about in our first ever episode, when immigrant anarchists face down the Chicago police and someone hucked a bomb at them and lots of bad stuff happened. But if you want to hear about nineteenth century labor organizing, go back to our very first episode and you can hear about that.
It's all part of the fight for the eight hour workday, which included bombs and guns. Anyway back in nineteen sixty nine, when they occupied the McCormick Seminary factory, no Theological Seminary instead of the McCormick harvester factory, a bunch of the seminary students joined in, Oh wow, yeah, Like this is a thing that comes up a bunch is that people, I don't know, people are more radical than we give them credit for, like random bystanders sometimes you know, not
always sometimes bysenders. The university conceded to most of their demands, which included shit like when you rebuild, you'd better include parks and affordable housing and a daycare center and a Puerto Rican cultural center and a people's law office. Next, they went on to occupy Armitage Avenue Methodist Church, where they'd been meeting, which declined them to They basically went and were like, hey, we meet here, can we rent
space to do childcare and free food programs? And the Methodist church was like no, And so they're like, are we gonna do it anyway? Though, And when they did it anyway, the minister joined them and was like, yeah, no, I mean I wanted to be able to do it, damn. And the church turned into a center for social services, including a free clinic. I just they just did so much shit. We're like, we're not even halfway.
Yeah, And also just like pushing people to live by their ideals.
Like also, it's like they're pushing the church to be like, this is what you guys are talking about, like helping children and people who need help.
So it's also kind of like trusting.
It's giving them the opportunity of being like, so just join us and live by your ideals.
Actually, you know yeah, And I think that's what a lot of radicals did is they just went up and they're like, yo, you want to like do the thing that you say you want to do. And a ton of them were like, yeah, I want to do that, and a ton of them were like no, I just prefer having a position of power within a structure and using it to make my life thase. And that is that's religion. It's both of those things, you know. Yeah, yeah, okay, But for this next part, we're going to go to
a different part of the country. Have you ever heard of a city called New York City.
I've been there. Oh okay, okay, that's where That's where I was born.
It has a very unoriginal name, I'll just say. But first it was Dutch and it was New Amsterdam. I like doing my little weird history and zoom outs some different places. It was Dutch and it was New Amsterdam. And then the English grabbed it from the Dutch and gave it to the Duke of York, so it became New York. The state is named after the city. Then the Dutch grabbed it back and named it New Orange.
Then England get no exactly, this is my theory. The English got it back, thank god, and changed it to New York. Very rarely am I excited when the English take things. But could you imagine an alternate world where New York was named New Orange. I think New York City would not be an important place.
Absolutely not, although like Oranges are great, yeah, but it doesn't have the same It's definitely not like a tough name.
You can't be like from New Orange. You know, it doesn't have the same No, the York.
I think Newark would be the center of culture of the United States of America instead of New York. Wow, because it's a nicer than New Orange. Yeah, So New York City fine place. I actually really like New York City for as much as I'm like totally a country mouse right now. So New York is fucking amazing.
Yeah, if you're going to do a city, it's like you might as well go to the one.
Yeah, you might as well be like, be a fucking city. Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. I get the advantage of cities where everyone still has a single family homes crammed full of too many people, and you can get nice food around the corner, but those ones you have to drive around.
Yeah yeah.
Being a New Yorker, that definitely is. It's not a part of my experience. I'm terrible driver. Yeah, so I'm stuck in places that I can bike around.
Yeah, which is why you know when Hurry for the riff Raff comes to town, because the tour bus is crashed into the venu every single time. You get a new tour bus every time that's here, like rock and roll thing. Instead of setting the guitar and firet's start away. Yeah, so New York City. The Young Lords start up in New York City too, and this crew starts with very different routes. Well, it gets presented as very different routes.
But I don't want to pitch this because the Chicago branch was started by preteens looking to fight back against local white bullies and racists, and they wound up socialists and communists and shit through that work. The New York branch got started by radical political organizers, mostly communists and socialists m okay, who came out of the gate with that revolution stuff. Right. Most of them were college students, but there were college students from poor neighborhoods, many of
the first of their families to go to college. Most of them were Puerto Rican, though at least one this person was black, and not Puerto Rican black, but African American black.
Okay.
And is this thing where it's like people talk about like the first and their family go to college, as if it's the sort of like kind of upward mobility American dream, like liberally thing or something. But it's it's not a la la la American dream thing. And I don't know if it always is, but it certainly isn't
in this case. Some of the founders of the New York Young Lords were the first wave of people integrating school systems, and they grew They grew up fighting with their fists and community organization against racist abuse from fellow students, from teachers, and from police. They had to fight all of those people. So I would argue that even though they're the college educated communists, they're not actually that different from the Chicago Lords in the end in terms of their roots.
Yeah. Yeah.
In nineteen sixty nine, they heard about the Young Lords through the Black Panthers. They the Black Panthers had an interview with Cha Cha in their newspaper. In it, Chasha was saying that they were a class forward, anti imperialist organization and that was something that they were in a particularly good place to understand as Puerto Ricans. Chasha said, quote, we have all kinds of people, a rainbow of people among Puerto Ricans, and that's why this is a class struggle.
So they'se aspiring New York Lords. They take a road trip to Chicago and they met the Young Lord's organization and they're like, yeah, this is what's up, Like, all right, we're gonna start the New York chapter and the Chicago chapters. Like great, I guess we're the Chicago chapter instead of just the Young Lords, you know WHOA very exciting yeah, And their arrival in New York City was specifically really well timed because the radical scene was in trouble because
of the Panther twenty one frame up. And I've talked about it, like really briefly the show and I'm going to talk about it really briefly again, but still haven't dived into it. Twenty one Black Panthers had just been arrested in New York City. They had been accused of bombing and sniping, of planning to bomb in snipe cop stations. Everyone knows it's a frame up, and as a result, the police had an even worse reputation than usual in
New York. Everyone was found not guilty at trial in nineteen seventy one, in the most expensive and longest trial in New York's history to that point. Under oath, the shitty infiltrators admitted that the violence had been their ideas basically, and Afeni Shakur Tupac, Shakor's mother was one of the defendants. She got the undercovers to admit under oath that they
had betrayed their own community. And if you want to hear more about her, I like doing my little connections to other episodes in the In the Stonewall episode, we can hear more about her because she's one of the Stonewall rioters. Because the jail she was in the Women's House of Detention was across the street from the Stonewall in and they all rioted in solidarity with the queers outside, and or we're all trying to escape and or a bunch of queers themselves.
Yeah wait, this is two bucks mom.
Yeah whoa gay woman who rioted for Stonewall from inside the jail that was on the same street as Stonewall.
Damn No, I I had no idea.
I didn't either until I was working on the Stonewall episode and my friend Hugh Ryan has been a guest before, was like, you need to make sure to include the House of Detention in it. And I was like, I had never even heard no idea that part of the rioters were prisoners, you know, speaking of people I haven't, but I guess I haven't spoken about people who are often invisibilized, but prisoners often invisibilized in struggle. So this is the backdrop for the young lords because the the
police are on their back foot. They're just they've just been deeply embarrassed. They're not as set up to cope with this new threat. But at the same time time, the Black Panthers in in New York and actually kind of across the US by this, but are really fucked right and are like not as well organized anymore because they've just taken this massive blow. So enter the Young Lords.
Some of the founding members were Black Americans, and we talked about this earlier and you had some goods to say about There have been tension between black and Puerto Rican communities in New York. There was a but there's also a decades long history of solidarity, especially around instances of police murder, such as in nineteen sixty four. You have the Harlem Riots, which are remembered as the nineteen sixty four Harlem Riots, which is a terrible name for them.
Not well, okay, this is too long for a name, but it's a more descriptive name. When a white off duty cop murdered a fifteen year old black kid named James Powell, and people were justifiably upset by this. I think it's a racket. Before he was killed, James Powell was part of a small group of black and Puerto Rican students who were being harassed in a act for congregating near a school. And during one fifteenth month, during one fifteen month period ending in early nineteen sixty five,
the nypdad killed nine Puerto Rican children. Because the police are not an institution that is a positive force in our society. I'll just go with that. But don't worry. White people had solidarity too with the cops.
Oh god.
Uh when the mayor tried to pass a really lackluster police review board. I think after this killing. I can't remember, but four thousand signatures against a really lackluster police review board were gathered. The white conservatives went all out on this campaign in order to stop a civilian review board or the fucking police. Oh my god, because nothing ever changes.
They founded the totally legitimate grassroots organization called Citizens Committee against Civilian Review Boards, which had a total of three hundred and seventy billboards, twenty storefronts, and thousands of people door to door canvascene. They advertised in newspapers, TV radio, and the ads would feature like pictures of black and brown teenagers with switchblades and scared white women. Holy shit, yeah, is fucked up? Yeah, and it worked at.
That point too.
That's like a high tech, like fucking media campaign I know at that time period.
Honestly, like I haven't seen yeah, like yeah, like storefronts, I guess that must have been not like how you did it before. There was other more media or whatever, but twenty storefronts where you could go in and I guess like organize and learn against the police being overseen by the people who live in the city. Like it wasn't even like some like a cab campaign, you know, like no, just like we're checking in yeah basically, yeah, yeah, exactly,
Like it's like body cams. That's one of these things where it's like, yeah, I guess it's good in the abstract, but like it's not. It doesn't stop the things, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this is the this is the New York that the Young Lords start in. Right there, white people are being real racist and defending the cops. The cops are being real racist and killing the Puerto Rican children and black kids. And the youngest of these Founding Lords in New York was fourteen. Most of them were college age, but the fourteen year old joined as part of an arts program that helped found the New York City chapter that was like one of the groups that did it.
The founding was an arts arts group. The least cool of the Founding Lords was a guy named Roy Henya, and he was the least cool because he was an undercover cop.
Oh nice right from the beginning. Yeah.
Wow.
Their first public appearance was if you want to pick one place in New York City where you think maybe some like radicals met up. I'm curious whether this will work or not.
Just one place. Yeah, I don't know, like a public library.
No, that would have been a good guess. Tompkins Square Park.
My humble beginning. I know, that's often where I call that. That's my early education.
I think when a Lynda and I met, I was sometimes sleeping in Tompkins Square Park during the day because I hadn't found a squad to live in.
Yeah, they open it early in the morning.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You literally walk around all night, or you go to a party and you hang out a party all night, and then you go to Tompkin's Park and you go to sleep in the park. And that's probably where I mid sung now yeah, yeah, you say look at us now? Is that we said?
Oh no, I said, you take a nice now, yeah, also look at us. Yeah.
So this is where the Young Lords have their first public appearance in New York on July twenty six.
So connected, I know this history.
That's one thing that's cool about New York City. Is you can be like, oh, on the following street and you're like, oh, like a lot of things happened there, you know.
Yeah. Yeah.
On July twenty sixth, nineteen sixty nine, there was a commemoration of the Cuban Revolution organized by a ton of New York City leftists and the Young Lords, and the Young Lords showed up in purple berets, berets berets and black fatigues. Brets would be cute though. Yeah.
They had purple breads, definitely, and.
They had their banner a Cuban flag with an AK forty seven superimposed. They're not subtle.
At all.
Their chairman is a poet who spent some time in prison and came out of community organizer. And his name is Felipe Luciano, a.
Real g I've met him before. Shit really, oh yeah, it was. It was pretty fucking cool.
Yeah. He gave a speech in Tompkins Square Park on July twenty sixth, nineteen sixty nine. And this is their first appearance. Their first action came out not long after, and they called it, well, I'm not going to tell you what they called it, because it wasn't called Products and Services. But that's what we're going to cut to right now, it's products and services, because I don't have usually just to tell everyone how the show runs. Basically,
Sophie is like, do a fucking ad transition? What the fuck that's And here we are without Sophie, lost in the wilderness.
Our fearless leader due the curse that I brought upon this show.
Yeah, we've been things keep happening to all of us, all of the anywhere I had the script, I was like, and it's our second four part. It's because today I had to go through and change it to be our our second four part because this is going to be the first four partter. But we've had to delay multiple times this recording because of courses that we won't talk too much about. But yeah, yeah, but yeah, speaking of cursed objects, buy some gold with reagans based on it.
That'll make you happy, healthier, younger, more attractive. Absolutely nothing says smart financial decisions, like what if we got a crypto ad? Anyway, here's some ads and we'rebeca and so far iHeartRadio hasn't kicked us off for talking shit on all their advertisers. We'll see how long they last. Yeah, it's like I always worry that I'm just doing the thing where it's like by talking shit on them, I'm just like being edgy and then like making and like
more appealing or whatever. I just like to fucking feed my dog.
Yeah.
Like anyway, their first action, the Young Lord's it's not long after their appearance in nineteen sixty nine. They call it the Garbage Offensive, and this is a reference. Yeah, this is like they do a lot of really cool shit.
This is legend.
Yeah fuck yeah cool. It's a reference to the Tet Offensive and when the viet Cong turns some shit around a year earlier in the Vietnam War. So to tie it all into like we hate America and the Imperial government, you know. The the first thing they did was actually
they just went around fucking talk to people. They walked around East Harlem, their own neighborhoods, and they asked people what was wrong, what was on their minds, like, and they decided that the first thing they should do was something about all the garbage that wasn't getting picked up.
There's there were mountains of garbage at the time, Whole abandoned buildings full of garbage, sidewalks full of garbage, and This is because there's a bunch of complicated reasons, but mostly just classism and racism.
The like.
People didn't the garbage collectors just would ignore those neighborhoods. They didn't bother putting in enough garbage cans at the time, they didn't even use garbage bags in the garbage cans, so the whole garbage can to get picked up, and so garbage goes everywhere. And lots of reasons, but classessm and racism at the core of it. So they go
to the sanitation department. They try. I love how like radicals like, You're always like they just started off blowing people up, and you're like, no, they started off by they went to the sanitation department and we're like, can we have some trash bags and brooms? And the sanitation department said, well, what if we give you a bunch of racial slurs instead?
Wow, really throwing them a curveball.
I thine, like, can you just give us some bags and brooms so you can clean our neighborhood.
And they're like, no, we're gonna yell racist shit at you because we're to racists. Yeah, people, I feel like white people sometimes think that racism is more subtle than it is, you know. Yeah, so they stole a bunch of brooms from them getting called racist. That's as best as I can tell either way. About thirty five young lords started literally just keeping the streets of East Harlem
clean while wearing their uniforms every Sunday. But this wasn't quite the This is like worth trying, but this still wasn't quite the move. They couldn't single handedly do it. There's just thirty five of them, and it's just sort of volunteerism. Doing that work put them in the public eye, and it put them in conversation with people who mostly assumed they were there with the government or some church. Okay, they got some recruits, but they didn't get a mass
of them, and it also didn't clean the streets. It wasn't enough. So they stepped it up to doing the thing. That's the epic thing. Yeah, they gathered a ton of trash. If you have any like versions of the story, I'll love to hear them, because it's like I know about this from books. You know, they gathered it.
Well from books?
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Okay, they gathered a ton of trash from empty lots, including old mattresses and couches and such, took it over to Third Avenue, which is a you know avenue that was used by the rich to move across Manhattan, and dumped it into the street. And then they did this a bunch on various thoroughfairs, just over and over again. They did it daily for months.
Heany, God, I didn't know that.
Oh yes, he's heard like the lore as if it was like this one event, which of course it wasn't.
Ye think about it.
There is one that is the one event, but all of this happens first to build up to it, right, Okay, Yeah, for months they just dumped trash daily in the middle of fucking Third Ave or any other avenue that uh like law abiding white people or whatever you use.
Like inconveniences rich people. Basically.
Yeah, and this is a more effective tactic than the volunteerism on almost every metric the city was for to deal with the garbage because it was blocking the streets that white people used. Hundreds of people started joining in, creating the kind of spaces where people get to know each other and hang out because the social fabric has been disrupted. Yeah, and the young lords would lead impromptu discussions and let people air out their grievances and these
like temporary autonomous zones that were being created. Wow, and then when the cops came, they just take off their berets and take off and running and they never got caught. Plus, the other important metric which to judge actions is did you get to build barricades in the middle of the street, And the answer was yes, and it's always fun. On August seventeenth, nineteen sixty nine, they figured out how to have even more fun. What do you think is better than a barricade in the middle of a street?
Setting the barricade on fire? Yes, osctly, So.
They called for a mass action. Loads of people did this particular garbage action and then somehow it's spontaneously caught fire after some people from the neighborhood poured gas hut and lit it with a match. Damn, And the whole next day there's a six block radius of East Harlem that was barricaded and people were partying. And it's interesting too, right because you have this like the riots are like
trashing their neighborhoods blah blah blah blah blah thing. Yeah, one of the things they were doing is flipping over cars. And the thing is they were flipping over all the abandoned cars because the city used to have no means in place to deal with abandoned cars, so they just would wind up in poor neighborhoods. Yeah, yeah, totally and be like, well, let the fucking poor brown people deal with it, fuck them, you know.
Yeah.
So they were like, all right, let's flip over all these fucking abandoned cars that got abandoned here, you know. And so the cops declared it a riot, even though it seems like a block party to me, and they sent helicopters me. While the young lords are giving talks about how to tie sanitation issues into larger systemic problems, they had a press release with a list of demands, which included stuff like, put these are wild demands, these
are absolute terrorists. Put trash cans on our streets and pick up the trash, and not have only white sanitation workers, and also give the sanitation workers a raise. Yeah they're cool. Yeah, and also no more of this weird shit where for a while, in order to get your trash picked up you had to bribe the workers. Oh wow, So that was their demands.
May I chime in and is this when Quang Gonzalez was the press secretary.
Oh, I don't know. I kind of hardly didn't go with names on a lot of this, so please tell.
Me, Well, Huang Gonzalez of democracy now was I know they're like head of press, like was the person that spoke to the press.
So I'm wondering if he was around for this action if it was later on.
You know what's funny is because of all the delays, I wrote this script several months ago, and I don't remember whether he's someone that someone told me about after I finished the script or if he's in here. So there's a chance because I do talk about some of the press stuff a little bit later. The answer is I don't know.
Yeah he was there for the big famous stuff that we're going to get to as well.
Yeah cool, coolah, But just incredible that they had like this organization and they were like, all right, we have our demands. They were also like very bold but also very reasonable, like not even reasonable, and just like, oh you're being reasonable. You're not asking for the oppressive forces, like for too much stuff. It's just like this would make our lives better. And also it's.
Bold, yeah, totally yeah, the radical demand of what if there were garbage cans on the street and then the garbage can picker it like took it out? No it, I love it.
I love it.
And and the fact that it's a radical demand just shows us so much about what's happening, you know, the all white sanitation workers. It's actually this funny conflict, Like I have a generally positive impression of unions, right, but unions are not always inherently good or often do bad things. And in this case, it was the Italian American Sanitation Union, which was very racist, okay, and was like holding control over who got to be a garbage or sanitation worker.
They didn't win most of their demands in this particular go of it, but they won nonetheless. They won in two ways. First, they showed themselves in other people that collective direct action is an incredibly effective method of accomplishing change. They got rid of a ton of trash because they fucking just got rid of it. And two, they fundamentally changed how sanitation worked in New York City.
Wow.
Sanitation became a hot topic issue in the mayoral race which was happening that year. And so each side was one upping the other about how they were going to get the trash pickup to be good in the city. Interesting, and the city changed how it did trash. This is when they started putting plastic bags into the trash cans, and dumping schedules were changed, mechanics were put on standby
to fixed trucks. In three years, the city went from meeting seventy seven percent of its trash pickup per day to ninety seven point eight percent of the trash pickup per day.
Wow, that's incredible.
Direct action gets the fucking goods, Like seriously, and.
Not to mention like what I've said before about like reaching out to older generations, like well, from what I've read about this event, a major thing was.
That older folks were like, we trust you because you're actually listening to us, you know.
Yeah, And it became a thing of like we we believe that you young, you know, like radical kids are actually caring about what we want as well.
And I just think that's really powerful.
Yeah, that is such a good point. And the fact that the first thing they did was a listening project. They went and they were like, yo, what's up. What makes your life harden. You know, what can we do something about instead of like, I feel like it's really easy as a radical to be like I care about this, so I'm gonna go do.
This, you know, yeah, or I think this would be good for you, you know.
Yeah, that's where it's real bad. Yeah yeah. So yeah, uh, they won, not completely. They changed the face of the city by a combination of organized and spontaneous direct action, which I think also rules right because it wasn't entirely spontaneous. They organized that event right, like, you know, And they also tripled or quadrupled size in a matter of weeks because they were getting shit fucking done.
Damn.
And what are they gonna do with all those people? Find out next Monday? That's my cliffhanger. Yeah, but what else people should find out about is you and what you've been working on and how people can find you.
Well, I have a band.
I play music and my band's called Horry for the riff Raff and we will be on tour the month of May on the West Coast and in July, and you can find me on Instagram. I don't really I lurk on Twitter, and yeah, I'll be around. I just and I'm working on some new music.
So that's great.
Yeah. Okay, wait, can I ask you a question about your music?
Yeah?
So your music has been primarily folk and then you put out a song called Hungry Ghosts.
Is that it? Oh? Yes?
Did a bunch of people like did all the white hifsters get mad at you over this?
No?
I told me, oh no, Now I feel really guilty having brought it up, and please cut that entire thing out. You cut this out? Okay, fine, okay, fine, No.
I can take it. I can take it.
Okay. There's a dance song that Alinda has done. It's amazing. It's called Hungry ghost and it's this queer love music video about being kind of thirsty after a breakup. That's the best I can tell. Or maybe that was my interpretation because of where it is your interpretation, yeah, all right. And the comments on YouTube at least when the song came out, I don't know what year came out. Time is No, they were mad that you had moved away from folk music.
Oh, this is my favorite thing. It's my favorite thing. I will say.
Mostly I find that is older British gentlemen. Yeah, so it really makes me happy. Yeah, it's like the one time I am a troll. Like I definitely don't. I don't really find myself feeling very truly, but when it comes to that, I'm very.
Like, yes, so good.
Yeah, no, I like it certainly didn't affect your like you know, it was really fun. Yeah, like people were still very excited about your music. But I just had this moment. I was like, oh, is this the like Bob Dylan goes electric moment for a.
Little Absolutely no. But now I'm back. I'm back to like the like whatever. I'm not definitely not in.
A mainstream music world, but I feel like the music industry has beaten me down enough that I'm like, I just want my me and my guitar are going to hit the road.
I don't want all this gear that's legit. Yeah okay, well wait, what's the song about to you? I'm the for the listeners who are still listening.
I mean, most of my songs, like especially like kind of like songs like that. I was I don't know what I would call like heart not heartbroken song, Well yeah, heartbroken socks actually about my family TMI, okay, but a lot of that that song was a lot about like running away and being like and yeah, like literally, it's not even poetic.
It's like I was like a ghost to my family. And I was also very hungry. Okay, okay, so yeah that is I love I Love breakup interpretation.
Yeah no, yeah, it just seemed like a thirsty song, like like well, also the video, the video that said I think that's yeah, I didn't. I didn't pull that out of nowhere. Well, if you want to hear more about the Young Lords, you all can check in next Monday and next Wednesday when we talk even more about all the amazing shit they did, because we're just getting started and I will talk to you all soon.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast