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(Go to
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/24/arts/design/when-the-young-lords-strove-to-change-new-york.html
to see some of the art discussed in this article.)
NY Times, July 24 2015
When the Young Lords Were Outlaws in New York
By HOLLAND COTTER
On July 26, 1969, a group of young Latinos stood in the band shell in
Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village, and made an announcement.
They were founding a New York branch of a revolution-minded political
party called the Young Lords.
Inspired by the Black Panthers and an earlier
street-gang-turned-activist Young Lords group in Chicago, their purpose
was to gain social justice for New York’s working-class Latino
population, then largely Puerto Rican and treated with contempt by the
city government.
Most of the members onstage that day were recent college graduates well
versed in leftist political theory. To gain the trust and cooperation of
Latino communities — concentrated in the East Village, East Harlem and
the South Bronx — they knew they needed to get their feet on the street,
and they wasted no time.
The next day they started a “garbage offensive” in East Harlem, the
Barrio, pulling mounds of trash left festering by the city’s sanitation
department into the middle of Third Avenue and setting the refuse
alight. Local residents pitched in.
In October of that year, the Young Lords teamed up with a band of mostly
black and Latino hospital personnel to force improvements in labor
conditions and medical services for the poor at Gouverneur Hospital on
the Lower East Side. (Six months later, they would take over Lincoln
Hospital in the Bronx for the same reasons.)
In December, they occupied an East Harlem church and, until the police
evicted them, turned it into a food dispensary and free clinic by day
and a performance space for music, poetry readings and history lessons
at night.
By that point they had started a newspaper, Palante. (The name, a
contraction of “para adelante,” means “forward” or “right on.”)
Bilingual and published every two weeks, it was a color tabloid with
some of the jazziest graphics around.
You’ll find dozens of copies covering the walls in the tripartite
exhibition “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York.” Spread over three
institutions — the Bronx Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio in East
Harlem; and Loisaida Inc., a cultural center in the East Village — this
show departs from straight political history by presenting the Young
Lords as a cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a
highly developed instinct for visual self-projection, right down to
having an official party photographer, the gifted Hiram Maristany.
Each of the show’s three parts is more or less self-contained, giving a
general picture of the party’s brief history while centering on events
specific to each venue. The Bronx Museum portion, for example, organized
by two New York-based art historians, Johanna Fernández and Yasmin
Ramirez, focuses on the July 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital, which is
not far from the museum, but also touches on developments elsewhere in
the city.
It gives particular attention to links between the Young Lords and
Taller Boricua, a print workshop started in East Harlem in 1970 by a
group of Puerto Rican artists — Marcos Dimas, Adrián Garcia, Carlos
Osorio, Manuel Otero, Martin Rubio and Armando Soto.
Still in operation in a converted public school building at 106th Street
and Lexington Avenue, the workshop was originally across the street from
the barrio headquarters of the Lords, who occasionally appropriated
prints for Palante covers. Mostly, though, the exchange was in the form
of aesthetic influence: The workshop’s presence seemed to inspire
members of the party who were artists.
Denise Oliver-Velez, an African-American member of the Lords who
designed several Palante covers, was one. She was also one of the few
women to gain a place in the party’s governing hierarchy. Like many
other male-dominated radical groups, the Young Lords were inherently
sexist and promoted a form of revolutionary machismo in their original
statement of purpose. She would have none of it. Under pressure from her
and another female member, Iris Morales, the group revised the statement
to read: “We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male
chauvinism.”
Those words appear in the Bronx show and again in the installation at El
Museo del Barrio, organized by Rocio Aranda-Alvarado and sharply
designed by Ignacio Vázquez-Paravano. There are brilliant, monumental
prints here by Antonio Martorell, Juan Sánchez and Rafael Tufiño,
although the general mood is dark.
A photograph by Geno Rodriguez records a demonstration after a teenager
named Martin Perez died while in police custody. An issue of Palante
records the death, under similar circumstances, of Julio Roldán, a Young
Lords member. When the Lords staged an anger-fueled funeral procession
for him in the streets of the Barrio, they were fully armed.
A 1970 video of the poet Pedro Pietri reciting his chantlike “Puerto
Rican Obituary” feels like a lament for the end of a certain type of
activism. The Young Lords Party was already beginning to narrow along
hard ideological lines and splinter into competitive factions. It had
bought into American gun culture, becoming its own enemy in the process.
The group had lost its connection to the grass-roots communities it was
meant to serve.
The Pietri poem, however, ends with a direct address to the people of
those communities, exhorting them to carry on and to find joy where they
can and in who they are. The exhibition at Loisaida Inc., which opens
next Thursday, is pitched in that key. Organized by Wilson
Valentin-Escobar and Libertad O. Guerra, it’s about the cultural legacy
that the Lords left, a populist activism that produced vivid images and
had the imaginative lift of performance art.
In that upbeat spirit, Mr. Pietri often collaborated with another former
Young Lord, Eddie Figueroa — you see them in beautiful photographic
portraits by Adál Maldonado at the Bronx Museum. In 1976, Mr. Figueroa
founded a space for experimentation, the New Rican Village Cultural Arts
Center in the East Village.
Taller Boricua artists like Sandra Maria Esteves and Nestor Otero
appeared there. So did a who’s-who of musicians combining
African-Caribbean forms with jazz. The mood, as captured in a series of
fabulous photographs by Maximo Colon, was ebullient and embracing.
In terms of identity, the Young Lords were, at least initially, also
embracing. Puerto Rican society is multiethnic and multicultural; so was
the party. This may be one reason that feminism was able to forge a
presence, and why the Lords made common cause with the gay rights movement.
A month before the Tompkins Square Park announcement, the Stonewall
riots happened across town. Sylvia Rivera, a transgender Latino
performer who was rumored to have been involved in the riots and was
arrested soon afterward, joined the Lords and helped attract a lesbian
and gay contingent.
There’s a small photographic homage to her at Loisaida Inc. And there
are tributes to other figures from the past by contemporary artists
elsewhere.
At the Bronx Museum, the young New York painter Sophia Dawson has three
strong paint-and-collage pictures made in collaboration with women who
had been Young Lords. And a sculpture by Miguel Luciano, also at the
Bronx Museum, commemorates a militant offshoot of the Lords, a Puerto
Rican nationalist group called Los Macheteros, or the Machete Wielders.
For them, Mr. Luciano has customized a pair of Nike sneakers by
transforming the brand’s Swoosh logo into a machete emblem. In doing so,
he symbolically gives these activists a swift means for attack and
retreat. But he also asks a blunt question, particularly pertinent in
the market-saturated present, about the bond between rebellion and
consumption.
How revolutionary can you be if what you’re basically fighting for is
the right to have the coolest — usually meaning the most expensive —
shoes on the block? The Young Lords, who knew a lot about style, might
have had a persuasive answer for that. We could use one.
“¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York” continues through Oct. 18 at
the Bronx Museum of the Arts; 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org. Through
Oct. 17, it will be at El Museo del Barrio, Manhattan; 212-831-7272,
elmuseo.org. From next Thursday to Oct. 30, it will be at Loisaida Inc.,
Manhattan; 646-757-0522, loisaida.org.
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