Part One: The Young Lords: How Some Puerto Rican Socialists Changed Everything

actually maybe we should just we'll do that later. First, we'll do it. Cool people did cool stuff. Okay, Yeah, I guess we had 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 Segata and the principal songwriter. I guess this is the maybe way to say it, but I'm not entirely certain of one of the best bands out there. Hooray for the riffraff. Helenda, 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. Yeah. Yeah. I keep finding my guests are like my old friends from back in the day in a nice way. Um and Linda and I know each other from New York many many years ago. Yeah, that'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, Oh there's there's a rock in it, but it's also folk. Yeah, I will say to anyone who I don't usually like folk rock as described, and I really like hooray for the riff raff, so if anyone good, yeah, everyone, would 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 me I used to distinguish between folk punk and punk's playing folk because folk punk is when you take the punk vocals and put them over folk instrumentation, and then punk's playing folk is when punks play folk music. Yes, and I like that one more. I gotta I want some I want stop playing shows. Because I was playing shows 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 relate 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. I want to be folk power. 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 Sharine at least partly,

but otherwise we're flying solo. I believe in you. I thank you. That's I'll claim that I do too, so that everyone feels safe. Our audio engineers Ian high Ian, and our theme music was written for us by a woman. And our topic today, Elenda. 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 some 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 answers yes, because today we're gonna talk about the Young Lords. E Linda, have you heard of the Young Lords? I have learned. I have 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 the reason A Linda's the guest for this is that I started writing a script for someone else, and then um, I was name dropping A Linda and one of one of their songs in the script, and then I was like, e Linda should be the guest for this, and then A Linda said, yes, I'm really excited to learn 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 gonna talk about this week and next week we're gonna talk about some of the amazing stuff done by the Puerto Rican radicals in the continental 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 use 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 commonwealth. Yeah, well, the that's the white people in the United States have the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. 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 sold 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 there was just in time for all

the Puerto Rican meant to get drafted. Yes, yeah, yes, So the US gave Puerto Ricans US a 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 US statehood is a big part of a lot of Puerto Rican movement stuff. Now right, we're gonna 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, 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's a strong sense of statehood, independence, that kind of thing,

Like it really depends. It's like, I think there's definitely 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 independency even being possible. But then there are certain people, like, you know, there's like some more radically leaning people, and my family they're 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 for me, as someone who's not Puerto Ricans, 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 interestingness relates to not the band part, but the mainland US Puerto Ricans, and we'll talk about that later. Everyone's got to wait

a little bit. 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 Puerto 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 need 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 the New York City.

This massive gration started because of a US project called Operation Bootstrap, which was this massive spike in industrialization that displaced people even as it like put in power lines. 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, 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. Yeah, 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 undocumented people should also be

treated well in 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 mother 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 house 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, that's 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 Bootstrap 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.

Oh as industrialization has 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 Elbadio 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, 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 their 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 fire bombed to Puerto Rican bar in 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 Chicago 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 at a loss and basically like stoke these fears in order to make money and flip houses. And it was kind of like Domino style, and so like the white flight was like both racist

cowards and also racist capitalists. We're looking to exploit the fear of them 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, cap Botalism and products and services that support our show because we're 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 thinks 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 will get to this, Like one of our heroes that we're going to talk about, Jose Chachamenesh he was eleven years old in nineteen fifty nine when he was a founding member of this gang.

Yeah that 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 and 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 there is like a history of Puerto Rican children being like yeah, fuck you, but we're not gonna go, which is the opposite of us. Sorry, go ahead, it's in the blood. Yeah, and 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 schools speaking Spanish. I can't handle it. Yeah, God forbid. Wow

eleven yeah, Jose Shacha Jimenez. He was a founding member. He's eleven years old. By the time he was fourteen, he was a pretty petty crook. He got caught a 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 pool 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 priests at this school not so cool. Um. 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, why did And it's like, honey, that's on you. Your missionaries went and turned all these people of color into My family had so many stories about like nuns, like hitting them with rulers and ship 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 hit bees 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, Lacha Vieja the Old Hatchet, which is the oldest known Puerto Rican street gang in 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 one. Well cool name though, I know, right, and especially sick band 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 yeah, you, um, you broke the law,

band jail you have to go to. Yeah, I know, especially because the old Hatchet was probably a bunch of teenagers, right, Like, yeah, the only like Puerto Rican street gang I know about is the Ghetto Brothers. Okay, I don't know about, but I think that was. I think that was later on. Okay, they eventually became a band. Oh 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 street 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 or the Germans, the Irish, 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 gangs 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 a professor guy, his names John M. Haggardorn 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 some of 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 cha 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 And he just becomes a badass, you know. And it liked be like a scary name to run into someone who's like fucking with you. 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 and they're like Tiddley winks and you're like I gotta go. I hear my mom, 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 shipped from people from which he learned to defend himself. And I'm kind of curious you're on this part because it's like this is something I can like 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 immigration status. 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 inter fighting 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. Then there's 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 main stream 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 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. Um. 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, yeah, I don't have to

experience that racism. So I think certain Puerto Ricans that are super light skinned. It's I think, I know, like we get these you know, platforms and experience you know, these opportunities and shit, and j Lo becomes like the idea of what being Puerto Ricans instead of a super complex identity. Yeah. I had no idea that Jaylo was port 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 jay look about Ricky Martin. Yeah yeah, I mean I grew up thinking that was what being Porto 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. This is crazy. Yeah. I thought we were just like pop 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 knell of everything in the eighties and all that, um, isn't the kind of sad thing about like cool people in history and you'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 as 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 into fourteen, and I think may some of them 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 as 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 how he 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 old 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, 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, all badasses, I know.

I like my friend who turned me on too. I heard some about the Young Lords, but not like a ton, right, and my friends like, you really need to 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.

Tuberculosis this running theme throughout all these things, and it's going to come up, but not yet, okay, but yeah, so and the white gangs would fight back, right, you know, the I presume German, German and an Irish gangs would fight back and try and fight the Young Lords and be like, no, we wont our whites only beach or whatever.

But eventually the white gangs were lented. And I'm under the impression this isn't less because the Young Lords always won, and more because they always fought and I think that this is how oppressive power works. You don't even need to all 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, wouldn't a great lesson to like

keep in mind. Yeah. Yeah. When Shasha was fifteen, he found himself increasingly in charge of the gang because he was willing to do the paperwork for the gang perwork 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 fought 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 not violence, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

We're gonna swim at this beach non violently ideally. Yeah, 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 to I don't remember. We get a 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 doesn't like one eighty, but it's way more effective than getting sent to jail, 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 as one of them. He did come back in a week later go to jail for stealing a toaster, so

he's not one eighty. New habits they take a little while to catch on, much like what also takes a wild 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 them. 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, 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. Um. 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 behind 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 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. And Shaha 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 Lado LATO, and they rule. They spread across the country. They bring together working class Latin Americans. And 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 join the military. They could a 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 six day stint for heroin possession. This is another thing no one likes talking about in all the history Everyone who's listening to 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, like like there's all this stuff that gets cut out. And so I don't know much about Chato'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 interesting him. That cool, It's really interesting. Yeah, Like I'm I kept whatever. I'm really excited about this.

Everyone knows this. So he's doing 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 m Okay 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 chatchas 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 they're bigger, rested a lot, and they would get themselves jobs in prison libraries in order to provide radical books to people, which is fucking rat. And so he starts reading Martin Luther King. He starts reading Malcolm X. He also started reading a book called The Seventh Story Mountain, written by a radical Catholic monk named Thomas Merton. Oh, gonna look that up immediately. Yeah,

he was super social justice in his faith. He was really into interfaith 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 fighting 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 their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies. Wow yeah, so yeah, what is this sname again? His name is

Thomas Murton. I haven't read his books yet, I am, but I really like this weird like, yeah, he reads m Okay, he reads Malcolmax, he reads Thomas Murton. And then he gets out of prison. 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's 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 for 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

and some other places. Yeah. Yeah, And you seriously owe it to yourself to go check out Hurry 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 Joe 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 Killjoy, where I mostly post pictures of my dog as I go hyping really cute dog. Thanks, I like him and I will see everyone on Wednesday. Farewell. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.