We Took the Streets
Fighting for Latino Rights with the Young Lords
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An inside look at the Young Lords, the radical Puerto Rican activist group of the 1960s, from one of its founding members.
In 1968 Miguel "Mickey" Melendez was a college student, developing pride in his unique cultural identity as Cuban and Puerto Rican, while growing increasingly aware of the lack of quality health care, education, and housing—not to mention respect—his people endured for the sake of the American Dream. He was not alone. Bringing together other like-minded Latino student activists, like Juan Gonzalez, Felipe Luciano, David Perez, and Pablo "Yoruba" Guzman, Melendez helped to form the central committee of what would become the New York branch of the Young Lords.
Over the course of the next three years, the Young Lords were a force to be reckoned with. From their storefront offices in East Harlem, they defiantly took back the streets of El Barrio. In addition to running clothing drives, day-care centers, and free breakfast and health programs, the Young Lords became known for their bold radical actions, like the takeovers of the First People's Church and Lincoln Hospital. Front-page news, they forced the city to take notice of their demands for social and political justice and make drastic policy changes.
Melendez was part of it all, and describes the idealism, anger, and vitality of the Lords with the unsparing eye of an insider. For the first time, he reveals the extent of the clandestine military branch of the organization and his role coordinating and arming the underground.
Although they were active for only a brief period of time, the legacy of the Young Lords—their urban guerrilla, media-savvy tactics, as well as their message of popular power and liberation, civil rights, and ethnic equity—is lasting. We Took the Streets is one man's passionate and inspiring story of the Puerto Rican struggle for equality, civil rights, and independence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
One of the founding members of The Young Lords describes his role in creating the Puerto Rican activist group in this engaging memoir set in New York City's Bronx and Harlem. In 1969, inspired by the "world of revolution" erupting around them, Melendez and several of his friends decided to create an organization that would fight, sometimes literally, for the rights and improvement of the Latino community. Their first "offensive" gives a fair overview of their preferred tactics: to protest the city's systematic neglect of sanitation in Harlem, the Young Lords spent an afternoon sweeping together a five-foot tall roadblock of trash--then, in front of a crowd of community members, they set the garbage pile on fire. No one was injured; police and journalists arrived; the Young Lords had orchestrated a lead news story. Detailed accounts of similar "actions" and "offensives" form the backbone of this book, explaining how the Young Lords helped convince City Hall to ban the use of poisonous lead paint, took over churches and hospitals to demand better social services and bolstered many Latinos' pride. Melendez also describes his role in creating the group's clandestine, armed division, which became public in 1970, when the Young Lords publicly discarded their commitment to unarmed action. (Melendez left the group in 1971 after its new director, Gloria Gonzales Frontaenz, renamed it the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers party and reorganized it into a Maoist-inspired political party.) Though many readers may object to Melendez's "direct action" tactics ("rather than Mahatma Gandhi, my role models are...Simon Bolivar, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Don Pedro"), his fast-paced blend of personal memoir and political tell-all forms a valuable, if biased, contribution to Puerto Rican history. Photos.
Customer Reviews
Community Organizing 102
This is a must read for anyone studying the facets of community organizing. What the Young Lords accomplished, in a short amount of time, is nothing short of extraordinary and STILL POSITIVELY impacts NYC. A good companion would be "Dry Bones Rattling."