Speaker 1: Hello, I'm out of jokes to start episodes with. This
Speaker 1: is cool people did cool stuff, which kind of sounds
Speaker 1: like a joke name for a podcast anyway, but I
Speaker 1: rather like it. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me
Speaker 1: today on this Journey is a Linda Segata.
Speaker 2: How are you doing good? I just said a snack?
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, and you're an hour wiser than last time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Sophie. Sophie, how are you?
Speaker 2: How are you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Compared to like toothpain recording, antibiotics, antibiotics recording is a breeze.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel that as somebody who also is on anbiotics.
Speaker 1: Yeah. This podcast brought to you by a Max of Sillan. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fish antibiotics legal, but not for human This week I
Speaker 1: couldn't hear out of my hey right here.
Speaker 2: This week I mostly can. It's great.
Speaker 1: Yeah. To be clear, I don't believe either of us
Speaker 1: are in fishing antibiotics, and I do not recommend them. Nope, anyway,
Speaker 1: that's not even for legal reasons. I just feel guilty
Speaker 1: when I accidentally make a joke about bad advice. Our
Speaker 1: audio engineers Ian Hi Ian, Everyone say Hi Ian. That
Speaker 1: being including you listening to your headphones in a public place.
Speaker 1: I want you to say Hi, Ian. God hates a coward.
Speaker 1: Say it all right, Ian. You're exempt from having to
Speaker 1: say Hi Ian unless you want to. Our music was
Speaker 1: written for us by un woman. And today we're talking
Speaker 1: about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican socialist organization that
Speaker 1: is kicking ass and taking names in New York City
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy, they've just taken over
Speaker 1: a Methodist church and turned it into the People's Church
Speaker 1: for eleven days, which I said thirteen last time because
Speaker 1: I wasn't looking at the script and I was coming
Speaker 1: up with numbers and I came up with the wrong one.
Speaker 2: They got a lot done for eleven days.
Speaker 1: I know, there's like multiple festivals of the Oppress that
Speaker 1: they managed to throw in eleven days.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 1: Could you imagine, like I would take more than eleven
Speaker 1: days to organize a festival the Oppressed? Right now?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, good year?
Speaker 1: Yeah totally, Like all right, we're getting ready for twenty
Speaker 1: twenty fives Festival the Oppressed.
Speaker 2: Totally.
Speaker 1: Everyone got to check their schedules. So this action got
Speaker 1: them national attention and support and their membership soared especially
Speaker 1: and it brought in again more women. More than six
Speaker 1: hundred new members came on. And this is an official
Speaker 1: membership organization as compared to some other things. Right, Okay.
Speaker 1: They would take Puerto Rican people, and they would take
Speaker 1: both non Puerto Rican black people and non Puerto Rican
Speaker 1: LATINX folks from their neighborhoods. Overall, they skewed demographically after
Speaker 1: Puerto Rican and English speaking at this point, no value judgment,
Speaker 1: and that that's just what their demographics were. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it. Whatever. They'd already opened a Newark, New Jersey
Speaker 1: chapter by this point, and soon they opened some in
Speaker 1: the South Bronx, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Boston, the Lower East Side,
Speaker 1: and Philly. They lived communally. They ate free meals at
Speaker 1: dining halls. They had a whole building.
Speaker 2: Now oh wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, women and men lived together and organized together and
Speaker 1: threw down together. And the women worked hard to fight
Speaker 1: chauvinism in the movement. They would specifically, this is the
Speaker 1: thing I didn't known to I researched this. They would
Speaker 1: call people out as male Chauvenes's pigs. And it's one
Speaker 1: of the first uses of that phrase, male Chauvenes's pig.
Speaker 1: And something I hadn't realized is that the men men
Speaker 1: are pigs. Rhetoric within feminism doesn't come out of calling
Speaker 1: men animals. Like it's not directly calling them the pig,
Speaker 1: the animal. It's that since the Black Panthers has started
Speaker 1: calling cops pigs, they're calling men cops when the right Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, they're saying you're being a cop right now. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like that makes a lot more. It just like it
Speaker 2: rings it rings well with me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, be like you are the oppressor right now. You
Speaker 1: are pressing, and it probably fucking stung more than being
Speaker 1: like because when you call men pigs, you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're a pig, You're you're gross and being overly sexual
Speaker 1: or whatever. Men are often like, yeah, I am, that's
Speaker 1: just the way we are.
Speaker 2: Baby, totally right, broachet.
Speaker 1: As compared to being like, you are acting like a
Speaker 1: police officer, yeah, you know, which is not a nice
Speaker 1: thing to be called. And that helps get men get
Speaker 1: their shit together, as does a woman's caucus, as does
Speaker 1: an action that did not come up from my research,
Speaker 1: but you brought up Okay, but.
Speaker 2: Then I couldn't I researched it online. I couldn't find
Speaker 2: it online.
Speaker 1: But I found a little bit claiming you did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but only a little bit, like only a single reference,
Speaker 1: so you should say what you okay.
Speaker 2: I land this when I went to the Bronx Museum
Speaker 2: and they had an exhibit all about the Young Lords
Speaker 2: and it was written in their paper that the women
Speaker 2: had gotten together and they decided if their demands would
Speaker 2: not be met where they were able to carry firearms.
Speaker 2: Although you're saying that they didn't really care.
Speaker 1: Well some people, so I know, I know, it's like
Speaker 1: it's messy. I think that they must have sometimes or something,
Speaker 1: but okay.
Speaker 2: And be treated as comrades instead of servants, and you know,
Speaker 2: like the way that traditionally their families taught them to
Speaker 2: treat women. There would be a sex strike. And you
Speaker 2: know this is also acting as if like the majority
Speaker 2: were straight, but that men would not be able to
Speaker 2: receive sex anymore from women until they got their shit together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, probably effective.
Speaker 2: I think is really cool. Yeah, And I don't know
Speaker 2: if it went down for a long time or if
Speaker 2: it was put into a fact, but it was definitely
Speaker 2: printed in the paper. It was definitely like warm, you've
Speaker 2: been warmed. This is how it seemed in the paper.
Speaker 1: So the thing I ran across when I when I
Speaker 1: did more research after you told me this, is that
Speaker 1: I ran across like one line that was like in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy the women had a sex strike. Okay, but
Speaker 1: I I don't entirely know. And actually it's interesting. I
Speaker 1: would trust well, I would trust Polente more than I
Speaker 1: would trust a random article that I read, yeah something,
Speaker 1: or even of history book. And so the thing about
Speaker 1: firearms is really interesting to me because I there is
Speaker 1: going to be a point in the script when they
Speaker 1: kind of take up arms, right, and all these other
Speaker 1: times they're like rolling around in nunchucks. But I bet
Speaker 1: you that there were times in which they were armed
Speaker 1: and that just wasn't like fitting the narrative of the
Speaker 1: way that people want to talk about things. And like,
Speaker 1: so I don't know, you know.
Speaker 2: Or perhaps it was like education and how to use firearms. Yeah,
Speaker 2: i'd have been the vibe. Like, so I learned that
Speaker 2: from when I went to the museum. But a lot
Speaker 2: of what I've learned is from a book called Palante
Speaker 2: that I encourage people to get. It's I have here,
Speaker 2: but anyone's going to see It's called voices and photographs
Speaker 2: of the Young Lords, and it's a lot of interviews
Speaker 2: and also like little you know essays that were written
Speaker 2: in the newspaper. So cool. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that I read was talking about how they believed that
Speaker 2: how women members wanted to learn how to use firearms
Speaker 2: and not be treated like they weren't warriors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so so they're
Speaker 1: doing all this after the church, their numbers were up.
Speaker 1: Their numbers became about thirty five to forty percent women,
Speaker 1: and there were numerous openly gay members, and gay members
Speaker 1: had their own caucus as well. The Black Panthers paved
Speaker 1: their way on that one, openly stating their allegiance with
Speaker 1: the gay rights movement and specifically the Gay Liberation Front
Speaker 1: that had grown up to the Stonewall Uprising, which yes,
Speaker 1: you can hear about on our episode about the Stonewall Uprising.
Speaker 1: And in fact, the Young Lords provided a personal guard
Speaker 1: to Sylvia Rivera, the Transit, one of the trans heroes
Speaker 1: from Stonewall, when she was facing death threats. And this is.
Speaker 2: Also half Puerto Rican.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's right.
Speaker 2: Just wanted to give her a shout out.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, fucking totally and like, and so I will
Speaker 1: say that many young lords refused the assignment because they
Speaker 1: like were transphobic and didn't understand what the fuck was
Speaker 1: up and they were like freaked out. There's still a
Speaker 1: long way to go. But other ones accepted it and
Speaker 1: were Sylvia Rivera's personal bodyguard were young lords, and that
Speaker 1: fucking rules. Yeah, people with jobs gave up more than
Speaker 1: half their salaries for the group. Because it sounds a
Speaker 1: little bit culty at this point, no one My theory is,
Speaker 1: no one ever gets anything done without getting a little
Speaker 1: bit close to the cult line. You shouldn't cross the
Speaker 1: cult line, you know.
Speaker 2: Ah, But.
Speaker 1: If the cult line isn't even in sight, you might
Speaker 1: not be creating a community. It's real messy.
Speaker 2: Ah, interesting, Okay.
Speaker 1: One of the cultier things that they did is they
Speaker 1: did that MAOIs self criticism thing, where you're supposed to
Speaker 1: like stand up and say all the stuff you did
Speaker 1: wrong to the whole crowd.
Speaker 2: Oh, I've never heard of this before.
Speaker 1: It's it was a big part of like like the
Speaker 1: cultural revolution in China, which I don't know as much
Speaker 1: about as I would like to. This like MAOIs self
Speaker 1: criticism thing, And what's interesting Actually, if you listen to
Speaker 1: the podcast Behind the Bassards, they talk about a lot
Speaker 1: of cults, and one of the things that comes up
Speaker 1: a lot is not MAOIs self criticism, but is this
Speaker 1: like stand up at a circle and admit why you're
Speaker 1: like bad and fall apart from like the group's rules
Speaker 1: or whatever. Is like a way you encourage group thinking,
Speaker 1: and it is, from my point of view bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And anyone who failed to do this was all
Speaker 1: the liberal. This is something that like I feel like
Speaker 1: liberals don't quite always realize, is that, like the left
Speaker 1: wing also calls liberals liberals in a negative way, you know,
Speaker 1: like every now and then I'll say something's like liberal
Speaker 1: and people like fuck you, right winger, and I'm like what. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's during this period of growth that you start seeing
Speaker 1: the cracks that are later going to fuck it up.
Speaker 1: At least by the convenient narrative that I'm drawing and
Speaker 1: have read in other sources, the New York Lords were
Speaker 1: given full autonomy by the quote Central Committee of Chicago, right,
Speaker 1: because it still had started in Chicago, even it's bigger
Speaker 1: in New York. But New York is pretty sure that
Speaker 1: they should be the Central Committee and that the chapter
Speaker 1: shouldn't shouldn't have full autonomy, that the New York chapter
Speaker 1: should be in charge of all the other chapters, and
Speaker 1: that more discipline was needed. And also the Chicago newspaper
Speaker 1: wasn't coming out regularly enough. What are you all doing?
Speaker 1: You better get on that. So after starts getting kind
Speaker 1: of controlling, m h. And then another thing to understand
Speaker 1: about their politics, and I try to avoid, like, let's
Speaker 1: talk about Marx, right, but along with the Black Panthers,
Speaker 1: the Young Lords were a break from traditional Marxism in
Speaker 1: that they identified the lump and proletariat as the revolutionary subject,
Speaker 1: which means that I have to break down really quickly
Speaker 1: Marx's ideas about classes in which you have the proletariat,
Speaker 1: who are industrial workers in the city, they all and
Speaker 1: Marx thinks that these are the beasnis, They're the best.
Speaker 1: Everyone else sucks according to Marx. Right, then you got
Speaker 1: the bourgeoisie, a class whom no one who is alive
Speaker 1: can spell correctly, and yeah they are I still bow urgy.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I thank you spell check.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It took me a very long time to
Speaker 1: wrap my head around hierarchy.
Speaker 3: More importantly, thanks talk to speech talk to text speech
Speaker 3: apps for word.
Speaker 1: Two kids fell, Oh that's clever. Yeah, bougeoisive.
Speaker 3: Think about it.
Speaker 1: The bourgeoisie are the owning class. They don't work for
Speaker 1: a living. This is their distinguishing characteristic. Instead, they own
Speaker 1: stuff for a living. Definition of capitalism in this case
Speaker 1: being roughly the access to capital being how you make
Speaker 1: money rather than work. Right. And then you've got two
Speaker 1: other weird classes. You have the petty bourgeoisie, who are
Speaker 1: like the small business owners. They're not running the show,
Speaker 1: but their relationship to capital is different from that of
Speaker 1: a worker. Marxists generally don't like them. And then you
Speaker 1: have the lump and proletariat, who are objectively the coolest.
Speaker 1: Marx does not agree by this with this. These are
Speaker 1: the unemployed and the thieves and the beggars, and the
Speaker 1: people whose work is illegal like sex workers, the criminal class,
Speaker 1: and Marx doesn't like them, right, but the young lords
Speaker 1: and the black panthers do. Personally. I like to think
Speaker 1: that Marxist classes are like he's writing a role playing game.
Speaker 1: Instead of paladins and wizards, you have petty bourgeoisie and
Speaker 1: the lump and proletariat and shit and so from this
Speaker 1: point of view, we clearly need everyone. Maybe not the
Speaker 1: regular bourgeoisie, I don't know, but you just clearly you
Speaker 1: can't have a party of only thieves. You're only wizards.
Speaker 1: It's not as much fun. There's my class humanity statement
Speaker 1: of Oh god. Anyway, the Black Panthers like the lump
Speaker 1: and proletariat. The Young Lords like them. The New York
Speaker 1: Young Lords claim to like them. But part of what
Speaker 1: they're mad at Chicago about because the Chicago clearly comes
Speaker 1: out of them. They are they come from the criminal class.
Speaker 1: The Young Lord comes. This was not a bunch of
Speaker 1: workers sitting around being like, man, I don't like how
Speaker 1: the boss is treating me. You like how the boss
Speaker 1: is treating me. It's a bunch of car thieves who
Speaker 1: are like, let's stand up against racism and try and
Speaker 1: get everyone some health care. Yeah, And the New York
Speaker 1: Lords don't quite have quite the same background as relates
Speaker 1: to that, and so part of why they're mad at
Speaker 1: Chicago is that Chicago is still too criminal and gang
Speaker 1: like and they're not good proper revolutionaries. So by May
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy they sever ties from the Young Lord's organization
Speaker 1: of Chicago and they become the Young Lord's Party. It
Speaker 1: is very likely that the split was orchestrated by co
Speaker 1: Intel Pro, the counterintelligence program of the FBI. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: it was almost certainly encouraged by them. The disagreements existed,
Speaker 1: but co Intel Pro existed to make those disagreements grow.
Speaker 1: Right back in Chicago, Cha Cha is taking it hard.
Speaker 1: He was close friends with Fred Hampton, who had just
Speaker 1: been murdered, and now he's getting told he's too gangster
Speaker 1: for the group. He turned from a gang into an organization.
Speaker 1: But he keeps it civil and no fights breakout between
Speaker 1: the cities. So it's a break but it's not a war, right, Okay.
Speaker 1: But they've got all these political things brewing. There's all
Speaker 1: of these fractures that are starting to form. It doesn't
Speaker 1: stop them from doing really cool shit. One of the
Speaker 1: cool things they do is they get into a fight
Speaker 1: with a long standing friend of the podcast Tuberculosis. For
Speaker 1: anyone who's just learning, now, what happened when I started
Speaker 1: making this podcast is I started reading a lot more
Speaker 1: history books, and I started learning that everyone dies of tuberculosis.
Speaker 1: That's just how you die.
Speaker 3: Everyone.
Speaker 1: If you're in a history book, you either get killed
Speaker 1: by the state or you get killed by tuberculosis.
Speaker 3: You forgot the third or your lover. What there's tuberculosis
Speaker 3: the government or your lover.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: That's the trifecta. There's no other way.
Speaker 1: No, I can't see how hells I could die as
Speaker 1: long as it's not some combo move.
Speaker 3: Oh, you'd be living a really weird life.
Speaker 1: That the infiltrators like coffee into handkerchiefs and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I don't know about that government thing that
Speaker 3: seems that seems uh not not not for cause for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I wouldn't be.
Speaker 2: It would be very far from that.
Speaker 1: My plan is to not be killed by any of
Speaker 1: these things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So tuberculosis or TB as it's called by its friend friends,
Speaker 1: or consumption when it's out of the Goth night. We
Speaker 1: talked about this in our Alan Hart episode. The first
Speaker 1: ever known transman to receive gender affirming surgery saved millions
Speaker 1: of lives by revolutionizing the way that public screening was
Speaker 1: done for tuberculosis decades before today's story, specifically by using
Speaker 1: X rays to screen ahead of time. What is TB. Well,
Speaker 1: it's a bacterial infection. It's just around latently. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: pops up with symptoms, and shit, it kills about half
Speaker 1: of its victims if you actually get the symptoms. For
Speaker 1: those keeping track at home, that's about a five percent
Speaker 1: mortality rate overall, which is brutally high. Today we have
Speaker 1: antibiotics and no one dies of it anymore. Just kidding.
Speaker 1: It kills a lot of people still, mostly in other
Speaker 1: parts of the world. It killed one point five million
Speaker 1: people in twenty twenty. It is the number one deadliest
Speaker 1: infectious disease after COVID nineteen. It's the number one preventable
Speaker 1: infectious disease, preventable with vaccines, treatment with antibiotics, and screening,
Speaker 1: things like that. So everyone who dies of it is
Speaker 1: murdered by capitalism from my point of view, because you
Speaker 1: don't have to die from it except for access to care.
Speaker 1: So the young Lords they go to war against two
Speaker 1: of the biggest enemies of the show, capitalism and fucking tuberculosis.
Speaker 1: Let's go. Yeah, the real problem in the poorer areas
Speaker 1: of New York City thanks to stale air and overcrowding
Speaker 1: and lack of access to screening. So in addition to
Speaker 1: door to door lead poisoning tests, they start testing people
Speaker 1: for TB, which involves an X ray machine. So they
Speaker 1: send a petition around and it gets them use of
Speaker 1: one machine, but it's a stationary machine. They want a
Speaker 1: mobile unit. They want like a van with an X
Speaker 1: ray machine in it, like the X ray van that
Speaker 1: goes around the city already, but is inaccessible to poor
Speaker 1: people of color. One book I read says it was
Speaker 1: inaccessible because it was it operated from twelve to six
Speaker 1: pm and didn't accommodate working people's schedules. But the guy
Speaker 1: who stole the van, I listened to an interview with him. Oh,
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, steal the van. We'll get to that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like I was like, did we skip chapter?
Speaker 2: What's happening.
Speaker 1: We'll get to that. The guy who steals the van
Speaker 1: later in the story, he says in an interview that
Speaker 1: it was inaccessible because it only went to white neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: And that feels a little bit more.
Speaker 2: Truth, once again, giving a shout out to the thief
Speaker 2: the thief class.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So on June seventeenth and nineteen seventy, they
Speaker 1: steal the van, They unfurl a Puerto Rican flag on it,
Speaker 1: and they drive it off. They tipped off the press
Speaker 1: ahead of time to make sure everyone saw them steal
Speaker 1: this van. People don't do like crime like they used
Speaker 1: to for better and worse. Yeah, they parked it. They're
Speaker 1: really subtle. They parked it across the street from their
Speaker 1: office and then announced free testing for everyone. And I
Speaker 1: think the texts who worked in the van were like
Speaker 1: entirely fine with it.
Speaker 2: They're just like, whow cool, this is the coolest thing
Speaker 2: that's happened to me. Ever, I know.
Speaker 1: They'd be like, I'm so bored and now I'm part
Speaker 1: of some like crazy shit on the news and I
Speaker 1: still just get to help people for a living here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: Within hours of stealing the van, they won the director
Speaker 1: of health of the area agreed to let them keep
Speaker 1: the van and run it on the city's dime twelve
Speaker 1: hours a day every day.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: The first day they tested hundreds of people. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: around that time, well before we move them to the
Speaker 1: South Bronx, we should move everyone to these killer deals
Speaker 1: about stuff, job opportunities. You could go become an Irish
Speaker 1: cup h so many options here. Listen to these options.
Speaker 1: Don't press the forward fifteen seconds button that has no
Speaker 1: influence on anything from my point of view. Here's some ads,
Speaker 1: and we're back from those enlightening ads. I try to
Speaker 1: come up with something clever, but I got nothing. So
Speaker 1: I'll just tell you about when they moved to the
Speaker 1: South Bronx because there's yet another health epidemic for them
Speaker 1: to deal with, because they really just fucking did it all.
Speaker 1: Like I can't say.
Speaker 2: Also, like the number of issues that this community was facing,
Speaker 2: like as it just like really boggles my mind being like, wow,
Speaker 2: I grew up in that city. Yeah, and like these
Speaker 2: are all people like my parents' age, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, your parents' age, Like people like talk about lead
Speaker 1: poisoning in tuberculosis and.
Speaker 2: Streets and for sure, Yeah, and a lot of like
Speaker 2: how the Bronx was burning, you know, a lot of
Speaker 2: like faulty electricity and just you know, like a lot
Speaker 2: of issues like that.
Speaker 1: For sure, is that what that was the Bronx learning
Speaker 1: because of faulty electricity, there.
Speaker 2: Was like a lot of safety hazards, but also a
Speaker 2: lot of like some lords that were setting you know,
Speaker 2: just like wedding, Yeah, their buildings burner being the reason
Speaker 2: why their buildings were burning. Yeah, Yeah, So there was
Speaker 2: a lot of my family definitely talked a lot about
Speaker 2: these issues.
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know whether you want to say this
Speaker 1: in error. Is your family from East Harlem or is
Speaker 1: it from South Bronx, or is it.
Speaker 2: Somewhere They're actually from Chelsea? Ok yeah, they grew up
Speaker 2: in the Chelsea projects. Okay, you know they were born
Speaker 2: My dad was born and my aunt was born in
Speaker 2: Puerto Rico, but came over when they were very young.
Speaker 2: My grandfather came over and was like working at first
Speaker 2: and then was able to pay for everybody to come cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I hadn't as a white outsider in New
Speaker 1: York City, I hadn't realized the degree to which Puerto
Speaker 1: Rican City shaped the city in all different parts of
Speaker 1: the city, you know, and like the Lower east Side
Speaker 1: like doesn't even really necessarily come out much in the story,
Speaker 1: even though they had a young Lords had a chapter
Speaker 1: in the Lower east Side, even though that was a
Speaker 1: Puerto Rican neighborhood, you know, yeah at that point, which
Speaker 1: heavily influences all of the like hippie culture stuff that
Speaker 1: was happening in that area.
Speaker 2: Oh totally. Yeah. Like talking to my dad when I
Speaker 2: would mention like hanging out on the Lower east Side
Speaker 2: or Tompkins Group Park or squatting or anything you know.
Speaker 2: To him, he was just like, oh yeah, me and
Speaker 2: my friends like did all that shit, but we were
Speaker 2: cooler than.
Speaker 1: Probably he was right, like, I'm just like, yeah, but.
Speaker 2: You know, you think about the New Aurekan, the New
Speaker 2: Erekan Poets Cafe, like that's in the Lower east Side still.
Speaker 2: I don't know how, but I'm so glad that it's
Speaker 2: still with us. Yeah, and that was born out of
Speaker 2: this movement you.
Speaker 1: Know, Yeah, is New York in a name of an
Speaker 1: identity for New York Puerto Ricans? Is that the Yes?
Speaker 2: So a lot of the people that you're talking about,
Speaker 2: who are you know, joining the Young Lords at this point,
Speaker 2: who don't speak Spanish for example, Like that would be
Speaker 2: a really great representation of like a new Eurekan, although
Speaker 2: of course there are New Eurekans that do, but it's
Speaker 2: like a very specific like doesn't have extremely strong ties
Speaker 2: to the island. Like even my dad, who was born
Speaker 2: in Puerto Rico, felt like he wasn't Puerto Rican enough,
Speaker 2: and then also he was an outsider in his own city. Okay,
Speaker 2: so it's like they you know, this idea that you
Speaker 2: don't quite fit into anything because you're always a little
Speaker 2: bit of an outsider. So New Eurekan was born.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 1: I feel like the diasporic identity is like this thing
Speaker 1: that often grows in New York or at least I
Speaker 1: know that, like the diasporic identity of like Jews, Jewish
Speaker 1: people like grew in New York City in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways as an identity that was separate from anything else.
Speaker 1: It was like, this is the diasporas, like who we are.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether diaspera's are all that people use
Speaker 1: in this context or not.
Speaker 2: Oh definitely, okay, yeah. Yeah. And also there's a lot
Speaker 2: of like longing for like you know, when you talked
Speaker 2: about how the Young Words were teaching Puerto Rican history,
Speaker 2: like that was something that was I mean to this day,
Speaker 2: it's so hidden from anybody who is Puerto Rican or
Speaker 2: New Eurekan, Like just this feeling that you come from
Speaker 2: a place that is so foreign to you and you
Speaker 2: want to learn about it, but it's been hidden or
Speaker 2: kept away.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's like because America has this like public
Speaker 1: school systems has this like one monolithic educational idea of
Speaker 1: what we teach people, you know, and it's just like,
Speaker 1: rather than teach people Puerto Rican history, we teach people
Speaker 1: about like Paul Revere or whatever the fuck, you know. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's just interesting because like a really high percentage
Speaker 1: of people who live in the United States are not
Speaker 1: descended from the Revolutionary war fighters, you know, yeah, or
Speaker 1: have at least other just whatever. Anyway, Yeah, I'm I
Speaker 1: guess I should start a podcast where I talk about
Speaker 1: history that hasn't talked about as much. So we want
Speaker 1: to help me do that.
Speaker 3: This entire podcast is just propaganda, and it's you just
Speaker 3: advertising for your own show, on your own show.
Speaker 1: Incredible. Self promotion is awesome. I haven't worked the name
Speaker 1: of my book and any of these scripts. I'm very
Speaker 1: proud of that. Okay, so they've just stolen a van.
Speaker 1: That makes it very like not much happened. They just
Speaker 1: changed the way.
Speaker 2: I just love how much they like play chicken with
Speaker 2: the city. It's like, yeah, of course, we could like
Speaker 2: go to jail for a really long time for a
Speaker 2: grand theft auto or something, or maybe they'll just give
Speaker 2: us what we want.
Speaker 1: I know, I know, I can't imagine any of this working.
Speaker 1: Then it keeps working.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So they go to South Bronx, or rather a
Speaker 1: branch opens in the South Bronx, And I don't know
Speaker 1: how many individuals are specifically moving, right, And there's a
Speaker 1: problem that needs to be dealt with in South Bronx heroin.
Speaker 1: The state wasn't doing a very good job of helping
Speaker 1: people who are addicted. Instead, it criminalized people. The South
Speaker 1: Bronx and Spring nineteen seventy had the highest heroin addiction
Speaker 1: rate in the world. Fifteen percent of people who lived
Speaker 1: there were addicted to heroin, according to one number I heard.
Speaker 1: Other numbers that I heard included the South Bronx had
Speaker 1: a mortality rate fifty percent higher than the rest of
Speaker 1: the country, syphilis and gonorrhea six and four times the
Speaker 1: national average, and overdose was the leading cause of death
Speaker 1: among adolescents and young adults.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, And.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of thing that we see reflected
Speaker 1: more later in the opioid crisis on a wider scale. Right,
Speaker 1: So the first thing that the Young Lords did, They're like,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna deal with heroin addiction. That's what
Speaker 1: our community needs, that's what we're gonna do. They got
Speaker 1: an apartment, they cleaned it up nice, and they started
Speaker 1: screening drug users for commitment to sobriety. And then two
Speaker 1: young lords would keep watch over They just set up
Speaker 1: a detox center just or a cold Turkey center. Really,
Speaker 1: this is their first first attempt. Two young lords would
Speaker 1: keep watch over the detoxing people for twenty four hours
Speaker 1: a day and help them quit cold turkey. Then each
Speaker 1: person in recovery was assigned a mentor who was available
Speaker 1: to them twenty four hours a day for the next
Speaker 1: six months.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They also robbed drug dealers and scared them off the block,
Speaker 1: which got the mafia mad at them, but they somehow
Speaker 1: had enough power that they didn't get any No one
Speaker 1: got killed as a result of this that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2: This is so wild to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Yeah, I keeps.
Speaker 2: Waiting for, like, when is someone going to get assassinated
Speaker 2: by one of the many powerful forces who don't want
Speaker 2: change to happen.
Speaker 1: I I am not aware of it happening. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: like and I one of the things that often underlies
Speaker 1: a lot of history that doesn't get left in like,
Speaker 1: is people working with the mafia or like all these
Speaker 1: different radicals like working with different power structures, right, and
Speaker 1: that's like often left out because it's not as like
Speaker 1: sexy or it's criminal or whatever. Right, So probably they're
Speaker 1: doing something that is making the mafia not attack them.
Speaker 1: But I believe the mafia is mad at them, So
Speaker 1: I believe that that something is not working with the mafia. Okay,
Speaker 1: if I were to guess, and I expect I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: it probably is just literally like we are a scary
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of us, and we are tied
Speaker 1: in with the panthers, and we are tied in with
Speaker 1: them up against the wall motherfuckers, and yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: city is full of angry revolutionaries. That's my best guess.
Speaker 1: But I don't Yeah, you know, I know it. Around
Speaker 1: the same time, for example, the up against wall motherfuckers
Speaker 1: are like scaring off mafia hits by having more guns
Speaker 1: than the people trying to kill them, you know. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so they're robbing drug dealers and scaring them off the block,
Speaker 1: which is also really hard to morally understand in a
Speaker 1: situation that predates the War on drugs, right because right now,
Speaker 1: during the War on drugs, when people talk about like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna like, go fuck up all the drug dealers.
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, you're gonna go fuck up drug users
Speaker 1: who are like fucked by society. Congratulations, you're the same
Speaker 1: as the fucking war on drugs. Yeah, but when we're
Speaker 1: not in that context, I don't fucking know. This is
Speaker 1: like straight up, I don't know, you know. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: the cold Turkey approach wasn't gonna work with everyone. The
Speaker 1: medical problems that people are facing were bigger than just heroin,
Speaker 1: so they needed something more. They needed something bigger, like
Speaker 1: a hospital. The South Bronx had won hospital. Lincoln Hospital
Speaker 1: was built in eighteen ninety eight, the same year that
Speaker 1: the US stole Puerto Rico from the Spanish. This is
Speaker 1: the place that I was saying. It's called the butcher shop.
Speaker 1: It's the wrong leg amputated whoops shop with lead paint
Speaker 1: for the children to eat. And it's the kind of
Speaker 1: place where the er doesn't do triage. There's no translators
Speaker 1: on staff, no accommodations for non English speaking patients. But
Speaker 1: the best part, and this is not sarcasm, the actual
Speaker 1: good part was that some reformers had set up a
Speaker 1: fairly groundbreaking mental health clinic there that emphasized talk therapy
Speaker 1: and actually hearing patients out. Oh wow, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of a battleground spot already. In March nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: before the Lords arrived, the Lords did a lot, and
Speaker 1: they deserve it a ton of the credit. But by
Speaker 1: tying into existing infrastructures and working with other groups. In
Speaker 1: March nineteen sixty nine, the Mental Health clinic had taken
Speaker 1: itself over. The workers, mostly people of color, had seized
Speaker 1: the building and kicked out the director and his upper staff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The doctors, including white doctors, which is most of them
Speaker 1: this is the late sixties, supported the action and kept
Speaker 1: working and they held it for three days, and the
Speaker 1: Black Panthers ran security and brought supporters. This is before
Speaker 1: the Panther twenty one trial took the wind out of
Speaker 1: the New York City Panthers.
Speaker 2: Just would like to say that I am really loving
Speaker 2: these stories of like doctors standing with their staff and
Speaker 2: like standing up to administration and their bosses. It's really
Speaker 2: I encourage all the doctors out there who might be
Speaker 2: listening to do that, Yeah, as we really need it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this particular takeover was when the city I don't
Speaker 1: even think the mystery is the hospital. The city was
Speaker 1: like any doctors who practice here will lose their licenses.
Speaker 1: But the action did get a bunch of workers have
Speaker 1: been fired, and it got the fired workers on fired
Speaker 1: and the director was transferred out. So it was like
Speaker 1: successful to some degree. Right by nineteen seventy some of
Speaker 1: the workers there were young lords themselves, and some of
Speaker 1: these workers set up a complaint table for workers and
Speaker 1: patients in the er. Twelve hours a day they were
Speaker 1: there with this table. On weekends they were there twenty
Speaker 1: four hours a day, wow. And they kept getting kicked out,
Speaker 1: and they kept coming right back in. There's like interviewsing
Speaker 1: in here about like the people like kind of being
Speaker 1: friends with the security guards, like I'm kicking you out again,
Speaker 1: and they're like I'm going to be right back in
Speaker 1: and like all right, have fun, you know. So they
Speaker 1: set up this complaint table. They get two thousand complaints
Speaker 1: in a month, wow, and they just start acting on
Speaker 1: them like all the ones that they can. They just
Speaker 1: direct action, get the goods and all privacy screens in
Speaker 1: the bathrooms. They move trash off the street outside and
Speaker 1: into the director's office because this is what you do
Speaker 1: with trash.
Speaker 3: WHOA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the medical staff who were part of this organization.
Speaker 1: I think this is atrun, but I'm not. I'm not
Speaker 1: one hundred percent certain the larger organization that's doing this.
Speaker 1: The medical staff just start doing triage in the er,
Speaker 1: like when they're not at work. They're just like, we're triaging.
Speaker 1: Fuck this an er needs triage, which I did not
Speaker 1: learn this word until I was an adult. Triage is
Speaker 1: when you determine which patients are the most injured and
Speaker 1: who needs medical care most immediately. So they put pressure
Speaker 1: on administration for better care for the workers, but there
Speaker 1: was a wall. They couldn't get anything systemic fixed. They
Speaker 1: could only like band aids. People are like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: just a band aid. Like band aids are great, they
Speaker 1: stop bleeding, you can keep infection out, like yeah, but
Speaker 1: they don't address the systemic issues. So they did what
Speaker 1: they had to do with a really interesting security culture method.
Speaker 1: On July thirteenth, nineteen seventy, one hundred and fifty young
Speaker 1: lords met in an apartment and locked themselves in so
Speaker 1: that no infiltrators could get out and give anyone a
Speaker 1: heads up because they knew they were infiltrated. It's the
Speaker 1: fucking it's nineteen seventy, you know, a huh, And so
Speaker 1: not all of them knew the plan going in. They
Speaker 1: all get told the plan, but they can't call out.
Speaker 1: At three thirty am, they pile into a U haul
Speaker 1: and a bunch of cars. They backed up to the
Speaker 1: hospital loading dock. They opened the doors. They stormed the
Speaker 1: hospital with nun chucks.
Speaker 2: Oh, this episode brought to you by nonsense dunchucks. I
Speaker 2: know how cool they are.
Speaker 1: I know, for some reason, most retelies leave the nun
Speaker 1: trucks out. That's a mistake, hely nunchuck radicals, you get it, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll tell my one nunchuck story please.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm like twenty two or something, and I'm like living
Speaker 1: in the basement of this house with some hipsters and
Speaker 1: they have this party and I'm avoiding it, hanging out
Speaker 1: in the basement, and at one point someone comes down.
Speaker 1: At this time, I'm like, all I'm doing is like
Speaker 1: studying martial arts and trying to stop a war and
Speaker 1: all that shit. And they come down and they're like, Magpie,
Speaker 1: this guy won't leave and he's harassing people. He's like
Speaker 1: harassing this woman. You have to kick him out. And
Speaker 1: I'm like okay, And so I'm like in my my
Speaker 1: sleeping dress and I just like walk upstairs with the
Speaker 1: pair of nunchucks. And I'm like the weird kid an
Speaker 1: address from the basement who hasn't been at the party,
Speaker 1: and I just like walk up. I think I have
Speaker 1: a beard at the time, and I'm just like, hey,
Speaker 1: you better leave, and the guy's like I'm already gone,
Speaker 1: and he runs away. I don't know how to use nunchucks.
Speaker 1: I do not know how to use nunchucks at this
Speaker 1: point in my life. I just have them.
Speaker 2: I Mean it's definitely a power move of like who's
Speaker 2: going to assume that you don't know how to use them?
Speaker 2: You know, like if you're pulling them out just visually,
Speaker 2: you'd be like that person knows how to use those. Yeah, Like.
Speaker 1: Bluffy is a very effective as we.
Speaker 2: Learned from the Young Lords, Like sometimes you just gotta
Speaker 2: try it.
Speaker 1: Storm a hospital with nunchucks. What could go wrong? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they secure the entrances, they barricade shit, they still
Speaker 1: let workers and patients in and out of the building,
Speaker 1: just they're controlling it. They set up screening clinics for
Speaker 1: tuberculosis and lead poisoning anemia. They set up a daycare
Speaker 1: in a classroom because one of their whole things is
Speaker 1: that they believe that kids should get childcare while their
Speaker 1: sole caretaker is in the hospital. It's wild.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: They hung up a banner welcome to the People's Hospital
Speaker 1: and a Puerto Rican flag. They hadn't tipped off the
Speaker 1: hospital workers or it wouldn't have worked, right, But the
Speaker 1: hospital workers were down. The physicians backed them. They hated
Speaker 1: working for the butcher's shop because they became doctors to
Speaker 1: help people.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Even the chief administrator was like, well, I mean they
Speaker 1: kind of got a point, like, wow, no one likes
Speaker 1: working at the butcher shop, you know, except like Sweeney
Speaker 1: Todd or whatever. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: We really like.
Speaker 1: You did that one for you apparently. So they call
Speaker 1: for a press conference. It was so perfectly timed. So
Speaker 1: they call for a press conference and they explain themselves
Speaker 1: to the press, and they give their demands, which is
Speaker 1: like door to door healthcare, better pay for workers, daycare
Speaker 1: for patients and workers, hurry up and build a new hospital.
Speaker 1: I did not find a name for this action. I
Speaker 1: assume it was the Lincoln Offensive or the Hospital Offensive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they held it for about twelve hours. The negotiations
Speaker 1: of the police were going very badly. Undercovers were trying
Speaker 1: to infiltrate into the hospital, so they left and rather
Speaker 1: than letting themselves get mass arrested, they put on white
Speaker 1: coats and slipped out with the doctors covered by supporters
Speaker 1: from inside and outside. Yeah. Oh, and once the cops
Speaker 1: realized they'd been duped, they combed the area for the lords,
Speaker 1: but people in the neighborhoods took them in. Only two
Speaker 1: participants out of one hundred and fifty two hundred participants
Speaker 1: got fucking caught. Wow, good fucking odds. I would take
Speaker 1: those odds seriously. Nothing changed immediately. Then three days later,
Speaker 1: a patient named Carmen Rodriguez died during an abortion at
Speaker 1: the hospital. The resident, a student doctor, didn't look at
Speaker 1: her chart in her pre existing conditions and performed the
Speaker 1: wrong kind of abortion, and then when she responded badly,
Speaker 1: doubled down on mistreating her, and a few days later,
Speaker 1: July nineteenth, nineteen seventy, she died of negligence.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, this is something I've read about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's fucking heartbreaking. Like I I don't know
Speaker 1: just especially doubling down and shit especially like.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's also just a really painful history of
Speaker 2: sterilization of Puerto Rican women, and just to it was
Speaker 2: a part of what like the women of the Young
Speaker 2: Lords would talk about in when they would talk about
Speaker 2: the women's movement and women's liberation, as they would make
Speaker 2: a very clear distinction between upper class women's liberation and
Speaker 2: how like the Young Lord women of course, you know,
Speaker 2: stood for abortion rights, but they also were like, we
Speaker 2: have to be very clear about our experience of you know,
Speaker 2: being forcefully sterilized like a lot of work and women
Speaker 2: getting sterilized in who worked in factories and just without
Speaker 2: their knowledge.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's just a part of the history, and
Speaker 2: it's just such a recent history, yeah, you know of
Speaker 2: Puerto Rican women.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, It's something that I didn't really understand when
Speaker 1: I first started doing some of this research about like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's doing well now, I feel self conscious
Speaker 1: about it. But I did an EPISO about the Jaine
Speaker 1: Collective Okay, Sophie that you can go listen to so fun.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I didn't realize going
Speaker 1: into that research was how I had only read about
Speaker 1: the you know, the Panthers and black liberationists had very
Speaker 1: complicated relationships with abortion rights because the pill. Oh interesting, yeah,
Speaker 1: because they're like, we're trying to avoid a cultural genocide.
Speaker 1: You have to like freedom to reproduce was what more
Speaker 1: of them were fighting for as compared to more white
Speaker 1: women were fighting for freedom to control to not reproduce,
Speaker 1: and any logical look at it is we want bodily autonomy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, but childcare like goes into
Speaker 2: it as well, because from what I read, like women
Speaker 2: and the young lords would talk about how working class
Speaker 2: people deserve to be able to have children and that
Speaker 2: include that means that we will need to set up
Speaker 2: community childcare, you know, because that is the only way
Speaker 2: that we can that if you're not incredibly wealthy. They
Speaker 2: were just saying it shouldn't be a barrier to be
Speaker 2: to starting a family, yeah, which you know, yeah, so
Speaker 2: it's just it's a really yeah, it's this painful part
Speaker 2: of it just really moves me that there was so
Speaker 2: much like mind blowing growth and like just what these
Speaker 2: people are experiencing, you know, like so quickly within a generation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, well that's an awkward place that I've to
Speaker 1: stick an ad transition, but I do. So here's some
Speaker 1: ads and we're back and yeah, we're talking about how
Speaker 1: Carmen Rodriguez died at the hospital three days after the takeover.
Speaker 1: And so this led to the most enduring and wide
Speaker 1: reaching legacy of the Young Lord's Hrum. The radical group
Speaker 1: of medical professionals that the Young Lords are part of.
Speaker 1: They draft a new document and they call it the
Speaker 1: Patient's Bill of Rights, and it says you deserve to
Speaker 1: be treated respectfully, to have your treatment explained, that you
Speaker 1: can refuse treatment, that you can see your chart, that
Speaker 1: people deserve door to door preventative care, that people can
Speaker 1: pick their doctors. That you should get free food with
Speaker 1: your care, that there should be daycare, and that healthcare
Speaker 1: should be free. This is obviously not I know, you
Speaker 1: look at that and you're like that, Yeah, I'm in like,
Speaker 1: this is not the patient's Bill of rights we have
Speaker 1: today in the US. Specifically, the free stuff part didn't
Speaker 1: really survive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, still working on that.
Speaker 1: But some of this other stuff I have always taken
Speaker 1: for granted. I mean I didn't. I don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about my own family history too much, but it's
Speaker 1: like it makes sense to me that of course you
Speaker 1: get to have your treatment explained. Of course you can
Speaker 1: refuse treatment. Of course you can see your chart, like,
Speaker 1: of course you can pick your doctor. Why would I
Speaker 1: mean again, complications around financial barriers, but it of course
Speaker 1: you can refuse treatment. It's like such a clear example
Speaker 1: of that that looking back, you're like, what do you mean?
Speaker 1: Why would anyone ever have thought it was okay to
Speaker 1: sterilize someone without their consent?
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, how is that not that? Yeah, that's called
Speaker 2: something else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So they start pushing for this bill of rights.
Speaker 1: And one thing that I find so fascinating about the
Speaker 1: story is that, you know, the Young Lords aren't reformists.
Speaker 1: They believe in a socialist revolution, but by not coming
Speaker 1: to the table to beg for scraps, but by demanding everything,
Speaker 1: they accomplished more reform than reformists tend to, which I
Speaker 1: would say, keep in mind, reformists, you should pretend to
Speaker 1: be socialist revolutionaries if you want reform.
Speaker 2: Make Italian bake it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So they do this, but they're still they haven't
Speaker 1: gotten their health, their their harm reduction clinic, which they
Speaker 1: haven't called that yet, but leads to that kind of framing.
Speaker 1: So they have a better idea than their cold Turkey clinic.
Speaker 1: Nothing the other day, it was bad. It just didn't
Speaker 1: work for everyone. They got link In to sponsor a
Speaker 1: drug detoc center. They succeeded by asking nicely, just kidding.
Speaker 1: On November sixth, nineteen seventy, they occupied the sixth floor
Speaker 1: of one of the buildings of the hospital and set
Speaker 1: it up with the help of doctors, into a detox facility. Wow,
Speaker 1: fifteen people were back. Yeah exactly, Yeah, fifteen people were arrested.
Speaker 1: So then other one other people came back the next
Speaker 1: day and they set it up again, and this time
Speaker 1: it stuck. This gets called the first harm reduction clinic,
Speaker 1: and they used a novel approach in which addiction was
Speaker 1: seen as a social problem and not as individual weakness. Oh.
Speaker 1: Soon they're treating six hundred people a week at this
Speaker 1: clinic and it and it starts as a methodone clinic
Speaker 1: and becomes an acupuncture clinic. And it lasted for eight years.
Speaker 1: It outlasts the young lords, and it ends up staffed
Speaker 1: by many people who'd been through the treatment themselves.
Speaker 2: And so this is the beginning of not a acupuncture
Speaker 2: Please explain, Okay, I do not know what nada nada
Speaker 2: stands for. I will just say that not a detox
Speaker 2: no wait, no, right, it's something that i've It's like
Speaker 2: ear acupuncture that I've received when I was like, you know,
Speaker 2: like they used to do it at the drop in
Speaker 2: center when I was like a young, homeless teenager, and
Speaker 2: it's I didn't know that this was created by the
Speaker 2: Young Lords or that this just you know, the treatment
Speaker 2: was like formed with the Young Lords, and it was like,
Speaker 2: how do we bring accessible effective acupuncture to working people
Speaker 2: or lower class people?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am I believe that that is the case,
Speaker 1: that this is. These are the pioneers of doing that
Speaker 1: in the United States.
Speaker 2: So cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they just fucking did everything. I actually didn't
Speaker 1: end up writing into the script more about how the
Speaker 1: patients of Bill of Rights developed out of what they did.
Speaker 1: There's so much that I didn't get to, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like a I didn't get to follow these threads
Speaker 1: as far as I want, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so let's kind.
Speaker 1: Of talk about their decline. Unfortunately, but they have so
Speaker 1: much lasting impact. So whatever if you write high for
Speaker 1: two years and then burn out and change everything along
Speaker 1: the way. So I fucking goes.
Speaker 2: And we can learn from him them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so these two years are kind of the high
Speaker 1: point of the young lords. Coen tail Pro is fucking
Speaker 1: with them really hard. They found an easy target in
Speaker 1: the culture of obsessive discipline and self criticism and central authority.
Speaker 1: That was I think building and growing, but I could
Speaker 1: be wrong. That could be the read of stuff I'm reading.
Speaker 1: One of the central leaders, Philippe Luciano, he's practically the
Speaker 1: face of the group. He was demoted after cheating on
Speaker 1: his wife, who was one of the other leaders. They
Speaker 1: had set really strict rules about who could talk to
Speaker 1: the press, and so a co intel Pro agent pretended
Speaker 1: to be one of the Bronx leaders speaking to the press,
Speaker 1: like Hey, I'm this guy and I'm speaking to the press.
Speaker 1: And then so then the other leaders are so mad
Speaker 1: that this guy spoke to the press even though they
Speaker 1: have strict rules about who can speak to the press,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't on the approved.
Speaker 2: List because I wasn't him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he's in trouble. And oh and the thing
Speaker 1: that he supposedly spoke to the press about was about
Speaker 1: how Philippe had been demoted because he was a male
Speaker 1: chauvinist with unclear politics. So they're like stirring up the shit, right.
Speaker 2: Which is like on his Wikipedia page because I looked
Speaker 2: it up.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I thought he's a male choveness who was yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the quote. So it's interesting to know, yeah,
Speaker 2: where this is coming from.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like, and he overall co intail pro
Speaker 1: likes to find existing cracks and expand them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But so you can look at that two ways. We
Speaker 1: could be like, well, we're vulnerable to federal infiltration if
Speaker 1: we have sexists, which is true. You can also look
Speaker 1: go out as we're vulnerable to federal we're vulnerable to
Speaker 1: this shit if we're so quick to well, now get
Speaker 1: into murky waters. But like you know, we're so quick
Speaker 1: to like get mad at everyone about these things, and
Speaker 1: we have so many controls about all of these things,
Speaker 1: you know, And so it's like demoting a leader because
Speaker 1: he's sexist is not bad, but the way it was
Speaker 1: handled was manipulated by the FEDS. Most likely within a month,
Speaker 1: he left the organization that he'd started or had a
Speaker 1: hand in starting. Yeah, things start to get darker. On
Speaker 1: October seventeenth, nineteen seventy, the young Lord Julio Roldin. He's
Speaker 1: found it hanging in a cell in the tombs, and
Speaker 1: he's one of eight quote suicides that year in the tombs,
Speaker 1: one of whom had somehow fractured his own skull while
Speaker 1: hanging himself, if you believe the police, which I don't.
Speaker 1: So when Julio died, a thousand people came to his viewing.
Speaker 1: At his funeral march the onlookers chanted and this chant
Speaker 1: rules Fuego, Fuego, fuego, Los Yankees Kia, and fuego fire, fire, fire,
Speaker 1: The Yankees want some fire. Whoa, which is hard as fuck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, They're like, oh you want you want some fun?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So it's at this point in the narratives that I've
Speaker 1: read that they pick up the gun more literally. Okay,
Speaker 1: The funeral stops for a second viewing at that Methodist
Speaker 1: church they'd once occupied with nothing but non trucks and
Speaker 1: community support. They go into the church, they open the casket.
Speaker 1: Alongside his body is an arsenal of guns.
Speaker 2: In the casket.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's how they hit it. Yeah, that's how they
Speaker 1: got into the church.
Speaker 2: Whoa.
Speaker 1: They stuffed his casket full of full of weapons and
Speaker 1: they use it to occupy the church. Their first and
Speaker 1: foremost demand was an independent investigation into Julio Roldon's death.
Speaker 1: The other demands were, let us set up a legal
Speaker 1: defense center here, and also the city needs to let
Speaker 1: clergymen visit people in prison and investigate prison conditions. And
Speaker 1: so a diverse group of clergy took the demand to
Speaker 1: the city. The city was like, you know, fuck you.
Speaker 1: So then eighteen clergy members joined the armed occupation because
Speaker 1: they were like, he's not listening to us. You're the
Speaker 1: only way to get anything fucking done. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: started this off by being like, oh, they're getting this darker.
Speaker 1: It's during the decline. I feel like I almost I
Speaker 1: feel kind of bad using this as like because it's
Speaker 1: an escalation, but it's not. I am not putting moral
Speaker 1: judgment on this particular choice and escalation. Yeah, right. They
Speaker 1: weren't trying to go down in a blaze of glory,
Speaker 1: and they started negotiations. Older women from the neighborhood secreted
Speaker 1: out the guns and pieces basically like because they were like,
Speaker 1: we're going fucking down. We don't want to all get murdered.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, piece by piece, all the guns get disappeared,
Speaker 1: negotiations picked up. The city gave in and started an
Speaker 1: independent investigation into the death of Julio Rolden, and the
Speaker 1: independent report was clear Julio did hang himself, and at
Speaker 1: least according this investigation, in twenty seven pages, some excerpted
Speaker 1: in The New York Times, it said, basically, in a paraphrase,
Speaker 1: he killed himself because the Tombs is a fucking nightmare
Speaker 1: pit that drives people to suicide. And mainstream news articles
Speaker 1: basically were saying like, yeah, sometimes suicide is murder. This
Speaker 1: is such a case. You put someone in this terrible
Speaker 1: of a situation, you are killing them. Even if Julio
Speaker 1: most likely hanged himself, I bet that one who cracked
Speaker 1: his own scald and fucking hang himself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that doesn't sound like a.
Speaker 1: They held the church for two months until December nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: a year after the last time they held the church,
Speaker 1: you know, and they did their thing there. They fed people,
Speaker 1: they offered free legal help. Radical priests started showing up
Speaker 1: and doing stuff there, but the organization started to decline
Speaker 1: after this. They follow a familiar course. To quote author
Speaker 1: Johanna Fernandez, the movements were on the path of decline.
Speaker 1: Others saw mounting state repression as a reason to embrace
Speaker 1: the right to self defense within their relatively small groups,
Speaker 1: which they confused with the defense of the masses in
Speaker 1: their communities. Amid the disorientation and siege mentality produced by
Speaker 1: state repression, radicals became somewhat isolated from their communities. They
Speaker 1: began to see themselves as enlightened actors. Before long, they
Speaker 1: began to substitute the painstaking task of grassroots mobilization with
Speaker 1: heroic acts of sacrifice taken on behalf of quote the people.
Speaker 1: The central leadership had a closed retreat just for itself
Speaker 1: to figure out what's going wrong, why things are getting bad,
Speaker 1: and they decide that the answer is that they need
Speaker 1: to centralize more power. They decided at the retreat that
Speaker 1: the social services move was the wrong one and instead
Speaker 1: they should focus on leading a revolution to free Puerto Rico,
Speaker 1: and basically are like, if you're real revolutionaries, this is
Speaker 1: what you care about, not this volunteerism, which means we're
Speaker 1: shifting over to fundraising. And now that's what we're going
Speaker 1: to do here in the United States is fundraise and
Speaker 1: relocate organizers to Puerto Rico and the rank and file
Speaker 1: of the Young Lords aren't really excited about this, And
Speaker 1: actually I think some of it probably has to do
Speaker 1: with some of what you're talking about, like New Eyorekan identity,
Speaker 1: and it was just from the island.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very I mean, I'm sure some of them had
Speaker 2: connection to the island, you know, but definitely strange move
Speaker 2: to go far away and then try to free people
Speaker 2: over there who could. If they're going to free themselves,
Speaker 2: they should probably free themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So their membership starts to decline. It
Speaker 1: didn't help that they got really paranoid about co intel Pro,
Speaker 1: which is not their fault. That is literally the purpose
Speaker 1: of co intel Pro totally, and they started to purge
Speaker 1: people without evidence, especially people who were critical of this
Speaker 1: new change in focus. So they dropped from a thousand
Speaker 1: members to two hundred members and not very long at all.
Speaker 1: They were not well received in Puerto Rico. They showed
Speaker 1: up in fatigues and berets, and this didn't go over
Speaker 1: as a powerful symbol of working class militancy. It just
Speaker 1: confused people. The Nationalist Party that they showed up to
Speaker 1: help didn't really like them. Most of the independence movements
Speaker 1: at the time there were rich and white, oh wow.
Speaker 1: And they also white within the Puerto Rican context, probably
Speaker 1: not the United States context, well the mainland. And also
Speaker 1: they were like, Budsy, you can't just show up out
Speaker 1: of nowhere and tell us you're going to free us.
Speaker 1: And they were outsiders. They knew how to organize in
Speaker 1: New York City really well. On the island, they met
Speaker 1: with little success. They did do stuff. It was earnest.
Speaker 1: By June nineteen seventy one, two of the three New
Speaker 1: York City offices shut their doors. They switched ideological focuses again,
Speaker 1: and this time they switched to a workerist attitude, meaning
Speaker 1: the lump and proletariat, the thieves and stuff. They're no
Speaker 1: longer the shit, so now we're all the workers. But
Speaker 1: there's a problem here. Being a young Lord was a
Speaker 1: full time twenty four to seven commitment, which means workers
Speaker 1: hadn't joined. It was the unemployed or the soon to
Speaker 1: be unemployed. Students, youth, and criminals were primarily who the
Speaker 1: young Lord's recruited from. So they didn't get workers, they
Speaker 1: just lost lumpin. So they went out and tried to
Speaker 1: get jobs in industry to go organize people, which kind
Speaker 1: of went over, like showing up in Puerto Rico. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they got more rigid and dogmatic, and they spiraled. They
Speaker 1: tried to solve it in nineteen seventy two by having
Speaker 1: a forty day course of Marxist study, in which they
Speaker 1: discussed in read marks for six hours a day and
Speaker 1: tried to out revolutionary each other. This further alienated them
Speaker 1: from everyone. No, I know, I know, and it's like,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's another read of this, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but like.
Speaker 2: Also dealing with immense pressure and like yeah, like yeah,
Speaker 2: it's so easy for us to be like and co
Speaker 2: entergrow was happening. It's like they didn't know the thing
Speaker 2: people knew, you know, just learned. But ah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: but the paranoia and yeah.
Speaker 1: So they tried to solve their further alienation from everyone
Speaker 1: by centralizing the authority from a central leadership to a
Speaker 1: central leader, a woman named Gloria Fontanas. And then they
Speaker 1: kicked out all the people who had gone to Puerto Rico.
Speaker 1: Because the people who had gone to Puerto Rico were like, hey,
Speaker 1: this isn't working, we shouldn't do this, but central leadership
Speaker 1: was like, Nope, you've got to stay the course, some
Speaker 1: of the leadership flew down there and barged in and
Speaker 1: yelled at everyone for betraying the movement by by betraying
Speaker 1: their authority, and called them the enemies of the people.
Speaker 1: The Young Lord's Party changed their name to Puerto Rican
Speaker 1: Revolutionary Workers Organization, which isn't so catchy. They demoted their
Speaker 1: central leader for being too petty bourgeoisie. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of the tail spin of the New York chapter. As
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, Chicago kept going, and individuals
Speaker 1: from all of this right and like people still doing
Speaker 1: things as Young Lords did a lot of stuff. Chicago,
Speaker 1: in particular, their moment seemed kind of gone, and I
Speaker 1: don't know enough to do the rest of it real justice.
Speaker 1: A lot of Chicago Young Lords sort of move into
Speaker 1: the electoral sphere, are involved in getting I think, I
Speaker 1: want to say Chicago's first black mayor elected. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: like ten years later or so. It's not in the scripts.
Speaker 1: I don't have the numbers in front of me. A
Speaker 1: ton of them stayed really radical and keep kept doing
Speaker 1: good work. I don't really want to linger on their fall.
Speaker 1: I want to stay with most of what they did,
Speaker 1: but I will mention one of the young Lords, one
Speaker 1: of their lawyers who helped them out a lot. He
Speaker 1: went on to become a famous man.
Speaker 2: Oh no, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: The Republican Fox News host. Oh my god, her name,
Speaker 1: his name is her Alda Rivera.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, taking my fucking head. I prefer to
Speaker 2: remember Huan Gonzales instead. Yeah, co Steve Democracy now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, and fucking and your
Speaker 1: uncle who fucking quit. Yeah yeah, he's not actually related.
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to see about that. Okay, Okay, I'm
Speaker 2: scared of DNA websites, so I don't do that, but
Speaker 2: I'll do some I'll do some googling, yeah, and find him,
Speaker 2: write him a random email.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, no. And it's like every some cliche. I
Speaker 1: learned a long time ago that like every story is
Speaker 1: a tragedy if you don't know when to end it,
Speaker 1: you know, because like all of us die, right, everything passes,
Speaker 1: But god damn it, that's so much done.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And also there are so many of these members
Speaker 2: who even if they didn't get famous or something, you know,
Speaker 2: there were still like incredible community activists and yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: are doing or making an amazing art. One woman made
Speaker 2: a really great documentary called That's Really Great on YouTube.
Speaker 2: So they're still out there and there's still total badasses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so fucking good. I listened to a bunch
Speaker 1: of different interviews where yeah, you can still listen to
Speaker 1: interviews where like the guy who stole the van, who's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we stole the van, and like the woman who like
Speaker 1: staffed the table in the host in Lincoln Hospital and
Speaker 1: just was like every day I'm gonna sit in the
Speaker 1: butcher shop and let people tell me what's wrong here,
Speaker 1: you know, like still alive, like still fucking yeah. Well
Speaker 1: that's ah, that's the Young Lords. That's the first four
Speaker 1: partter I ever wrote. The second one we recorded, but
Speaker 1: I don't know any any other final.
Speaker 2: Well, no, I think we said it all. I guess.
Speaker 2: You know. For me, what I really took away from
Speaker 2: learning about the Young Lords is just is how important
Speaker 2: it was for them and it is for us to
Speaker 2: listen to the folks that live around us, to listen
Speaker 2: to people who you know, if you're someone like me
Speaker 2: who's an artist, I think it's really important for me
Speaker 2: to listen to people who have to fucking work every
Speaker 2: day and or are much older than me or you know.
Speaker 2: I think that was something that I really inspired me
Speaker 2: about them is their ability in the beginning to listen
Speaker 2: to their community about what they wanted and needed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and just like create a fucking to
Speaker 1: do list and just started checking boxes off seriously.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And also the Berets were cool, let's just.
Speaker 1: Say it, and first organized by a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: who was like, I need fucking I need to like
Speaker 1: throw a bunch of dance shows to like make money
Speaker 1: to get us all cool black and for the whim. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: if people want to listen to you, I will say
Speaker 1: everyone should go listen to the song Polente. You should
Speaker 1: look it up on YouTube so you can watch the
Speaker 1: video p A l e n t E. I don't
Speaker 1: know where the p A l a n t e
Speaker 1: a n t e. Yeah, apologize.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a great music video directed by my friend
Speaker 2: Chris Murk, who's an incredible director. My dad is in it,
Speaker 2: which is really cool to see him pop up in there,
Speaker 2: and a lot of there's the Pedro Pietri uh an
Speaker 2: excerpt from his his poem Puerto Rican Obituary. And I
Speaker 2: encourage anybody to just like go down the rabbit hole
Speaker 2: of like how much amazing stuff was created from this movement,
Speaker 2: like the new Eekan Poets Cafe and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's your new album called?
Speaker 2: Well, my new album. I just finished recording it, so
Speaker 2: I'm not going to reveal the name yet.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm sorry I timed this past.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Okay, it's okay. Uh, it's going to come out.
Speaker 2: I hope it comes out sometime next year. I haven't
Speaker 2: gotten the rough mixes back yet, so I'm going kind
Speaker 2: of crazy because I want to hear what I did.
Speaker 1: Okay, So this is what you're about to tour on.
Speaker 2: No, I'm still touring on my last record. My last
Speaker 2: record is called Life on Earth. It came out last February,
Speaker 2: and I'll be out there playing music like on the
Speaker 2: West Coast in May cool, and then in July. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be playing Portland cool. In July. I'll
Speaker 2: be playing all around like the Midwest and stuff sick. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So come see us, buy some merch, help us out.
Speaker 2: We're it's tough out there, hanging in there.
Speaker 1: Hasn't been a good couple of years for career musicians.
Speaker 2: Is that what you're saying my god, Yeah, I get like,
Speaker 2: you know, a glimmer of a penny anytime you listen
Speaker 2: to me on Spotify, so head over to band camp.
Speaker 2: I encourage everyone to get music off band camp on
Speaker 2: band Camp Fridays. It really helps us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I try and buy albums and then I do
Speaker 1: a lot of my listening on Spotify. But I like
Speaker 1: it's nice to also buy it, you.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, totally, yeah, it all helps.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay, what else can I pitch? I'm going to
Speaker 1: kickstart a tabletop role playing game this summer.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: I've been working on a stabletop role playing game called
Speaker 1: Number City for like ten fucking years, and I'm working
Speaker 1: with a really good crew of people. If you want
Speaker 1: to play Gangs Versus the God King tabletop role playing game,
Speaker 1: you should check that out once it gets kickstarted. I
Speaker 1: think I don't want to. I know what dates. I
Speaker 1: think we're going to kickstart it, but I don't want
Speaker 1: to say it. But I don't want to be wrong.
Speaker 1: And then I'm going to be another tabletop role playing
Speaker 1: game I'm writing for oh that was not announced yet. Ah,
Speaker 1: stupid things with things and controlling information. That's what I
Speaker 1: got and also my most recent book is Escape from
Speaker 1: Insul Island, and if you want quick adventure, read it's
Speaker 1: very short book. If you have a I get a
Speaker 1: lot of messages from people who are like, I don't
Speaker 1: read much because I don't have the attention span for
Speaker 1: it anymore. But I can read your books. Takes only
Speaker 1: a couple hours to read it Escape from Insul Island.
Speaker 1: And he'd be like, I read a whole last book
Speaker 1: because his about one hundred pages long. Uh. And you
Speaker 1: can also get my friend Jamie's book called raw dogged
Speaker 1: Rall Dog, Oh God.
Speaker 2: Dog.
Speaker 1: Okay, you can get Jamie's book, which is about hot dogs.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you're talking about, Margaret, there's no
Speaker 1: double euphemism there. I'm fucking literally blushing. I think we
Speaker 1: got to end the episode.
Speaker 3: It's over.
Speaker 1: We're done. You did it.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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Speaker 3: your podcasts.