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

In the finale of this four part episode, Margaret continues her conversation with Alynda Segarra from Hurray for the Riff Raff about how radicals got the trash taken out in New York, literally.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, I'm out of jokes to start episodes with. This
is cool people did cool stuff, which kind of sounds
like a joke name for a podcast anyway, but I
rather like it. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy with me
today on this Journey is a Linda Segata.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
How are you doing good? I just said a snack?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Hell yeah, and you're an hour wiser than last time.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Our producer is Sophie. Sophie, how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
How are you? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Compared to like toothpain recording, antibiotics, antibiotics recording is a breeze.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah, I feel that as somebody who also is on anbiotics.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yeah. This podcast brought to you by a Max of Sillan. Yeah.
Fish antibiotics legal, but not for human This week I
couldn't hear out of my hey right here.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
This week I mostly can. It's great.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Yeah. To be clear, I don't believe either of us
are in fishing antibiotics, and I do not recommend them. Nope, anyway,
that's not even for legal reasons. I just feel guilty
when I accidentally make a joke about bad advice. Our
audio engineers Ian Hi Ian, Everyone say Hi Ian. That
being including you listening to your headphones in a public place.

(01:23):
I want you to say Hi, Ian. God hates a coward.
Say it all right, Ian. You're exempt from having to
say Hi Ian unless you want to. Our music was
written for us by un woman. And today we're talking
about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican socialist organization that
is kicking ass and taking names in New York City
in nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy, they've just taken over

(01:44):
a Methodist church and turned it into the People's Church
for eleven days, which I said thirteen last time because
I wasn't looking at the script and I was coming
up with numbers and I came up with the wrong one.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
They got a lot done for eleven days.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
I know, there's like multiple festivals of the Oppress that
they managed to throw in eleven days.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Totally.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Could you imagine, like I would take more than eleven
days to organize a festival the Oppressed? Right now?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Oh yeah, good year?

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah totally, Like all right, we're getting ready for twenty
twenty fives Festival the Oppressed.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Totally.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
Everyone got to check their schedules. So this action got
them national attention and support and their membership soared especially
and it brought in again more women. More than six
hundred new members came on. And this is an official
membership organization as compared to some other things. Right, Okay.

(02:37):
They would take Puerto Rican people, and they would take
both non Puerto Rican black people and non Puerto Rican
LATINX folks from their neighborhoods. Overall, they skewed demographically after
Puerto Rican and English speaking at this point, no value judgment,
and that that's just what their demographics were. Yeah, I
think it. Whatever. They'd already opened a Newark, New Jersey

(02:59):
chapter by this point, and soon they opened some in
the South Bronx, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Boston, the Lower East Side,
and Philly. They lived communally. They ate free meals at
dining halls. They had a whole building.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Now oh wow.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, women and men lived together and organized together and
threw down together. And the women worked hard to fight
chauvinism in the movement. They would specifically, this is the
thing I didn't known to I researched this. They would
call people out as male Chauvenes's pigs. And it's one
of the first uses of that phrase, male Chauvenes's pig.
And something I hadn't realized is that the men men

(03:35):
are pigs. Rhetoric within feminism doesn't come out of calling
men animals. Like it's not directly calling them the pig,
the animal. It's that since the Black Panthers has started
calling cops pigs, they're calling men cops when the right Wow.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah yeah, they're saying you're being a cop right now. Yeah,
Like that makes a lot more. It just like it
rings it rings well with me.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, be like you are the oppressor right now. You
are pressing, and it probably fucking stung more than being
like because when you call men pigs, you're like, oh,
you're a pig, You're you're gross and being overly sexual
or whatever. Men are often like, yeah, I am, that's
just the way we are.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Baby, totally right, broachet.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
As compared to being like, you are acting like a
police officer, yeah, you know, which is not a nice
thing to be called. And that helps get men get
their shit together, as does a woman's caucus, as does
an action that did not come up from my research,
but you brought up Okay, but.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Then I couldn't I researched it online. I couldn't find
it online.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
But I found a little bit claiming you did. Yeah,
but only a little bit, like only a single reference,
so you should say what you okay.

Speaker 2 (05:01):
I land this when I went to the Bronx Museum
and they had an exhibit all about the Young Lords
and it was written in their paper that the women
had gotten together and they decided if their demands would
not be met where they were able to carry firearms.
Although you're saying that they didn't really care.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Well some people, so I know, I know, it's like
it's messy. I think that they must have sometimes or something,
but okay.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
And be treated as comrades instead of servants, and you know,
like the way that traditionally their families taught them to
treat women. There would be a sex strike. And you
know this is also acting as if like the majority
were straight, but that men would not be able to

(05:47):
receive sex anymore from women until they got their shit together.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Yeah, probably effective.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
I think is really cool. Yeah, And I don't know
if it went down for a long time or if
it was put into a fact, but it was definitely
printed in the paper. It was definitely like warm, you've
been warmed. This is how it seemed in the paper.

Speaker 1 (06:15):
So the thing I ran across when I when I
did more research after you told me this, is that
I ran across like one line that was like in
nineteen seventy the women had a sex strike. Okay, but
I I don't entirely know. And actually it's interesting. I
would trust well, I would trust Polente more than I
would trust a random article that I read, yeah something,
or even of history book. And so the thing about

(06:36):
firearms is really interesting to me because I there is
going to be a point in the script when they
kind of take up arms, right, and all these other
times they're like rolling around in nunchucks. But I bet
you that there were times in which they were armed
and that just wasn't like fitting the narrative of the
way that people want to talk about things. And like,
so I don't know, you know.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Or perhaps it was like education and how to use firearms. Yeah,
i'd have been the vibe. Like, so I learned that
from when I went to the museum. But a lot
of what I've learned is from a book called Palante
that I encourage people to get. It's I have here,
but anyone's going to see It's called voices and photographs
of the Young Lords, and it's a lot of interviews

(07:16):
and also like little you know essays that were written
in the newspaper. So cool. And one of the things
that I read was talking about how they believed that
how women members wanted to learn how to use firearms
and not be treated like they weren't warriors.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so so they're
doing all this after the church, their numbers were up.
Their numbers became about thirty five to forty percent women,
and there were numerous openly gay members, and gay members
had their own caucus as well. The Black Panthers paved
their way on that one, openly stating their allegiance with

(07:56):
the gay rights movement and specifically the Gay Liberation Front
that had grown up to the Stonewall Uprising, which yes,
you can hear about on our episode about the Stonewall Uprising.
And in fact, the Young Lords provided a personal guard
to Sylvia Rivera, the Transit, one of the trans heroes
from Stonewall, when she was facing death threats. And this is.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Also half Puerto Rican.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
Oh yeah, it's right.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Just wanted to give her a shout out.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
No, yeah, fucking totally and like, and so I will
say that many young lords refused the assignment because they
like were transphobic and didn't understand what the fuck was
up and they were like freaked out. There's still a
long way to go. But other ones accepted it and
were Sylvia Rivera's personal bodyguard were young lords, and that
fucking rules. Yeah, people with jobs gave up more than

(08:48):
half their salaries for the group. Because it sounds a
little bit culty at this point, no one My theory is,
no one ever gets anything done without getting a little
bit close to the cult line. You shouldn't cross the
cult line, you know.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Ah, But.

Speaker 1 (09:05):
If the cult line isn't even in sight, you might
not be creating a community. It's real messy.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
Ah, interesting, Okay.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
One of the cultier things that they did is they
did that MAOIs self criticism thing, where you're supposed to
like stand up and say all the stuff you did
wrong to the whole crowd.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Oh, I've never heard of this before.

Speaker 1 (09:25):
It's it was a big part of like like the
cultural revolution in China, which I don't know as much
about as I would like to. This like MAOIs self
criticism thing, And what's interesting Actually, if you listen to
the podcast Behind the Bassards, they talk about a lot
of cults, and one of the things that comes up
a lot is not MAOIs self criticism, but is this
like stand up at a circle and admit why you're

(09:46):
like bad and fall apart from like the group's rules
or whatever. Is like a way you encourage group thinking,
and it is, from my point of view bad.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yeah, And anyone who failed to do this was all
the liberal. This is something that like I feel like
liberals don't quite always realize, is that, like the left
wing also calls liberals liberals in a negative way, you know,
like every now and then I'll say something's like liberal
and people like fuck you, right winger, and I'm like what. Oh,

(10:21):
it's during this period of growth that you start seeing
the cracks that are later going to fuck it up.
At least by the convenient narrative that I'm drawing and
have read in other sources, the New York Lords were
given full autonomy by the quote Central Committee of Chicago, right,
because it still had started in Chicago, even it's bigger
in New York. But New York is pretty sure that

(10:41):
they should be the Central Committee and that the chapter
shouldn't shouldn't have full autonomy, that the New York chapter
should be in charge of all the other chapters, and
that more discipline was needed. And also the Chicago newspaper
wasn't coming out regularly enough. What are you all doing?
You better get on that. So after starts getting kind

(11:01):
of controlling, m h. And then another thing to understand
about their politics, and I try to avoid, like, let's
talk about Marx, right, but along with the Black Panthers,
the Young Lords were a break from traditional Marxism in
that they identified the lump and proletariat as the revolutionary subject,

(11:22):
which means that I have to break down really quickly
Marx's ideas about classes in which you have the proletariat,
who are industrial workers in the city, they all and
Marx thinks that these are the beasnis, They're the best.
Everyone else sucks according to Marx. Right, then you got
the bourgeoisie, a class whom no one who is alive
can spell correctly, and yeah they are I still bow urgy.

Speaker 2 (11:48):
Oh my god, I thank you spell check.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah. Yeah. It took me a very long time to
wrap my head around hierarchy.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
More importantly, thanks talk to speech talk to text speech
apps for word.

Speaker 1 (12:00):
Two kids fell, Oh that's clever. Yeah, bougeoisive.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
Think about it.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
The bourgeoisie are the owning class. They don't work for
a living. This is their distinguishing characteristic. Instead, they own
stuff for a living. Definition of capitalism in this case
being roughly the access to capital being how you make
money rather than work. Right. And then you've got two
other weird classes. You have the petty bourgeoisie, who are
like the small business owners. They're not running the show,

(12:33):
but their relationship to capital is different from that of
a worker. Marxists generally don't like them. And then you
have the lump and proletariat, who are objectively the coolest.
Marx does not agree by this with this. These are
the unemployed and the thieves and the beggars, and the
people whose work is illegal like sex workers, the criminal class,

(12:53):
and Marx doesn't like them, right, but the young lords
and the black panthers do. Personally. I like to think
that Marxist classes are like he's writing a role playing game.
Instead of paladins and wizards, you have petty bourgeoisie and
the lump and proletariat and shit and so from this
point of view, we clearly need everyone. Maybe not the
regular bourgeoisie, I don't know, but you just clearly you

(13:16):
can't have a party of only thieves. You're only wizards.
It's not as much fun. There's my class humanity statement
of Oh god. Anyway, the Black Panthers like the lump
and proletariat. The Young Lords like them. The New York
Young Lords claim to like them. But part of what
they're mad at Chicago about because the Chicago clearly comes

(13:41):
out of them. They are they come from the criminal class.
The Young Lord comes. This was not a bunch of
workers sitting around being like, man, I don't like how
the boss is treating me. You like how the boss
is treating me. It's a bunch of car thieves who
are like, let's stand up against racism and try and
get everyone some health care. Yeah, And the New York
Lords don't quite have quite the same background as relates

(14:02):
to that, and so part of why they're mad at
Chicago is that Chicago is still too criminal and gang
like and they're not good proper revolutionaries. So by May
nineteen seventy they sever ties from the Young Lord's organization
of Chicago and they become the Young Lord's Party. It
is very likely that the split was orchestrated by co

(14:24):
Intel Pro, the counterintelligence program of the FBI. Oh wow,
it was almost certainly encouraged by them. The disagreements existed,
but co Intel Pro existed to make those disagreements grow.
Right back in Chicago, Cha Cha is taking it hard.

(14:45):
He was close friends with Fred Hampton, who had just
been murdered, and now he's getting told he's too gangster
for the group. He turned from a gang into an organization.
But he keeps it civil and no fights breakout between
the cities. So it's a break but it's not a war, right, Okay.

(15:06):
But they've got all these political things brewing. There's all
of these fractures that are starting to form. It doesn't
stop them from doing really cool shit. One of the
cool things they do is they get into a fight
with a long standing friend of the podcast Tuberculosis. For

(15:27):
anyone who's just learning, now, what happened when I started
making this podcast is I started reading a lot more
history books, and I started learning that everyone dies of tuberculosis.
That's just how you die.

Speaker 3 (15:42):
Everyone.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
If you're in a history book, you either get killed
by the state or you get killed by tuberculosis.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
You forgot the third or your lover. What there's tuberculosis
the government or your lover.

Speaker 1 (15:58):
Oh yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
That's the trifecta. There's no other way.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
No, I can't see how hells I could die as
long as it's not some combo move.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
Oh, you'd be living a really weird life.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
That the infiltrators like coffee into handkerchiefs and.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know about that government thing that
seems that seems uh not not not for cause for you.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah, no, I wouldn't be.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
It would be very far from that.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
My plan is to not be killed by any of
these things.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:35):
So tuberculosis or TB as it's called by its friend friends,
or consumption when it's out of the Goth night. We
talked about this in our Alan Hart episode. The first
ever known transman to receive gender affirming surgery saved millions
of lives by revolutionizing the way that public screening was
done for tuberculosis decades before today's story, specifically by using

(16:56):
X rays to screen ahead of time. What is TB. Well,
it's a bacterial infection. It's just around latently. Sometimes it
pops up with symptoms, and shit, it kills about half
of its victims if you actually get the symptoms. For
those keeping track at home, that's about a five percent
mortality rate overall, which is brutally high. Today we have
antibiotics and no one dies of it anymore. Just kidding.

(17:19):
It kills a lot of people still, mostly in other
parts of the world. It killed one point five million
people in twenty twenty. It is the number one deadliest
infectious disease after COVID nineteen. It's the number one preventable
infectious disease, preventable with vaccines, treatment with antibiotics, and screening,
things like that. So everyone who dies of it is

(17:42):
murdered by capitalism from my point of view, because you
don't have to die from it except for access to care.
So the young Lords they go to war against two
of the biggest enemies of the show, capitalism and fucking tuberculosis.
Let's go. Yeah, the real problem in the poorer areas

(18:02):
of New York City thanks to stale air and overcrowding
and lack of access to screening. So in addition to
door to door lead poisoning tests, they start testing people
for TB, which involves an X ray machine. So they
send a petition around and it gets them use of
one machine, but it's a stationary machine. They want a
mobile unit. They want like a van with an X

(18:23):
ray machine in it, like the X ray van that
goes around the city already, but is inaccessible to poor
people of color. One book I read says it was
inaccessible because it was it operated from twelve to six
pm and didn't accommodate working people's schedules. But the guy
who stole the van, I listened to an interview with him. Oh,
spoiler alert, steal the van. We'll get to that. Yeah.

(18:46):
It's like I was like, did we skip chapter?

Speaker 2 (18:48):
What's happening.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
We'll get to that. The guy who steals the van
later in the story, he says in an interview that
it was inaccessible because it only went to white neighborhoods,
And that feels a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Truth, once again, giving a shout out to the thief
the thief class.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Yeah. Yeah, So on June seventeenth and nineteen seventy, they
steal the van, They unfurl a Puerto Rican flag on it,
and they drive it off. They tipped off the press
ahead of time to make sure everyone saw them steal
this van. People don't do like crime like they used
to for better and worse. Yeah, they parked it. They're

(19:31):
really subtle. They parked it across the street from their
office and then announced free testing for everyone. And I
think the texts who worked in the van were like
entirely fine with it.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
They're just like, whow cool, this is the coolest thing
that's happened to me. Ever, I know.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
They'd be like, I'm so bored and now I'm part
of some like crazy shit on the news and I
still just get to help people for a living here.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
Within hours of stealing the van, they won the director
of health of the area agreed to let them keep
the van and run it on the city's dime twelve
hours a day every day.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (20:16):
The first day they tested hundreds of people. Yeah, and
around that time, well before we move them to the
South Bronx, we should move everyone to these killer deals
about stuff, job opportunities. You could go become an Irish

(20:39):
cup h so many options here. Listen to these options.
Don't press the forward fifteen seconds button that has no
influence on anything from my point of view. Here's some ads,
and we're back from those enlightening ads. I try to

(21:03):
come up with something clever, but I got nothing. So
I'll just tell you about when they moved to the
South Bronx because there's yet another health epidemic for them
to deal with, because they really just fucking did it all.
Like I can't say.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
Also, like the number of issues that this community was facing,
like as it just like really boggles my mind being like, wow,
I grew up in that city. Yeah, and like these
are all people like my parents' age, you know.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
Yeah, your parents' age, Like people like talk about lead
poisoning in tuberculosis and.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
Streets and for sure, Yeah, and a lot of like
how the Bronx was burning, you know, a lot of
like faulty electricity and just you know, like a lot
of issues like that.

Speaker 1 (21:57):
For sure, is that what that was the Bronx learning
because of faulty electricity, there.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Was like a lot of safety hazards, but also a
lot of like some lords that were setting you know,
just like wedding, Yeah, their buildings burner being the reason
why their buildings were burning. Yeah, Yeah, So there was
a lot of my family definitely talked a lot about
these issues.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
Okay, I don't know whether you want to say this
in error. Is your family from East Harlem or is
it from South Bronx, or is it.

Speaker 2 (22:28):
Somewhere They're actually from Chelsea? Ok yeah, they grew up
in the Chelsea projects. Okay, you know they were born
My dad was born and my aunt was born in
Puerto Rico, but came over when they were very young.
My grandfather came over and was like working at first
and then was able to pay for everybody to come cool.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, yeah, I hadn't as a white outsider in New
York City, I hadn't realized the degree to which Puerto
Rican City shaped the city in all different parts of
the city, you know, and like the Lower east Side
like doesn't even really necessarily come out much in the story,
even though they had a young Lords had a chapter

(23:09):
in the Lower east Side, even though that was a
Puerto Rican neighborhood, you know, yeah at that point, which
heavily influences all of the like hippie culture stuff that
was happening in that area.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
Oh totally. Yeah. Like talking to my dad when I
would mention like hanging out on the Lower east Side
or Tompkins Group Park or squatting or anything you know.
To him, he was just like, oh yeah, me and
my friends like did all that shit, but we were
cooler than.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Probably he was right, like, I'm just like, yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
You know, you think about the New Aurekan, the New
Erekan Poets Cafe, like that's in the Lower east Side still.
I don't know how, but I'm so glad that it's
still with us. Yeah, and that was born out of
this movement you.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
Know, Yeah, is New York in a name of an
identity for New York Puerto Ricans? Is that the Yes?

Speaker 2 (24:04):
So a lot of the people that you're talking about,
who are you know, joining the Young Lords at this point,
who don't speak Spanish for example, Like that would be
a really great representation of like a new Eurekan, although
of course there are New Eurekans that do, but it's
like a very specific like doesn't have extremely strong ties

(24:27):
to the island. Like even my dad, who was born
in Puerto Rico, felt like he wasn't Puerto Rican enough,
and then also he was an outsider in his own city. Okay,
so it's like they you know, this idea that you
don't quite fit into anything because you're always a little
bit of an outsider. So New Eurekan was born.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense to me.
I feel like the diasporic identity is like this thing
that often grows in New York or at least I
know that, like the diasporic identity of like Jews, Jewish
people like grew in New York City in a lot
of ways as an identity that was separate from anything else.

(25:07):
It was like, this is the diasporas, like who we are.
I don't know whether diaspera's are all that people use
in this context or not.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
Oh definitely, okay, yeah. Yeah. And also there's a lot
of like longing for like you know, when you talked
about how the Young Words were teaching Puerto Rican history,
like that was something that was I mean to this day,
it's so hidden from anybody who is Puerto Rican or
New Eurekan, Like just this feeling that you come from

(25:36):
a place that is so foreign to you and you
want to learn about it, but it's been hidden or
kept away.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like because America has this like public
school systems has this like one monolithic educational idea of
what we teach people, you know, and it's just like,
rather than teach people Puerto Rican history, we teach people
about like Paul Revere or whatever the fuck, you know. Like, yeah,

(26:02):
and it's just interesting because like a really high percentage
of people who live in the United States are not
descended from the Revolutionary war fighters, you know, yeah, or
have at least other just whatever. Anyway, Yeah, I'm I
guess I should start a podcast where I talk about
history that hasn't talked about as much. So we want

(26:23):
to help me do that.

Speaker 3 (26:24):
This entire podcast is just propaganda, and it's you just
advertising for your own show, on your own show.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
Incredible. Self promotion is awesome. I haven't worked the name
of my book and any of these scripts. I'm very
proud of that. Okay, so they've just stolen a van.

(26:53):
That makes it very like not much happened. They just
changed the way.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
I just love how much they like play chicken with
the city. It's like, yeah, of course, we could like
go to jail for a really long time for a
grand theft auto or something, or maybe they'll just give
us what we want.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
I know, I know, I can't imagine any of this working.
Then it keeps working.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, So they go to South Bronx, or rather a
branch opens in the South Bronx, And I don't know
how many individuals are specifically moving, right, And there's a
problem that needs to be dealt with in South Bronx heroin.
The state wasn't doing a very good job of helping
people who are addicted. Instead, it criminalized people. The South

(27:39):
Bronx and Spring nineteen seventy had the highest heroin addiction
rate in the world. Fifteen percent of people who lived
there were addicted to heroin, according to one number I heard.
Other numbers that I heard included the South Bronx had
a mortality rate fifty percent higher than the rest of
the country, syphilis and gonorrhea six and four times the
national average, and overdose was the leading cause of death

(28:02):
among adolescents and young adults.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
Oh wow, And.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
This is the kind of thing that we see reflected
more later in the opioid crisis on a wider scale. Right,
So the first thing that the Young Lords did, They're like,
all right, we're gonna deal with heroin addiction. That's what
our community needs, that's what we're gonna do. They got
an apartment, they cleaned it up nice, and they started
screening drug users for commitment to sobriety. And then two

(28:26):
young lords would keep watch over They just set up
a detox center just or a cold Turkey center. Really,
this is their first first attempt. Two young lords would
keep watch over the detoxing people for twenty four hours
a day and help them quit cold turkey. Then each
person in recovery was assigned a mentor who was available
to them twenty four hours a day for the next
six months.

Speaker 2 (28:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
They also robbed drug dealers and scared them off the block,
which got the mafia mad at them, but they somehow
had enough power that they didn't get any No one
got killed as a result of this that I'm aware of.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
This is so wild to me.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
Yeah, you know, Yeah, I keeps.

Speaker 2 (29:08):
Waiting for, like, when is someone going to get assassinated
by one of the many powerful forces who don't want
change to happen.

Speaker 1 (29:16):
I I am not aware of it happening. Yeah, I
like and I one of the things that often underlies
a lot of history that doesn't get left in like,
is people working with the mafia or like all these
different radicals like working with different power structures, right, and
that's like often left out because it's not as like

(29:37):
sexy or it's criminal or whatever. Right, So probably they're
doing something that is making the mafia not attack them.
But I believe the mafia is mad at them, So
I believe that that something is not working with the mafia. Okay,
if I were to guess, and I expect I'm wrong,
it probably is just literally like we are a scary

(30:00):
and there's a lot of us, and we are tied
in with the panthers, and we are tied in with
them up against the wall motherfuckers, and yeah, yeah, the
city is full of angry revolutionaries. That's my best guess.
But I don't Yeah, you know, I know it. Around
the same time, for example, the up against wall motherfuckers
are like scaring off mafia hits by having more guns
than the people trying to kill them, you know. But yeah,

(30:25):
so they're robbing drug dealers and scaring them off the block,
which is also really hard to morally understand in a
situation that predates the War on drugs, right because right now,
during the War on drugs, when people talk about like, oh,
we're gonna like, go fuck up all the drug dealers.
You're like, oh, you're gonna go fuck up drug users
who are like fucked by society. Congratulations, you're the same
as the fucking war on drugs. Yeah, but when we're

(30:47):
not in that context, I don't fucking know. This is
like straight up, I don't know, you know. Yeah, but
the cold Turkey approach wasn't gonna work with everyone. The
medical problems that people are facing were bigger than just heroin,
so they needed something more. They needed something bigger, like
a hospital. The South Bronx had won hospital. Lincoln Hospital

(31:14):
was built in eighteen ninety eight, the same year that
the US stole Puerto Rico from the Spanish. This is
the place that I was saying. It's called the butcher shop.
It's the wrong leg amputated whoops shop with lead paint
for the children to eat. And it's the kind of
place where the er doesn't do triage. There's no translators
on staff, no accommodations for non English speaking patients. But

(31:36):
the best part, and this is not sarcasm, the actual
good part was that some reformers had set up a
fairly groundbreaking mental health clinic there that emphasized talk therapy
and actually hearing patients out. Oh wow, so it's kind
of a battleground spot already. In March nineteen sixty nine,
before the Lords arrived, the Lords did a lot, and
they deserve it a ton of the credit. But by

(32:00):
tying into existing infrastructures and working with other groups. In
March nineteen sixty nine, the Mental Health clinic had taken
itself over. The workers, mostly people of color, had seized
the building and kicked out the director and his upper staff. Yeah.
The doctors, including white doctors, which is most of them
this is the late sixties, supported the action and kept

(32:22):
working and they held it for three days, and the
Black Panthers ran security and brought supporters. This is before
the Panther twenty one trial took the wind out of
the New York City Panthers.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Just would like to say that I am really loving
these stories of like doctors standing with their staff and
like standing up to administration and their bosses. It's really
I encourage all the doctors out there who might be
listening to do that, Yeah, as we really need it.

Speaker 1 (32:56):
Yeah, this particular takeover was when the city I don't
even think the mystery is the hospital. The city was
like any doctors who practice here will lose their licenses.
But the action did get a bunch of workers have
been fired, and it got the fired workers on fired
and the director was transferred out. So it was like

(33:17):
successful to some degree. Right by nineteen seventy some of
the workers there were young lords themselves, and some of
these workers set up a complaint table for workers and
patients in the er. Twelve hours a day they were
there with this table. On weekends they were there twenty
four hours a day, wow. And they kept getting kicked out,
and they kept coming right back in. There's like interviewsing

(33:38):
in here about like the people like kind of being
friends with the security guards, like I'm kicking you out again,
and they're like I'm going to be right back in
and like all right, have fun, you know. So they
set up this complaint table. They get two thousand complaints
in a month, wow, and they just start acting on
them like all the ones that they can. They just

(33:58):
direct action, get the goods and all privacy screens in
the bathrooms. They move trash off the street outside and
into the director's office because this is what you do
with trash.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
WHOA.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, the medical staff who were part of this organization.
I think this is atrun, but I'm not. I'm not
one hundred percent certain the larger organization that's doing this.
The medical staff just start doing triage in the er,
like when they're not at work. They're just like, we're triaging.
Fuck this an er needs triage, which I did not

(34:30):
learn this word until I was an adult. Triage is
when you determine which patients are the most injured and
who needs medical care most immediately. So they put pressure
on administration for better care for the workers, but there
was a wall. They couldn't get anything systemic fixed. They
could only like band aids. People are like, oh, it's
just a band aid. Like band aids are great, they
stop bleeding, you can keep infection out, like yeah, but

(34:52):
they don't address the systemic issues. So they did what
they had to do with a really interesting security culture method.
On July thirteenth, nineteen seventy, one hundred and fifty young
lords met in an apartment and locked themselves in so
that no infiltrators could get out and give anyone a
heads up because they knew they were infiltrated. It's the

(35:13):
fucking it's nineteen seventy, you know, a huh, And so
not all of them knew the plan going in. They
all get told the plan, but they can't call out.
At three thirty am, they pile into a U haul
and a bunch of cars. They backed up to the
hospital loading dock. They opened the doors. They stormed the
hospital with nun chucks.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Oh, this episode brought to you by nonsense dunchucks. I
know how cool they are.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
I know, for some reason, most retelies leave the nun
trucks out. That's a mistake, hely nunchuck radicals, you get it, Okay,
I'll tell my one nunchuck story please.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
I'm like twenty two or something, and I'm like living
in the basement of this house with some hipsters and
they have this party and I'm avoiding it, hanging out
in the basement, and at one point someone comes down.
At this time, I'm like, all I'm doing is like
studying martial arts and trying to stop a war and
all that shit. And they come down and they're like, Magpie,
this guy won't leave and he's harassing people. He's like

(36:13):
harassing this woman. You have to kick him out. And
I'm like okay, And so I'm like in my my
sleeping dress and I just like walk upstairs with the
pair of nunchucks. And I'm like the weird kid an
address from the basement who hasn't been at the party,
and I just like walk up. I think I have
a beard at the time, and I'm just like, hey,
you better leave, and the guy's like I'm already gone,

(36:35):
and he runs away. I don't know how to use nunchucks.
I do not know how to use nunchucks at this
point in my life. I just have them.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
I Mean it's definitely a power move of like who's
going to assume that you don't know how to use them?
You know, like if you're pulling them out just visually,
you'd be like that person knows how to use those. Yeah, Like.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
Bluffy is a very effective as we.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Learned from the Young Lords, Like sometimes you just gotta
try it.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
Storm a hospital with nunchucks. What could go wrong? Yeah,
So they secure the entrances, they barricade shit, they still
let workers and patients in and out of the building,
just they're controlling it. They set up screening clinics for
tuberculosis and lead poisoning anemia. They set up a daycare
in a classroom because one of their whole things is
that they believe that kids should get childcare while their

(37:32):
sole caretaker is in the hospital. It's wild.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
I know.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
They hung up a banner welcome to the People's Hospital
and a Puerto Rican flag. They hadn't tipped off the
hospital workers or it wouldn't have worked, right, But the
hospital workers were down. The physicians backed them. They hated
working for the butcher's shop because they became doctors to
help people.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:53):
Even the chief administrator was like, well, I mean they
kind of got a point, like, wow, no one likes
working at the butcher shop, you know, except like Sweeney
Todd or whatever. Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
We really like.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
You did that one for you apparently. So they call
for a press conference. It was so perfectly timed. So
they call for a press conference and they explain themselves
to the press, and they give their demands, which is
like door to door healthcare, better pay for workers, daycare

(38:41):
for patients and workers, hurry up and build a new hospital.
I did not find a name for this action. I
assume it was the Lincoln Offensive or the Hospital Offensive.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:53):
Yeah, they held it for about twelve hours. The negotiations
of the police were going very badly. Undercovers were trying
to infiltrate into the hospital, so they left and rather
than letting themselves get mass arrested, they put on white
coats and slipped out with the doctors covered by supporters
from inside and outside. Yeah. Oh, and once the cops

(39:17):
realized they'd been duped, they combed the area for the lords,
but people in the neighborhoods took them in. Only two
participants out of one hundred and fifty two hundred participants
got fucking caught. Wow, good fucking odds. I would take
those odds seriously. Nothing changed immediately. Then three days later,

(39:41):
a patient named Carmen Rodriguez died during an abortion at
the hospital. The resident, a student doctor, didn't look at
her chart in her pre existing conditions and performed the
wrong kind of abortion, and then when she responded badly,
doubled down on mistreating her, and a few days later,
July nineteenth, nineteen seventy, she died of negligence.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Oh wow, this is something I've read about.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's fucking heartbreaking. Like I I don't know
just especially doubling down and shit especially like.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
I mean, there's also just a really painful history of
sterilization of Puerto Rican women, and just to it was
a part of what like the women of the Young
Lords would talk about in when they would talk about
the women's movement and women's liberation, as they would make
a very clear distinction between upper class women's liberation and

(40:35):
how like the Young Lord women of course, you know,
stood for abortion rights, but they also were like, we
have to be very clear about our experience of you know,
being forcefully sterilized like a lot of work and women
getting sterilized in who worked in factories and just without
their knowledge.

Speaker 1 (40:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, So it's just a part of the history, and
it's just such a recent history, yeah, you know of
Puerto Rican women.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah. No, It's something that I didn't really understand when
I first started doing some of this research about like,
you know, it's doing well now, I feel self conscious
about it. But I did an EPISO about the Jaine
Collective Okay, Sophie that you can go listen to so fun.
And one of the things that I didn't realize going
into that research was how I had only read about

(41:28):
the you know, the Panthers and black liberationists had very
complicated relationships with abortion rights because the pill. Oh interesting, yeah,
because they're like, we're trying to avoid a cultural genocide.
You have to like freedom to reproduce was what more

(41:49):
of them were fighting for as compared to more white
women were fighting for freedom to control to not reproduce,
and any logical look at it is we want bodily autonomy.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, but childcare like goes into
it as well, because from what I read, like women
and the young lords would talk about how working class
people deserve to be able to have children and that
include that means that we will need to set up
community childcare, you know, because that is the only way

(42:23):
that we can that if you're not incredibly wealthy. They
were just saying it shouldn't be a barrier to be
to starting a family, yeah, which you know, yeah, so
it's just it's a really yeah, it's this painful part
of it just really moves me that there was so

(42:45):
much like mind blowing growth and like just what these
people are experiencing, you know, like so quickly within a generation.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, well, well that's an awkward place that I've to
stick an ad transition, but I do. So here's some
ads and we're back and yeah, we're talking about how
Carmen Rodriguez died at the hospital three days after the takeover.

(43:19):
And so this led to the most enduring and wide
reaching legacy of the Young Lord's Hrum. The radical group
of medical professionals that the Young Lords are part of.
They draft a new document and they call it the
Patient's Bill of Rights, and it says you deserve to
be treated respectfully, to have your treatment explained, that you

(43:41):
can refuse treatment, that you can see your chart, that
people deserve door to door preventative care, that people can
pick their doctors. That you should get free food with
your care, that there should be daycare, and that healthcare
should be free. This is obviously not I know, you
look at that and you're like that, Yeah, I'm in like,

(44:04):
this is not the patient's Bill of rights we have
today in the US. Specifically, the free stuff part didn't
really survive.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, still working on that.

Speaker 1 (44:14):
But some of this other stuff I have always taken
for granted. I mean I didn't. I don't want to
talk about my own family history too much, but it's
like it makes sense to me that of course you
get to have your treatment explained. Of course you can
refuse treatment. Of course you can see your chart, like,
of course you can pick your doctor. Why would I
mean again, complications around financial barriers, but it of course

(44:42):
you can refuse treatment. It's like such a clear example
of that that looking back, you're like, what do you mean?
Why would anyone ever have thought it was okay to
sterilize someone without their consent?

Speaker 2 (44:54):
Like, yeah, how is that not that? Yeah, that's called
something else.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Yeah, So they start pushing for this bill of rights.
And one thing that I find so fascinating about the
story is that, you know, the Young Lords aren't reformists.
They believe in a socialist revolution, but by not coming
to the table to beg for scraps, but by demanding everything,
they accomplished more reform than reformists tend to, which I

(45:23):
would say, keep in mind, reformists, you should pretend to
be socialist revolutionaries if you want reform.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Make Italian bake it.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
Yeah. So they do this, but they're still they haven't
gotten their health, their their harm reduction clinic, which they
haven't called that yet, but leads to that kind of framing.
So they have a better idea than their cold Turkey clinic.
Nothing the other day, it was bad. It just didn't
work for everyone. They got link In to sponsor a

(45:51):
drug detoc center. They succeeded by asking nicely, just kidding.
On November sixth, nineteen seventy, they occupied the sixth floor
of one of the buildings of the hospital and set
it up with the help of doctors, into a detox facility. Wow,
fifteen people were back. Yeah exactly, Yeah, fifteen people were arrested.

(46:15):
So then other one other people came back the next
day and they set it up again, and this time
it stuck. This gets called the first harm reduction clinic,
and they used a novel approach in which addiction was
seen as a social problem and not as individual weakness. Oh.
Soon they're treating six hundred people a week at this
clinic and it and it starts as a methodone clinic

(46:38):
and becomes an acupuncture clinic. And it lasted for eight years.
It outlasts the young lords, and it ends up staffed
by many people who'd been through the treatment themselves.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
And so this is the beginning of not a acupuncture
Please explain, Okay, I do not know what nada nada
stands for. I will just say that not a detox
no wait, no, right, it's something that i've It's like
ear acupuncture that I've received when I was like, you know,

(47:10):
like they used to do it at the drop in
center when I was like a young, homeless teenager, and
it's I didn't know that this was created by the
Young Lords or that this just you know, the treatment
was like formed with the Young Lords, and it was like,
how do we bring accessible effective acupuncture to working people

(47:37):
or lower class people?

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Yeah, I am I believe that that is the case,
that this is. These are the pioneers of doing that
in the United States.

Speaker 2 (47:47):
So cool.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
Yeah, yeah, they just fucking did everything. I actually didn't
end up writing into the script more about how the
patients of Bill of Rights developed out of what they did.
There's so much that I didn't get to, you know,
it's like a I didn't get to follow these threads
as far as I want, you know.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Yeah, yeah, so let's kind.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
Of talk about their decline. Unfortunately, but they have so
much lasting impact. So whatever if you write high for
two years and then burn out and change everything along
the way. So I fucking goes.

Speaker 2 (48:23):
And we can learn from him them.

Speaker 1 (48:26):
Yeah, so these two years are kind of the high
point of the young lords. Coen tail Pro is fucking
with them really hard. They found an easy target in
the culture of obsessive discipline and self criticism and central authority.
That was I think building and growing, but I could
be wrong. That could be the read of stuff I'm reading.
One of the central leaders, Philippe Luciano, he's practically the

(48:49):
face of the group. He was demoted after cheating on
his wife, who was one of the other leaders. They
had set really strict rules about who could talk to
the press, and so a co intel Pro agent pretended
to be one of the Bronx leaders speaking to the press,
like Hey, I'm this guy and I'm speaking to the press.
And then so then the other leaders are so mad

(49:11):
that this guy spoke to the press even though they
have strict rules about who can speak to the press,
and he wasn't on the approved.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
List because I wasn't him.

Speaker 1 (49:18):
Yeah, so he's in trouble. And oh and the thing
that he supposedly spoke to the press about was about
how Philippe had been demoted because he was a male
chauvinist with unclear politics. So they're like stirring up the shit, right.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
Which is like on his Wikipedia page because I looked
it up.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
Oh yeah, I thought he's a male choveness who was yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Yeah, like the quote. So it's interesting to know, yeah,
where this is coming from.

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Yeah, I mean, like, and he overall co intail pro
likes to find existing cracks and expand them.

Speaker 2 (49:49):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
But so you can look at that two ways. We
could be like, well, we're vulnerable to federal infiltration if
we have sexists, which is true. You can also look
go out as we're vulnerable to federal we're vulnerable to
this shit if we're so quick to well, now get

(50:13):
into murky waters. But like you know, we're so quick
to like get mad at everyone about these things, and
we have so many controls about all of these things,
you know, And so it's like demoting a leader because
he's sexist is not bad, but the way it was
handled was manipulated by the FEDS. Most likely within a month,
he left the organization that he'd started or had a
hand in starting. Yeah, things start to get darker. On

(50:34):
October seventeenth, nineteen seventy, the young Lord Julio Roldin. He's
found it hanging in a cell in the tombs, and
he's one of eight quote suicides that year in the tombs,
one of whom had somehow fractured his own skull while
hanging himself, if you believe the police, which I don't.

(50:56):
So when Julio died, a thousand people came to his viewing.
At his funeral march the onlookers chanted and this chant
rules Fuego, Fuego, fuego, Los Yankees Kia, and fuego fire, fire, fire,
The Yankees want some fire. Whoa, which is hard as fuck.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
Yeah, They're like, oh you want you want some fun?

Speaker 1 (51:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
So it's at this point in the narratives that I've
read that they pick up the gun more literally. Okay,
The funeral stops for a second viewing at that Methodist
church they'd once occupied with nothing but non trucks and
community support. They go into the church, they open the casket.
Alongside his body is an arsenal of guns.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
In the casket.

Speaker 1 (51:43):
Yeah that's how they hit it. Yeah, that's how they
got into the church.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
Whoa.

Speaker 1 (51:48):
They stuffed his casket full of full of weapons and
they use it to occupy the church. Their first and
foremost demand was an independent investigation into Julio Roldon's death.
The other demands were, let us set up a legal
defense center here, and also the city needs to let
clergymen visit people in prison and investigate prison conditions. And

(52:08):
so a diverse group of clergy took the demand to
the city. The city was like, you know, fuck you.
So then eighteen clergy members joined the armed occupation because
they were like, he's not listening to us. You're the
only way to get anything fucking done. Yeah, And I
started this off by being like, oh, they're getting this darker.
It's during the decline. I feel like I almost I

(52:29):
feel kind of bad using this as like because it's
an escalation, but it's not. I am not putting moral
judgment on this particular choice and escalation. Yeah, right. They
weren't trying to go down in a blaze of glory,
and they started negotiations. Older women from the neighborhood secreted
out the guns and pieces basically like because they were like,

(52:50):
we're going fucking down. We don't want to all get murdered.
So like, yeah, piece by piece, all the guns get disappeared,
negotiations picked up. The city gave in and started an
independent investigation into the death of Julio Rolden, and the
independent report was clear Julio did hang himself, and at
least according this investigation, in twenty seven pages, some excerpted

(53:11):
in The New York Times, it said, basically, in a paraphrase,
he killed himself because the Tombs is a fucking nightmare
pit that drives people to suicide. And mainstream news articles
basically were saying like, yeah, sometimes suicide is murder. This
is such a case. You put someone in this terrible
of a situation, you are killing them. Even if Julio

(53:32):
most likely hanged himself, I bet that one who cracked
his own scald and fucking hang himself.

Speaker 2 (53:38):
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a.

Speaker 1 (53:41):
They held the church for two months until December nineteen seventies,
a year after the last time they held the church,
you know, and they did their thing there. They fed people,
they offered free legal help. Radical priests started showing up
and doing stuff there, but the organization started to decline
after this. They follow a familiar course. To quote author

(54:02):
Johanna Fernandez, the movements were on the path of decline.
Others saw mounting state repression as a reason to embrace
the right to self defense within their relatively small groups,
which they confused with the defense of the masses in
their communities. Amid the disorientation and siege mentality produced by
state repression, radicals became somewhat isolated from their communities. They

(54:22):
began to see themselves as enlightened actors. Before long, they
began to substitute the painstaking task of grassroots mobilization with
heroic acts of sacrifice taken on behalf of quote the people.
The central leadership had a closed retreat just for itself
to figure out what's going wrong, why things are getting bad,
and they decide that the answer is that they need

(54:44):
to centralize more power. They decided at the retreat that
the social services move was the wrong one and instead
they should focus on leading a revolution to free Puerto Rico,
and basically are like, if you're real revolutionaries, this is
what you care about, not this volunteerism, which means we're
shifting over to fundraising. And now that's what we're going
to do here in the United States is fundraise and

(55:05):
relocate organizers to Puerto Rico and the rank and file
of the Young Lords aren't really excited about this, And
actually I think some of it probably has to do
with some of what you're talking about, like New Eyorekan identity,
and it was just from the island.

Speaker 2 (55:21):
Yeah, very I mean, I'm sure some of them had
connection to the island, you know, but definitely strange move
to go far away and then try to free people
over there who could. If they're going to free themselves,
they should probably free themselves.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So their membership starts to decline. It
didn't help that they got really paranoid about co intel Pro,
which is not their fault. That is literally the purpose
of co intel Pro totally, and they started to purge
people without evidence, especially people who were critical of this
new change in focus. So they dropped from a thousand
members to two hundred members and not very long at all.

(56:01):
They were not well received in Puerto Rico. They showed
up in fatigues and berets, and this didn't go over
as a powerful symbol of working class militancy. It just
confused people. The Nationalist Party that they showed up to
help didn't really like them. Most of the independence movements
at the time there were rich and white, oh wow.
And they also white within the Puerto Rican context, probably

(56:24):
not the United States context, well the mainland. And also
they were like, Budsy, you can't just show up out
of nowhere and tell us you're going to free us.
And they were outsiders. They knew how to organize in
New York City really well. On the island, they met
with little success. They did do stuff. It was earnest.
By June nineteen seventy one, two of the three New
York City offices shut their doors. They switched ideological focuses again,

(56:49):
and this time they switched to a workerist attitude, meaning
the lump and proletariat, the thieves and stuff. They're no
longer the shit, so now we're all the workers. But
there's a problem here. Being a young Lord was a
full time twenty four to seven commitment, which means workers
hadn't joined. It was the unemployed or the soon to

(57:09):
be unemployed. Students, youth, and criminals were primarily who the
young Lord's recruited from. So they didn't get workers, they
just lost lumpin. So they went out and tried to
get jobs in industry to go organize people, which kind
of went over, like showing up in Puerto Rico. Yeah,
they got more rigid and dogmatic, and they spiraled. They

(57:30):
tried to solve it in nineteen seventy two by having
a forty day course of Marxist study, in which they
discussed in read marks for six hours a day and
tried to out revolutionary each other. This further alienated them
from everyone. No, I know, I know, and it's like,
I'm sure there's another read of this, you know, yeah,

(57:51):
but like.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
Also dealing with immense pressure and like yeah, like yeah,
it's so easy for us to be like and co
entergrow was happening. It's like they didn't know the thing
people knew, you know, just learned. But ah, okay, yeah,
but the paranoia and yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
So they tried to solve their further alienation from everyone
by centralizing the authority from a central leadership to a
central leader, a woman named Gloria Fontanas. And then they
kicked out all the people who had gone to Puerto Rico.
Because the people who had gone to Puerto Rico were like, hey,
this isn't working, we shouldn't do this, but central leadership

(58:34):
was like, Nope, you've got to stay the course, some
of the leadership flew down there and barged in and
yelled at everyone for betraying the movement by by betraying
their authority, and called them the enemies of the people.
The Young Lord's Party changed their name to Puerto Rican
Revolutionary Workers Organization, which isn't so catchy. They demoted their
central leader for being too petty bourgeoisie. And that's kind

(58:58):
of the tail spin of the New York chapter. As
far as I can tell, Chicago kept going, and individuals
from all of this right and like people still doing
things as Young Lords did a lot of stuff. Chicago,
in particular, their moment seemed kind of gone, and I
don't know enough to do the rest of it real justice.

(59:21):
A lot of Chicago Young Lords sort of move into
the electoral sphere, are involved in getting I think, I
want to say Chicago's first black mayor elected. Oh wow,
like ten years later or so. It's not in the scripts.
I don't have the numbers in front of me. A
ton of them stayed really radical and keep kept doing
good work. I don't really want to linger on their fall.

(59:42):
I want to stay with most of what they did,
but I will mention one of the young Lords, one
of their lawyers who helped them out a lot. He
went on to become a famous man.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Oh no, I know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
The Republican Fox News host. Oh my god, her name,
his name is her Alda Rivera.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
Oh my god, taking my fucking head. I prefer to
remember Huan Gonzales instead. Yeah, co Steve Democracy now.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
Yeah, oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, and fucking and your
uncle who fucking quit. Yeah yeah, he's not actually related.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Well, we're going to see about that. Okay, Okay, I'm
scared of DNA websites, so I don't do that, but
I'll do some I'll do some googling, yeah, and find him,
write him a random email.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
Yeah. Yeah, no. And it's like every some cliche. I
learned a long time ago that like every story is
a tragedy if you don't know when to end it,
you know, because like all of us die, right, everything passes,
But god damn it, that's so much done.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
Yeah. And also there are so many of these members
who even if they didn't get famous or something, you know,
there were still like incredible community activists and yeah, you know,
are doing or making an amazing art. One woman made
a really great documentary called That's Really Great on YouTube.

(01:01:25):
So they're still out there and there's still total badasses.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
Yeah, it's so fucking good. I listened to a bunch
of different interviews where yeah, you can still listen to
interviews where like the guy who stole the van, who's like, yeah,
we stole the van, and like the woman who like
staffed the table in the host in Lincoln Hospital and
just was like every day I'm gonna sit in the
butcher shop and let people tell me what's wrong here,
you know, like still alive, like still fucking yeah. Well

(01:01:58):
that's ah, that's the Young Lords. That's the first four
partter I ever wrote. The second one we recorded, but
I don't know any any other final.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Well, no, I think we said it all. I guess.
You know. For me, what I really took away from
learning about the Young Lords is just is how important
it was for them and it is for us to
listen to the folks that live around us, to listen
to people who you know, if you're someone like me

(01:02:31):
who's an artist, I think it's really important for me
to listen to people who have to fucking work every
day and or are much older than me or you know.
I think that was something that I really inspired me
about them is their ability in the beginning to listen
to their community about what they wanted and needed.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
Yeah, you know, and just like create a fucking to
do list and just started checking boxes off seriously.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
Yeah. And also the Berets were cool, let's just.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Say it, and first organized by a fifteen year old
who was like, I need fucking I need to like
throw a bunch of dance shows to like make money
to get us all cool black and for the whim. Yeah. Well,
if people want to listen to you, I will say

(01:03:25):
everyone should go listen to the song Polente. You should
look it up on YouTube so you can watch the
video p A l e n t E. I don't
know where the p A l a n t e
a n t e. Yeah, apologize.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Yeah, there's a great music video directed by my friend
Chris Murk, who's an incredible director. My dad is in it,
which is really cool to see him pop up in there,
and a lot of there's the Pedro Pietri uh an
excerpt from his his poem Puerto Rican Obituary. And I
encourage anybody to just like go down the rabbit hole

(01:03:59):
of like how much amazing stuff was created from this movement,
like the new Eekan Poets Cafe and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:04:07):
Yeah, what's your new album called?

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Well, my new album. I just finished recording it, so
I'm not going to reveal the name yet.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
Oh I'm sorry I timed this past.

Speaker 2 (01:04:18):
Yeah, Okay, it's okay. Uh, it's going to come out.
I hope it comes out sometime next year. I haven't
gotten the rough mixes back yet, so I'm going kind
of crazy because I want to hear what I did.

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Okay, So this is what you're about to tour on.

Speaker 2 (01:04:32):
No, I'm still touring on my last record. My last
record is called Life on Earth. It came out last February,
and I'll be out there playing music like on the
West Coast in May cool, and then in July. Oh yeah,
I'm going to be playing Portland cool. In July. I'll
be playing all around like the Midwest and stuff sick. Yeah,

(01:04:56):
So come see us, buy some merch, help us out.
We're it's tough out there, hanging in there.

Speaker 1 (01:05:03):
Hasn't been a good couple of years for career musicians.

Speaker 2 (01:05:05):
Is that what you're saying my god, Yeah, I get like,
you know, a glimmer of a penny anytime you listen
to me on Spotify, so head over to band camp.
I encourage everyone to get music off band camp on
band Camp Fridays. It really helps us.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Yeah. I try and buy albums and then I do
a lot of my listening on Spotify. But I like
it's nice to also buy it, you.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Know, yeah, totally, yeah, it all helps.

Speaker 1 (01:05:39):
Yeah. Okay, what else can I pitch? I'm going to
kickstart a tabletop role playing game this summer.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
I've been working on a stabletop role playing game called
Number City for like ten fucking years, and I'm working
with a really good crew of people. If you want
to play Gangs Versus the God King tabletop role playing game,
you should check that out once it gets kickstarted. I
think I don't want to. I know what dates. I
think we're going to kickstart it, but I don't want

(01:06:10):
to say it. But I don't want to be wrong.
And then I'm going to be another tabletop role playing
game I'm writing for oh that was not announced yet. Ah,
stupid things with things and controlling information. That's what I
got and also my most recent book is Escape from

(01:06:31):
Insul Island, and if you want quick adventure, read it's
very short book. If you have a I get a
lot of messages from people who are like, I don't
read much because I don't have the attention span for
it anymore. But I can read your books. Takes only
a couple hours to read it Escape from Insul Island.
And he'd be like, I read a whole last book
because his about one hundred pages long. Uh. And you

(01:06:52):
can also get my friend Jamie's book called raw dogged
Rall Dog, Oh God.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Dog.

Speaker 1 (01:07:07):
Okay, you can get Jamie's book, which is about hot dogs.
I don't know what you're talking about, Margaret, there's no
double euphemism there. I'm fucking literally blushing. I think we
got to end the episode.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
It's over.

Speaker 1 (01:07:23):
We're done. You did it.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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