Hello, I'm out of jokes to start episodes with. This is cool people did cool stuff, which kind of sounds like a joke name for a podcast anyway, but I rather like it. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me today on this Journey is a Linda Segata.
How are you doing good? I just said a snack?
Hell yeah, and you're an hour wiser than last time.
Yeah, totally.
Our producer is Sophie. Sophie, how are you?
How are you? Yeah?
Compared to like toothpain recording, antibiotics, antibiotics recording is a breeze.
Yeah, I feel that as somebody who also is on anbiotics.
Yeah. This podcast brought to you by a Max of Sillan. Yeah. Fish antibiotics legal, but not for human This week I couldn't hear out of my hey right here.
This week I mostly can. It's great.
Yeah. To be clear, I don't believe either of us are in fishing antibiotics, and I do not recommend them. Nope, anyway, that's not even for legal reasons. I just feel guilty when I accidentally make a joke about bad advice. Our audio engineers Ian Hi Ian, Everyone say Hi Ian. That being including you listening to your headphones in a public place. I want you to say Hi, Ian. God hates a coward. Say it all right, Ian. You're exempt from having to say Hi Ian unless you want to. Our music was
written for us by un woman. And today we're talking about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican socialist organization that is kicking ass and taking names in New York City in nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy, they've just taken over a Methodist church and turned it into the People's Church for eleven days, which I said thirteen last time because I wasn't looking at the script and I was coming up with numbers and I came up with the wrong one.
They got a lot done for eleven days.
I know, there's like multiple festivals of the Oppress that they managed to throw in eleven days.
Totally.
Could you imagine, like I would take more than eleven days to organize a festival the Oppressed? Right now?
Oh yeah, good year?
Yeah totally, Like all right, we're getting ready for twenty twenty fives Festival the Oppressed.
Totally.
Everyone got to check their schedules. So this action got them national attention and support and their membership soared especially and it brought in again more women. More than six hundred new members came on. And this is an official membership organization as compared to some other things. Right, Okay. They would take Puerto Rican people, and they would take both non Puerto Rican black people and non Puerto Rican
LATINX folks from their neighborhoods. Overall, they skewed demographically after Puerto Rican and English speaking at this point, no value judgment, and that that's just what their demographics were. Yeah, I think it. Whatever. They'd already opened a Newark, New Jersey chapter by this point, and soon they opened some in the South Bronx, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Boston, the Lower East Side, and Philly. They lived communally. They ate free meals at dining halls. They had a whole building.
Now oh wow.
Yeah, women and men lived together and organized together and threw down together. And the women worked hard to fight chauvinism in the movement. They would specifically, this is the thing I didn't known to I researched this. They would call people out as male Chauvenes's pigs. And it's one of the first uses of that phrase, male Chauvenes's pig. And something I hadn't realized is that the men men are pigs. Rhetoric within feminism doesn't come out of calling
men animals. Like it's not directly calling them the pig, the animal. It's that since the Black Panthers has started calling cops pigs, they're calling men cops when the right Wow.
Yeah yeah, they're saying you're being a cop right now. Yeah, Like that makes a lot more. It just like it rings it rings well with me.
Yeah, be like you are the oppressor right now. You are pressing, and it probably fucking stung more than being like because when you call men pigs, you're like, oh, you're a pig, You're you're gross and being overly sexual or whatever. Men are often like, yeah, I am, that's just the way we are.
Baby, totally right, broachet.
As compared to being like, you are acting like a police officer, yeah, you know, which is not a nice thing to be called. And that helps get men get their shit together, as does a woman's caucus, as does an action that did not come up from my research, but you brought up Okay, but.
Then I couldn't I researched it online. I couldn't find it online.
But I found a little bit claiming you did. Yeah, but only a little bit, like only a single reference, so you should say what you okay.
I land this when I went to the Bronx Museum and they had an exhibit all about the Young Lords and it was written in their paper that the women had gotten together and they decided if their demands would not be met where they were able to carry firearms. Although you're saying that they didn't really care.
Well some people, so I know, I know, it's like it's messy. I think that they must have sometimes or something, but okay.
And be treated as comrades instead of servants, and you know, like the way that traditionally their families taught them to treat women. There would be a sex strike. And you know this is also acting as if like the majority were straight, but that men would not be able to receive sex anymore from women until they got their shit together.
Yeah, probably effective.
I think is really cool. Yeah, And I don't know if it went down for a long time or if it was put into a fact, but it was definitely printed in the paper. It was definitely like warm, you've been warmed. This is how it seemed in the paper.
So the thing I ran across when I when I did more research after you told me this, is that I ran across like one line that was like in nineteen seventy the women had a sex strike. Okay, but I I don't entirely know. And actually it's interesting. I would trust well, I would trust Polente more than I would trust a random article that I read, yeah something,
or even of history book. And so the thing about firearms is really interesting to me because I there is going to be a point in the script when they kind of take up arms, right, and all these other times they're like rolling around in nunchucks. But I bet you that there were times in which they were armed and that just wasn't like fitting the narrative of the way that people want to talk about things. And like, so I don't know, you know.
Or perhaps it was like education and how to use firearms. Yeah, i'd have been the vibe. Like, so I learned that from when I went to the museum. But a lot of what I've learned is from a book called Palante that I encourage people to get. It's I have here, but anyone's going to see It's called voices and photographs of the Young Lords, and it's a lot of interviews and also like little you know essays that were written
in the newspaper. So cool. And one of the things that I read was talking about how they believed that how women members wanted to learn how to use firearms and not be treated like they weren't warriors.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so so they're doing all this after the church, their numbers were up. Their numbers became about thirty five to forty percent women, and there were numerous openly gay members, and gay members
had their own caucus as well. The Black Panthers paved their way on that one, openly stating their allegiance with the gay rights movement and specifically the Gay Liberation Front that had grown up to the Stonewall Uprising, which yes, you can hear about on our episode about the Stonewall Uprising. And in fact, the Young Lords provided a personal guard to Sylvia Rivera, the Transit, one of the trans heroes from Stonewall, when she was facing death threats. And this is.
Also half Puerto Rican.
Oh yeah, it's right.
Just wanted to give her a shout out.
No, yeah, fucking totally and like, and so I will say that many young lords refused the assignment because they like were transphobic and didn't understand what the fuck was up and they were like freaked out. There's still a long way to go. But other ones accepted it and were Sylvia Rivera's personal bodyguard were young lords, and that fucking rules. Yeah, people with jobs gave up more than
half their salaries for the group. Because it sounds a little bit culty at this point, no one My theory is, no one ever gets anything done without getting a little bit close to the cult line. You shouldn't cross the cult line, you know.
Ah, But.
If the cult line isn't even in sight, you might not be creating a community. It's real messy.
Ah, interesting, Okay.
One of the cultier things that they did is they did that MAOIs self criticism thing, where you're supposed to like stand up and say all the stuff you did wrong to the whole crowd.
Oh, I've never heard of this before.
It's it was a big part of like like the cultural revolution in China, which I don't know as much about as I would like to. This like MAOIs self criticism thing, And what's interesting Actually, if you listen to the podcast Behind the Bassards, they talk about a lot of cults, and one of the things that comes up a lot is not MAOIs self criticism, but is this like stand up at a circle and admit why you're like bad and fall apart from like the group's rules
or whatever. Is like a way you encourage group thinking, and it is, from my point of view bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, And anyone who failed to do this was all the liberal. This is something that like I feel like liberals don't quite always realize, is that, like the left wing also calls liberals liberals in a negative way, you know, like every now and then I'll say something's like liberal and people like fuck you, right winger, and I'm like what. Oh, it's during this period of growth that you start seeing the cracks that are later going to fuck it up.
At least by the convenient narrative that I'm drawing and have read in other sources, the New York Lords were given full autonomy by the quote Central Committee of Chicago, right, because it still had started in Chicago, even it's bigger in New York. But New York is pretty sure that they should be the Central Committee and that the chapter shouldn't shouldn't have full autonomy, that the New York chapter should be in charge of all the other chapters, and
that more discipline was needed. And also the Chicago newspaper wasn't coming out regularly enough. What are you all doing?
You better get on that. So after starts getting kind of controlling, m h. And then another thing to understand about their politics, and I try to avoid, like, let's talk about Marx, right, but along with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords were a break from traditional Marxism in that they identified the lump and proletariat as the revolutionary subject, which means that I have to break down really quickly Marx's ideas about classes in which you have the proletariat,
who are industrial workers in the city, they all and Marx thinks that these are the beasnis, They're the best. Everyone else sucks according to Marx. Right, then you got the bourgeoisie, a class whom no one who is alive can spell correctly, and yeah they are I still bow urgy.
Oh my god, I thank you spell check.
Yeah. Yeah. It took me a very long time to wrap my head around hierarchy.
More importantly, thanks talk to speech talk to text speech apps for word.
Two kids fell, Oh that's clever. Yeah, bougeoisive.
Think about it.
The bourgeoisie are the owning class. They don't work for a living. This is their distinguishing characteristic. Instead, they own stuff for a living. Definition of capitalism in this case being roughly the access to capital being how you make money rather than work. Right. And then you've got two other weird classes. You have the petty bourgeoisie, who are like the small business owners. They're not running the show, but their relationship to capital is different from that of
a worker. Marxists generally don't like them. And then you have the lump and proletariat, who are objectively the coolest. Marx does not agree by this with this. These are the unemployed and the thieves and the beggars, and the people whose work is illegal like sex workers, the criminal class, and Marx doesn't like them, right, but the young lords and the black panthers do. Personally. I like to think that Marxist classes are like he's writing a role playing game.
Instead of paladins and wizards, you have petty bourgeoisie and the lump and proletariat and shit and so from this point of view, we clearly need everyone. Maybe not the regular bourgeoisie, I don't know, but you just clearly you can't have a party of only thieves. You're only wizards. It's not as much fun. There's my class humanity statement of Oh god. Anyway, the Black Panthers like the lump and proletariat. The Young Lords like them. The New York
Young Lords claim to like them. But part of what they're mad at Chicago about because the Chicago clearly comes out of them. They are they come from the criminal class. The Young Lord comes. This was not a bunch of workers sitting around being like, man, I don't like how the boss is treating me. You like how the boss is treating me. It's a bunch of car thieves who are like, let's stand up against racism and try and
get everyone some health care. Yeah, And the New York Lords don't quite have quite the same background as relates to that, and so part of why they're mad at Chicago is that Chicago is still too criminal and gang like and they're not good proper revolutionaries. So by May nineteen seventy they sever ties from the Young Lord's organization of Chicago and they become the Young Lord's Party. It is very likely that the split was orchestrated by co
Intel Pro, the counterintelligence program of the FBI. Oh wow, it was almost certainly encouraged by them. The disagreements existed, but co Intel Pro existed to make those disagreements grow. Right back in Chicago, Cha Cha is taking it hard. He was close friends with Fred Hampton, who had just been murdered, and now he's getting told he's too gangster for the group. He turned from a gang into an organization. But he keeps it civil and no fights breakout between
the cities. So it's a break but it's not a war, right, Okay. But they've got all these political things brewing. There's all of these fractures that are starting to form. It doesn't stop them from doing really cool shit. One of the cool things they do is they get into a fight
with a long standing friend of the podcast Tuberculosis. For anyone who's just learning, now, what happened when I started making this podcast is I started reading a lot more history books, and I started learning that everyone dies of tuberculosis. That's just how you die.
Everyone.
If you're in a history book, you either get killed by the state or you get killed by tuberculosis.
You forgot the third or your lover. What there's tuberculosis the government or your lover.
Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
That's the trifecta. There's no other way.
No, I can't see how hells I could die as long as it's not some combo move.
Oh, you'd be living a really weird life.
That the infiltrators like coffee into handkerchiefs and.
Yeah, yeah, I don't know about that government thing that seems that seems uh not not not for cause for you.
Yeah, no, I wouldn't be.
It would be very far from that.
My plan is to not be killed by any of these things.
Yeah.
So tuberculosis or TB as it's called by its friend friends, or consumption when it's out of the Goth night. We talked about this in our Alan Hart episode. The first ever known transman to receive gender affirming surgery saved millions of lives by revolutionizing the way that public screening was done for tuberculosis decades before today's story, specifically by using X rays to screen ahead of time. What is TB. Well,
it's a bacterial infection. It's just around latently. Sometimes it pops up with symptoms, and shit, it kills about half of its victims if you actually get the symptoms. For those keeping track at home, that's about a five percent mortality rate overall, which is brutally high. Today we have antibiotics and no one dies of it anymore. Just kidding. It kills a lot of people still, mostly in other parts of the world. It killed one point five million
people in twenty twenty. It is the number one deadliest infectious disease after COVID nineteen. It's the number one preventable infectious disease, preventable with vaccines, treatment with antibiotics, and screening, things like that. So everyone who dies of it is murdered by capitalism from my point of view, because you don't have to die from it except for access to care. So the young Lords they go to war against two of the biggest enemies of the show, capitalism and fucking tuberculosis.
Let's go. Yeah, the real problem in the poorer areas of New York City thanks to stale air and overcrowding and lack of access to screening. So in addition to door to door lead poisoning tests, they start testing people for TB, which involves an X ray machine. So they send a petition around and it gets them use of one machine, but it's a stationary machine. They want a
mobile unit. They want like a van with an X ray machine in it, like the X ray van that goes around the city already, but is inaccessible to poor people of color. One book I read says it was inaccessible because it was it operated from twelve to six pm and didn't accommodate working people's schedules. But the guy who stole the van, I listened to an interview with him. Oh, spoiler alert, steal the van. We'll get to that. Yeah. It's like I was like, did we skip chapter?
What's happening.
We'll get to that. The guy who steals the van later in the story, he says in an interview that it was inaccessible because it only went to white neighborhoods, And that feels a little bit more.
Truth, once again, giving a shout out to the thief the thief class.
Yeah. Yeah, So on June seventeenth and nineteen seventy, they steal the van, They unfurl a Puerto Rican flag on it, and they drive it off. They tipped off the press ahead of time to make sure everyone saw them steal this van. People don't do like crime like they used to for better and worse. Yeah, they parked it. They're really subtle. They parked it across the street from their
office and then announced free testing for everyone. And I think the texts who worked in the van were like entirely fine with it.
They're just like, whow cool, this is the coolest thing that's happened to me. Ever, I know.
They'd be like, I'm so bored and now I'm part of some like crazy shit on the news and I still just get to help people for a living here.
Yeah, totally.
Within hours of stealing the van, they won the director of health of the area agreed to let them keep the van and run it on the city's dime twelve hours a day every day.
Wow.
The first day they tested hundreds of people. Yeah, and around that time, well before we move them to the South Bronx, we should move everyone to these killer deals about stuff, job opportunities. You could go become an Irish cup h so many options here. Listen to these options. Don't press the forward fifteen seconds button that has no influence on anything from my point of view. Here's some ads, and we're back from those enlightening ads. I try to
come up with something clever, but I got nothing. So I'll just tell you about when they moved to the South Bronx because there's yet another health epidemic for them to deal with, because they really just fucking did it all. Like I can't say.
Also, like the number of issues that this community was facing, like as it just like really boggles my mind being like, wow, I grew up in that city. Yeah, and like these are all people like my parents' age, you know.
Yeah, your parents' age, Like people like talk about lead poisoning in tuberculosis and.
Streets and for sure, Yeah, and a lot of like how the Bronx was burning, you know, a lot of like faulty electricity and just you know, like a lot of issues like that.
For sure, is that what that was the Bronx learning because of faulty electricity, there.
Was like a lot of safety hazards, but also a lot of like some lords that were setting you know, just like wedding, Yeah, their buildings burner being the reason why their buildings were burning. Yeah, Yeah, So there was a lot of my family definitely talked a lot about these issues.
Okay, I don't know whether you want to say this in error. Is your family from East Harlem or is it from South Bronx, or is it.
Somewhere They're actually from Chelsea? Ok yeah, they grew up in the Chelsea projects. Okay, you know they were born My dad was born and my aunt was born in Puerto Rico, but came over when they were very young. My grandfather came over and was like working at first and then was able to pay for everybody to come cool.
Yeah, yeah, I hadn't as a white outsider in New York City, I hadn't realized the degree to which Puerto Rican City shaped the city in all different parts of the city, you know, and like the Lower east Side like doesn't even really necessarily come out much in the story, even though they had a young Lords had a chapter in the Lower east Side, even though that was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, you know, yeah at that point, which heavily influences all of the like hippie culture stuff that
was happening in that area.
Oh totally. Yeah. Like talking to my dad when I would mention like hanging out on the Lower east Side or Tompkins Group Park or squatting or anything you know. To him, he was just like, oh yeah, me and my friends like did all that shit, but we were cooler than.
Probably he was right, like, I'm just like, yeah, but.
You know, you think about the New Aurekan, the New Erekan Poets Cafe, like that's in the Lower east Side still. I don't know how, but I'm so glad that it's still with us. Yeah, and that was born out of this movement you.
Know, Yeah, is New York in a name of an identity for New York Puerto Ricans? Is that the Yes?
So a lot of the people that you're talking about, who are you know, joining the Young Lords at this point, who don't speak Spanish for example, Like that would be a really great representation of like a new Eurekan, although of course there are New Eurekans that do, but it's like a very specific like doesn't have extremely strong ties to the island. Like even my dad, who was born in Puerto Rico, felt like he wasn't Puerto Rican enough,
and then also he was an outsider in his own city. Okay, so it's like they you know, this idea that you don't quite fit into anything because you're always a little bit of an outsider. So New Eurekan was born.
Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like the diasporic identity is like this thing that often grows in New York or at least I know that, like the diasporic identity of like Jews, Jewish people like grew in New York City in a lot of ways as an identity that was separate from anything else. It was like, this is the diasporas, like who we are. I don't know whether diaspera's are all that people use in this context or not.
Oh definitely, okay, yeah. Yeah. And also there's a lot of like longing for like you know, when you talked about how the Young Words were teaching Puerto Rican history, like that was something that was I mean to this day, it's so hidden from anybody who is Puerto Rican or New Eurekan, Like just this feeling that you come from a place that is so foreign to you and you want to learn about it, but it's been hidden or kept away.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like because America has this like public school systems has this like one monolithic educational idea of what we teach people, you know, and it's just like, rather than teach people Puerto Rican history, we teach people about like Paul Revere or whatever the fuck, you know. Like, yeah, and it's just interesting because like a really high percentage of people who live in the United States are not descended from the Revolutionary war fighters, you know, yeah, or
have at least other just whatever. Anyway, Yeah, I'm I guess I should start a podcast where I talk about history that hasn't talked about as much. So we want to help me do that.
This entire podcast is just propaganda, and it's you just advertising for your own show, on your own show.
Incredible. Self promotion is awesome. I haven't worked the name of my book and any of these scripts. I'm very proud of that. Okay, so they've just stolen a van. That makes it very like not much happened. They just changed the way.
I just love how much they like play chicken with the city. It's like, yeah, of course, we could like go to jail for a really long time for a grand theft auto or something, or maybe they'll just give us what we want.
I know, I know, I can't imagine any of this working. Then it keeps working.
Yeah.
Yeah, So they go to South Bronx, or rather a branch opens in the South Bronx, And I don't know how many individuals are specifically moving, right, And there's a problem that needs to be dealt with in South Bronx heroin. The state wasn't doing a very good job of helping people who are addicted. Instead, it criminalized people. The South Bronx and Spring nineteen seventy had the highest heroin addiction
rate in the world. Fifteen percent of people who lived there were addicted to heroin, according to one number I heard. Other numbers that I heard included the South Bronx had a mortality rate fifty percent higher than the rest of the country, syphilis and gonorrhea six and four times the national average, and overdose was the leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults.
Oh wow, And.
This is the kind of thing that we see reflected more later in the opioid crisis on a wider scale. Right, So the first thing that the Young Lords did, They're like, all right, we're gonna deal with heroin addiction. That's what our community needs, that's what we're gonna do. They got an apartment, they cleaned it up nice, and they started screening drug users for commitment to sobriety. And then two young lords would keep watch over They just set up
a detox center just or a cold Turkey center. Really, this is their first first attempt. Two young lords would keep watch over the detoxing people for twenty four hours a day and help them quit cold turkey. Then each person in recovery was assigned a mentor who was available to them twenty four hours a day for the next six months.
Yeah.
They also robbed drug dealers and scared them off the block, which got the mafia mad at them, but they somehow had enough power that they didn't get any No one got killed as a result of this that I'm aware of.
This is so wild to me.
Yeah, you know, Yeah, I keeps.
Waiting for, like, when is someone going to get assassinated by one of the many powerful forces who don't want change to happen.
I I am not aware of it happening. Yeah, I like and I one of the things that often underlies a lot of history that doesn't get left in like, is people working with the mafia or like all these different radicals like working with different power structures, right, and that's like often left out because it's not as like sexy or it's criminal or whatever. Right, So probably they're doing something that is making the mafia not attack them. But I believe the mafia is mad at them, So
I believe that that something is not working with the mafia. Okay, if I were to guess, and I expect I'm wrong, it probably is just literally like we are a scary and there's a lot of us, and we are tied in with the panthers, and we are tied in with them up against the wall motherfuckers, and yeah, yeah, the city is full of angry revolutionaries. That's my best guess.
But I don't Yeah, you know, I know it. Around the same time, for example, the up against wall motherfuckers are like scaring off mafia hits by having more guns
than the people trying to kill them, you know. But yeah, so they're robbing drug dealers and scaring them off the block, which is also really hard to morally understand in a situation that predates the War on drugs, right because right now, during the War on drugs, when people talk about like, oh, we're gonna like, go fuck up all the drug dealers. You're like, oh, you're gonna go fuck up drug users who are like fucked by society. Congratulations, you're the same
as the fucking war on drugs. Yeah, but when we're not in that context, I don't fucking know. This is like straight up, I don't know, you know. Yeah, but the cold Turkey approach wasn't gonna work with everyone. The medical problems that people are facing were bigger than just heroin, so they needed something more. They needed something bigger, like a hospital. The South Bronx had won hospital. Lincoln Hospital was built in eighteen ninety eight, the same year that
the US stole Puerto Rico from the Spanish. This is the place that I was saying. It's called the butcher shop. It's the wrong leg amputated whoops shop with lead paint for the children to eat. And it's the kind of place where the er doesn't do triage. There's no translators
on staff, no accommodations for non English speaking patients. But the best part, and this is not sarcasm, the actual good part was that some reformers had set up a fairly groundbreaking mental health clinic there that emphasized talk therapy and actually hearing patients out. Oh wow, so it's kind of a battleground spot already. In March nineteen sixty nine, before the Lords arrived, the Lords did a lot, and they deserve it a ton of the credit. But by
tying into existing infrastructures and working with other groups. In March nineteen sixty nine, the Mental Health clinic had taken itself over. The workers, mostly people of color, had seized the building and kicked out the director and his upper staff. Yeah. The doctors, including white doctors, which is most of them this is the late sixties, supported the action and kept working and they held it for three days, and the
Black Panthers ran security and brought supporters. This is before the Panther twenty one trial took the wind out of the New York City Panthers.
Just would like to say that I am really loving these stories of like doctors standing with their staff and like standing up to administration and their bosses. It's really I encourage all the doctors out there who might be listening to do that, Yeah, as we really need it.
Yeah, this particular takeover was when the city I don't even think the mystery is the hospital. The city was like any doctors who practice here will lose their licenses. But the action did get a bunch of workers have been fired, and it got the fired workers on fired and the director was transferred out. So it was like successful to some degree. Right by nineteen seventy some of the workers there were young lords themselves, and some of these workers set up a complaint table for workers and
patients in the er. Twelve hours a day they were there with this table. On weekends they were there twenty four hours a day, wow. And they kept getting kicked out, and they kept coming right back in. There's like interviewsing in here about like the people like kind of being friends with the security guards, like I'm kicking you out again, and they're like I'm going to be right back in and like all right, have fun, you know. So they
set up this complaint table. They get two thousand complaints in a month, wow, and they just start acting on them like all the ones that they can. They just direct action, get the goods and all privacy screens in the bathrooms. They move trash off the street outside and into the director's office because this is what you do with trash.
WHOA.
Yeah, the medical staff who were part of this organization. I think this is atrun, but I'm not. I'm not one hundred percent certain the larger organization that's doing this. The medical staff just start doing triage in the er, like when they're not at work. They're just like, we're triaging. Fuck this an er needs triage, which I did not learn this word until I was an adult. Triage is when you determine which patients are the most injured and
who needs medical care most immediately. So they put pressure on administration for better care for the workers, but there was a wall. They couldn't get anything systemic fixed. They could only like band aids. People are like, oh, it's just a band aid. Like band aids are great, they stop bleeding, you can keep infection out, like yeah, but they don't address the systemic issues. So they did what they had to do with a really interesting security culture method.
On July thirteenth, nineteen seventy, one hundred and fifty young lords met in an apartment and locked themselves in so that no infiltrators could get out and give anyone a heads up because they knew they were infiltrated. It's the fucking it's nineteen seventy, you know, a huh, And so not all of them knew the plan going in. They all get told the plan, but they can't call out. At three thirty am, they pile into a U haul and a bunch of cars. They backed up to the
hospital loading dock. They opened the doors. They stormed the hospital with nun chucks.
Oh, this episode brought to you by nonsense dunchucks. I know how cool they are.
I know, for some reason, most retelies leave the nun trucks out. That's a mistake, hely nunchuck radicals, you get it, Okay, I'll tell my one nunchuck story please.
Yeah.
I'm like twenty two or something, and I'm like living in the basement of this house with some hipsters and they have this party and I'm avoiding it, hanging out in the basement, and at one point someone comes down. At this time, I'm like, all I'm doing is like studying martial arts and trying to stop a war and all that shit. And they come down and they're like, Magpie, this guy won't leave and he's harassing people. He's like
harassing this woman. You have to kick him out. And I'm like okay, And so I'm like in my my sleeping dress and I just like walk upstairs with the pair of nunchucks. And I'm like the weird kid an address from the basement who hasn't been at the party, and I just like walk up. I think I have a beard at the time, and I'm just like, hey, you better leave, and the guy's like I'm already gone, and he runs away. I don't know how to use nunchucks. I do not know how to use nunchucks at this
point in my life. I just have them.
I Mean it's definitely a power move of like who's going to assume that you don't know how to use them? You know, like if you're pulling them out just visually, you'd be like that person knows how to use those. Yeah, Like.
Bluffy is a very effective as we.
Learned from the Young Lords, Like sometimes you just gotta try it.
Storm a hospital with nunchucks. What could go wrong? Yeah, So they secure the entrances, they barricade shit, they still let workers and patients in and out of the building, just they're controlling it. They set up screening clinics for tuberculosis and lead poisoning anemia. They set up a daycare in a classroom because one of their whole things is that they believe that kids should get childcare while their sole caretaker is in the hospital. It's wild.
I know.
They hung up a banner welcome to the People's Hospital and a Puerto Rican flag. They hadn't tipped off the hospital workers or it wouldn't have worked, right, But the hospital workers were down. The physicians backed them. They hated working for the butcher's shop because they became doctors to help people.
Yeah.
Even the chief administrator was like, well, I mean they kind of got a point, like, wow, no one likes working at the butcher shop, you know, except like Sweeney Todd or whatever. Thank you, thank you.
We really like.
You did that one for you apparently. So they call for a press conference. It was so perfectly timed. So they call for a press conference and they explain themselves to the press, and they give their demands, which is like door to door healthcare, better pay for workers, daycare for patients and workers, hurry up and build a new hospital. I did not find a name for this action. I assume it was the Lincoln Offensive or the Hospital Offensive.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they held it for about twelve hours. The negotiations of the police were going very badly. Undercovers were trying to infiltrate into the hospital, so they left and rather than letting themselves get mass arrested, they put on white coats and slipped out with the doctors covered by supporters from inside and outside. Yeah. Oh, and once the cops realized they'd been duped, they combed the area for the lords,
but people in the neighborhoods took them in. Only two participants out of one hundred and fifty two hundred participants got fucking caught. Wow, good fucking odds. I would take those odds seriously. Nothing changed immediately. Then three days later, a patient named Carmen Rodriguez died during an abortion at
the hospital. The resident, a student doctor, didn't look at her chart in her pre existing conditions and performed the wrong kind of abortion, and then when she responded badly, doubled down on mistreating her, and a few days later, July nineteenth, nineteen seventy, she died of negligence.
Oh wow, this is something I've read about.
Yeah, yeah, it's fucking heartbreaking. Like I I don't know just especially doubling down and shit especially like.
I mean, there's also just a really painful history of sterilization of Puerto Rican women, and just to it was a part of what like the women of the Young Lords would talk about in when they would talk about the women's movement and women's liberation, as they would make a very clear distinction between upper class women's liberation and how like the Young Lord women of course, you know, stood for abortion rights, but they also were like, we have to be very clear about our experience of you know,
being forcefully sterilized like a lot of work and women getting sterilized in who worked in factories and just without their knowledge.
Yeah.
Yeah, So it's just a part of the history, and it's just such a recent history, yeah, you know of Puerto Rican women.
Yeah. No, It's something that I didn't really understand when I first started doing some of this research about like, you know, it's doing well now, I feel self conscious about it. But I did an EPISO about the Jaine Collective Okay, Sophie that you can go listen to so fun. And one of the things that I didn't realize going into that research was how I had only read about the you know, the Panthers and black liberationists had very
complicated relationships with abortion rights because the pill. Oh interesting, yeah, because they're like, we're trying to avoid a cultural genocide. You have to like freedom to reproduce was what more of them were fighting for as compared to more white women were fighting for freedom to control to not reproduce, and any logical look at it is we want bodily autonomy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, but childcare like goes into it as well, because from what I read, like women and the young lords would talk about how working class people deserve to be able to have children and that include that means that we will need to set up community childcare, you know, because that is the only way
that we can that if you're not incredibly wealthy. They were just saying it shouldn't be a barrier to be to starting a family, yeah, which you know, yeah, so it's just it's a really yeah, it's this painful part of it just really moves me that there was so much like mind blowing growth and like just what these people are experiencing, you know, like so quickly within a generation.
Yeah, well, well that's an awkward place that I've to stick an ad transition, but I do. So here's some ads and we're back and yeah, we're talking about how Carmen Rodriguez died at the hospital three days after the takeover. And so this led to the most enduring and wide reaching legacy of the Young Lord's Hrum. The radical group of medical professionals that the Young Lords are part of.
They draft a new document and they call it the Patient's Bill of Rights, and it says you deserve to be treated respectfully, to have your treatment explained, that you can refuse treatment, that you can see your chart, that people deserve door to door preventative care, that people can pick their doctors. That you should get free food with your care, that there should be daycare, and that healthcare
should be free. This is obviously not I know, you look at that and you're like that, Yeah, I'm in like, this is not the patient's Bill of rights we have today in the US. Specifically, the free stuff part didn't really survive.
Yeah, still working on that.
But some of this other stuff I have always taken for granted. I mean I didn't. I don't want to talk about my own family history too much, but it's like it makes sense to me that of course you get to have your treatment explained. Of course you can refuse treatment. Of course you can see your chart, like, of course you can pick your doctor. Why would I mean again, complications around financial barriers, but it of course
you can refuse treatment. It's like such a clear example of that that looking back, you're like, what do you mean? Why would anyone ever have thought it was okay to sterilize someone without their consent?
Like, yeah, how is that not that? Yeah, that's called something else.
Yeah, So they start pushing for this bill of rights. And one thing that I find so fascinating about the story is that, you know, the Young Lords aren't reformists. They believe in a socialist revolution, but by not coming to the table to beg for scraps, but by demanding everything, they accomplished more reform than reformists tend to, which I would say, keep in mind, reformists, you should pretend to be socialist revolutionaries if you want reform.
Make Italian bake it.
Yeah. So they do this, but they're still they haven't gotten their health, their their harm reduction clinic, which they haven't called that yet, but leads to that kind of framing. So they have a better idea than their cold Turkey clinic. Nothing the other day, it was bad. It just didn't work for everyone. They got link In to sponsor a drug detoc center. They succeeded by asking nicely, just kidding.
On November sixth, nineteen seventy, they occupied the sixth floor of one of the buildings of the hospital and set it up with the help of doctors, into a detox facility. Wow, fifteen people were back. Yeah exactly, Yeah, fifteen people were arrested. So then other one other people came back the next day and they set it up again, and this time it stuck. This gets called the first harm reduction clinic, and they used a novel approach in which addiction was
seen as a social problem and not as individual weakness. Oh. Soon they're treating six hundred people a week at this clinic and it and it starts as a methodone clinic and becomes an acupuncture clinic. And it lasted for eight years. It outlasts the young lords, and it ends up staffed by many people who'd been through the treatment themselves.
And so this is the beginning of not a acupuncture Please explain, Okay, I do not know what nada nada
stands for. I will just say that not a detox no wait, no, right, it's something that i've It's like ear acupuncture that I've received when I was like, you know, like they used to do it at the drop in center when I was like a young, homeless teenager, and it's I didn't know that this was created by the Young Lords or that this just you know, the treatment was like formed with the Young Lords, and it was like, how do we bring accessible effective acupuncture to working people
or lower class people?
Yeah, I am I believe that that is the case, that this is. These are the pioneers of doing that in the United States.
So cool.
Yeah, yeah, they just fucking did everything. I actually didn't end up writing into the script more about how the patients of Bill of Rights developed out of what they did. There's so much that I didn't get to, you know, it's like a I didn't get to follow these threads as far as I want, you know.
Yeah, yeah, so let's kind.
Of talk about their decline. Unfortunately, but they have so much lasting impact. So whatever if you write high for two years and then burn out and change everything along the way. So I fucking goes.
And we can learn from him them.
Yeah, so these two years are kind of the high point of the young lords. Coen tail Pro is fucking with them really hard. They found an easy target in the culture of obsessive discipline and self criticism and central authority. That was I think building and growing, but I could be wrong. That could be the read of stuff I'm reading. One of the central leaders, Philippe Luciano, he's practically the face of the group. He was demoted after cheating on
his wife, who was one of the other leaders. They had set really strict rules about who could talk to the press, and so a co intel Pro agent pretended to be one of the Bronx leaders speaking to the press, like Hey, I'm this guy and I'm speaking to the press. And then so then the other leaders are so mad that this guy spoke to the press even though they have strict rules about who can speak to the press, and he wasn't on the approved.
List because I wasn't him.
Yeah, so he's in trouble. And oh and the thing that he supposedly spoke to the press about was about how Philippe had been demoted because he was a male chauvinist with unclear politics. So they're like stirring up the shit, right.
Which is like on his Wikipedia page because I looked it up.
Oh yeah, I thought he's a male choveness who was yeah.
Yeah, like the quote. So it's interesting to know, yeah, where this is coming from.
Yeah, I mean, like, and he overall co intail pro likes to find existing cracks and expand them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But so you can look at that two ways. We could be like, well, we're vulnerable to federal infiltration if we have sexists, which is true. You can also look go out as we're vulnerable to federal we're vulnerable to this shit if we're so quick to well, now get
into murky waters. But like you know, we're so quick to like get mad at everyone about these things, and we have so many controls about all of these things, you know, And so it's like demoting a leader because he's sexist is not bad, but the way it was handled was manipulated by the FEDS. Most likely within a month, he left the organization that he'd started or had a hand in starting. Yeah, things start to get darker. On
October seventeenth, nineteen seventy, the young Lord Julio Roldin. He's found it hanging in a cell in the tombs, and he's one of eight quote suicides that year in the tombs, one of whom had somehow fractured his own skull while hanging himself, if you believe the police, which I don't. So when Julio died, a thousand people came to his viewing. At his funeral march the onlookers chanted and this chant rules Fuego, Fuego, fuego, Los Yankees Kia, and fuego fire, fire, fire,
The Yankees want some fire. Whoa, which is hard as fuck.
Yeah, They're like, oh you want you want some fun?
Yeah?
Wow.
So it's at this point in the narratives that I've read that they pick up the gun more literally. Okay, The funeral stops for a second viewing at that Methodist church they'd once occupied with nothing but non trucks and community support. They go into the church, they open the casket. Alongside his body is an arsenal of guns.
In the casket.
Yeah that's how they hit it. Yeah, that's how they got into the church.
Whoa.
They stuffed his casket full of full of weapons and they use it to occupy the church. Their first and foremost demand was an independent investigation into Julio Roldon's death. The other demands were, let us set up a legal defense center here, and also the city needs to let clergymen visit people in prison and investigate prison conditions. And so a diverse group of clergy took the demand to the city. The city was like, you know, fuck you.
So then eighteen clergy members joined the armed occupation because they were like, he's not listening to us. You're the only way to get anything fucking done. Yeah, And I started this off by being like, oh, they're getting this darker. It's during the decline. I feel like I almost I feel kind of bad using this as like because it's an escalation, but it's not. I am not putting moral
judgment on this particular choice and escalation. Yeah, right. They weren't trying to go down in a blaze of glory, and they started negotiations. Older women from the neighborhood secreted out the guns and pieces basically like because they were like, we're going fucking down. We don't want to all get murdered. So like, yeah, piece by piece, all the guns get disappeared,
negotiations picked up. The city gave in and started an independent investigation into the death of Julio Rolden, and the independent report was clear Julio did hang himself, and at least according this investigation, in twenty seven pages, some excerpted in The New York Times, it said, basically, in a paraphrase, he killed himself because the Tombs is a fucking nightmare pit that drives people to suicide. And mainstream news articles
basically were saying like, yeah, sometimes suicide is murder. This is such a case. You put someone in this terrible of a situation, you are killing them. Even if Julio most likely hanged himself, I bet that one who cracked his own scald and fucking hang himself.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a.
They held the church for two months until December nineteen seventies, a year after the last time they held the church, you know, and they did their thing there. They fed people, they offered free legal help. Radical priests started showing up and doing stuff there, but the organization started to decline after this. They follow a familiar course. To quote author Johanna Fernandez, the movements were on the path of decline.
Others saw mounting state repression as a reason to embrace the right to self defense within their relatively small groups, which they confused with the defense of the masses in their communities. Amid the disorientation and siege mentality produced by state repression, radicals became somewhat isolated from their communities. They
began to see themselves as enlightened actors. Before long, they began to substitute the painstaking task of grassroots mobilization with heroic acts of sacrifice taken on behalf of quote the people. The central leadership had a closed retreat just for itself to figure out what's going wrong, why things are getting bad, and they decide that the answer is that they need
to centralize more power. They decided at the retreat that the social services move was the wrong one and instead they should focus on leading a revolution to free Puerto Rico, and basically are like, if you're real revolutionaries, this is what you care about, not this volunteerism, which means we're
shifting over to fundraising. And now that's what we're going to do here in the United States is fundraise and relocate organizers to Puerto Rico and the rank and file of the Young Lords aren't really excited about this, And actually I think some of it probably has to do with some of what you're talking about, like New Eyorekan identity, and it was just from the island.
Yeah, very I mean, I'm sure some of them had connection to the island, you know, but definitely strange move to go far away and then try to free people over there who could. If they're going to free themselves, they should probably free themselves.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So their membership starts to decline. It didn't help that they got really paranoid about co intel Pro, which is not their fault. That is literally the purpose of co intel Pro totally, and they started to purge people without evidence, especially people who were critical of this new change in focus. So they dropped from a thousand members to two hundred members and not very long at all.
They were not well received in Puerto Rico. They showed up in fatigues and berets, and this didn't go over as a powerful symbol of working class militancy. It just confused people. The Nationalist Party that they showed up to help didn't really like them. Most of the independence movements at the time there were rich and white, oh wow. And they also white within the Puerto Rican context, probably
not the United States context, well the mainland. And also they were like, Budsy, you can't just show up out of nowhere and tell us you're going to free us. And they were outsiders. They knew how to organize in New York City really well. On the island, they met with little success. They did do stuff. It was earnest. By June nineteen seventy one, two of the three New
York City offices shut their doors. They switched ideological focuses again, and this time they switched to a workerist attitude, meaning the lump and proletariat, the thieves and stuff. They're no longer the shit, so now we're all the workers. But there's a problem here. Being a young Lord was a full time twenty four to seven commitment, which means workers hadn't joined. It was the unemployed or the soon to be unemployed. Students, youth, and criminals were primarily who the
young Lord's recruited from. So they didn't get workers, they just lost lumpin. So they went out and tried to get jobs in industry to go organize people, which kind of went over, like showing up in Puerto Rico. Yeah, they got more rigid and dogmatic, and they spiraled. They tried to solve it in nineteen seventy two by having a forty day course of Marxist study, in which they discussed in read marks for six hours a day and tried to out revolutionary each other. This further alienated them
from everyone. No, I know, I know, and it's like, I'm sure there's another read of this, you know, yeah, but like.
Also dealing with immense pressure and like yeah, like yeah, it's so easy for us to be like and co entergrow was happening. It's like they didn't know the thing people knew, you know, just learned. But ah, okay, yeah, but the paranoia and yeah.
So they tried to solve their further alienation from everyone by centralizing the authority from a central leadership to a central leader, a woman named Gloria Fontanas. And then they kicked out all the people who had gone to Puerto Rico.
Because the people who had gone to Puerto Rico were like, hey, this isn't working, we shouldn't do this, but central leadership was like, Nope, you've got to stay the course, some of the leadership flew down there and barged in and yelled at everyone for betraying the movement by by betraying their authority, and called them the enemies of the people. The Young Lord's Party changed their name to Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, which isn't so catchy. They demoted their
central leader for being too petty bourgeoisie. And that's kind of the tail spin of the New York chapter. As far as I can tell, Chicago kept going, and individuals from all of this right and like people still doing things as Young Lords did a lot of stuff. Chicago, in particular, their moment seemed kind of gone, and I don't know enough to do the rest of it real justice. A lot of Chicago Young Lords sort of move into the electoral sphere, are involved in getting I think, I
want to say Chicago's first black mayor elected. Oh wow, like ten years later or so. It's not in the scripts. I don't have the numbers in front of me. A ton of them stayed really radical and keep kept doing good work. I don't really want to linger on their fall. I want to stay with most of what they did, but I will mention one of the young Lords, one of their lawyers who helped them out a lot. He went on to become a famous man.
Oh no, I know what you're talking about.
The Republican Fox News host. Oh my god, her name, his name is her Alda Rivera.
Oh my god, taking my fucking head. I prefer to remember Huan Gonzales instead. Yeah, co Steve Democracy now.
Yeah, oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, and fucking and your uncle who fucking quit. Yeah yeah, he's not actually related.
Well, we're going to see about that. Okay, Okay, I'm scared of DNA websites, so I don't do that, but I'll do some I'll do some googling, yeah, and find him, write him a random email.
Yeah. Yeah, no. And it's like every some cliche. I learned a long time ago that like every story is a tragedy if you don't know when to end it, you know, because like all of us die, right, everything passes, But god damn it, that's so much done.
Yeah.
Yeah. And also there are so many of these members who even if they didn't get famous or something, you know, there were still like incredible community activists and yeah, you know, are doing or making an amazing art. One woman made a really great documentary called That's Really Great on YouTube. So they're still out there and there's still total badasses.
Yeah, it's so fucking good. I listened to a bunch of different interviews where yeah, you can still listen to interviews where like the guy who stole the van, who's like, yeah, we stole the van, and like the woman who like staffed the table in the host in Lincoln Hospital and just was like every day I'm gonna sit in the butcher shop and let people tell me what's wrong here, you know, like still alive, like still fucking yeah. Well that's ah, that's the Young Lords. That's the first four
partter I ever wrote. The second one we recorded, but I don't know any any other final.
Well, no, I think we said it all. I guess. You know. For me, what I really took away from learning about the Young Lords is just is how important it was for them and it is for us to listen to the folks that live around us, to listen to people who you know, if you're someone like me who's an artist, I think it's really important for me to listen to people who have to fucking work every day and or are much older than me or you know.
I think that was something that I really inspired me about them is their ability in the beginning to listen to their community about what they wanted and needed.
Yeah, you know, and just like create a fucking to do list and just started checking boxes off seriously.
Yeah. And also the Berets were cool, let's just.
Say it, and first organized by a fifteen year old who was like, I need fucking I need to like throw a bunch of dance shows to like make money to get us all cool black and for the whim. Yeah. Well, if people want to listen to you, I will say everyone should go listen to the song Polente. You should look it up on YouTube so you can watch the video p A l e n t E. I don't know where the p A l a n t e a n t e. Yeah, apologize.
Yeah, there's a great music video directed by my friend Chris Murk, who's an incredible director. My dad is in it, which is really cool to see him pop up in there, and a lot of there's the Pedro Pietri uh an excerpt from his his poem Puerto Rican Obituary. And I encourage anybody to just like go down the rabbit hole of like how much amazing stuff was created from this movement, like the new Eekan Poets Cafe and stuff like that.
Yeah, what's your new album called?
Well, my new album. I just finished recording it, so I'm not going to reveal the name yet.
Oh I'm sorry I timed this past.
Yeah, Okay, it's okay. Uh, it's going to come out. I hope it comes out sometime next year. I haven't gotten the rough mixes back yet, so I'm going kind of crazy because I want to hear what I did.
Okay, So this is what you're about to tour on.
No, I'm still touring on my last record. My last record is called Life on Earth. It came out last February, and I'll be out there playing music like on the West Coast in May cool, and then in July. Oh yeah, I'm going to be playing Portland cool. In July. I'll be playing all around like the Midwest and stuff sick. Yeah, So come see us, buy some merch, help us out. We're it's tough out there, hanging in there.
Hasn't been a good couple of years for career musicians.
Is that what you're saying my god, Yeah, I get like, you know, a glimmer of a penny anytime you listen to me on Spotify, so head over to band camp. I encourage everyone to get music off band camp on band Camp Fridays. It really helps us.
Yeah. I try and buy albums and then I do a lot of my listening on Spotify. But I like it's nice to also buy it, you.
Know, yeah, totally, yeah, it all helps.
Yeah. Okay, what else can I pitch? I'm going to kickstart a tabletop role playing game this summer.
Wow.
I've been working on a stabletop role playing game called Number City for like ten fucking years, and I'm working with a really good crew of people. If you want to play Gangs Versus the God King tabletop role playing game, you should check that out once it gets kickstarted. I think I don't want to. I know what dates. I think we're going to kickstart it, but I don't want to say it. But I don't want to be wrong. And then I'm going to be another tabletop role playing
game I'm writing for oh that was not announced yet. Ah, stupid things with things and controlling information. That's what I got and also my most recent book is Escape from Insul Island, and if you want quick adventure, read it's very short book. If you have a I get a lot of messages from people who are like, I don't read much because I don't have the attention span for it anymore. But I can read your books. Takes only a couple hours to read it Escape from Insul Island.
And he'd be like, I read a whole last book because his about one hundred pages long. Uh. And you can also get my friend Jamie's book called raw dogged Rall Dog, Oh God.
Dog.
Okay, you can get Jamie's book, which is about hot dogs. I don't know what you're talking about, Margaret, there's no double euphemism there. I'm fucking literally blushing. I think we got to end the episode.
It's over.
We're done. You did it.
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