What The Young Lords Taught Me About Fighting for Change

Note: This piece originally appeared in my newsletter.

One of my first weeks in the garden last year, I walked in and saw a group of half a dozen older gentlemen sitting around the long table.

From a distance, I noted their sing-songy Puerto Rican Spanish accents. My friend José, another Puerto Rican man and the garden’s DJ, was sitting with them. I went over to say hi.

Some had canes, some were quiet, and others had a boisterous way of taking up conversation.

Jose came over to me and said, “David, jovencito, these are my old friends. Some of them were Young Lords.”

“Young Lords?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know,” Jose waved his hands as if I knew. “A Puerto Rican group. From the 60s and 70s. Big time activists.”

“Were you a Young Lord Jose?”

“Oh no,” he said. “Too young and pretty.”

That day was the first of many times I heard the Young Lords mentioned in the Bronx.

When they weren’t around, people spoke of them with a mythic air, like they do the ‘98 Yankees.

One time, in front of an old building, a neighbor told me how the Young Lords turned the site from a methadone clinic into a holistic health center with a focus on acupuncture. They argued that the city’s drug treatment was contributing to the drug crisis.

The Young Lords once took over tuberculosis treatment trucks and drove them, with their staff inside, to El Barrio (East Harlem) and let the healthcare workers see with their own eyes how neglected the Puerto Rican immigrants were.

At a South Bronx Unite meeting last month, we watched a documentary about how, in the middle of the night, they took over nearby Lincoln Hospital in protest of, as they called it, “A butcher shop.” By winning over public opinion, they evaded arrest while securing some of their demands for more hospital resources and better care.

Their urgency and daring political acts inspired me. And yet, they were ordinary people, as I saw with my own eyes. They’ve grown old and sit around tables in gardens with friends.

I knew it was time to learn more, so I went to the library and picked up The Young Lords: A Radical History by Johanna Fernández.

Asking Neighbors: The Garbage Offensive

The first lesson that stood out to me from the Young Lords was their focus on undeniable problems.

It’s easy to float to the clouds with our political ideals and big ideas.

But to build a movement of ordinary people with jobs, families, and other interests, you have to tackle ordinary problems.

They took on the severity of lead poisoning in Puerto Rican children from the paint on tenement walls. They pressured the city to admit it was killing children. They took on the issue of tuberculosis, a treatable disease, but still an epidemic in the poor, Puerto Rican neighborhoods they served.

How did they decide on what to take on? They asked their neighbors.

Young Lord Iris Morales said in an interview, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’ And they said, ‘Muchacha—LA BASURA!’ And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage? But that’s what they wanted.

So began the origin of their “Garbage Offensive,” where they dragged trash bags that the Department of Sanitation neglected to pick up onto the streets, closing down traffic, demanding that the poor, predominantly Puerto Rican residents of East Harlem get the same trash pick-up service as other parts of the city.

Focusing on concrete problems, the neighborhood rallied around them. It also helped them win over public opinion at large.

Who could be pro-lead-poisoning for children? Pro-tuberculosis? Pro-garbage-in-the-streets? Anti-children-eating-breakfast? They fought winnable fights in that most important arena of what the public thinks.

Connect It to The Bigger Issues

There’s a school of activism that says you should end here, that you should make your fight concrete and keep it at that. But that’s one thing that separates a radical group like the Young Lords from the countless non-profits today whose mission revolves around fighting a single issue, not connecting the dots between them, not linking the histories of how we got here.

A year after the Garbage Offensive, Young Lord Pablo Guzmán explained, “Our objective… [was] to move on the government for allowing the garbage to pile up in the first place. By questioning the system’s basic level of sanitation, our people would then begin to question drug traffic, urban renewal… until the whole corrupt machine could be exposed for the greedy monster it is.”

Fernandez argues that, “The Young Lords offered an economic and political analysis of the problem of garbage in East Harlem… With their assessment of the problem, the Young Lords were becoming part of a generation of radical activists who erected the building blocks of future movements that would focus on what has come to be known as “environmental racism.”

In 2025, this type of rhetoric, connecting concrete issues to the systemic and root causes, has fallen out of favor. ​As I reported in March, the federal regime canceled $1.8 million in approved grants for Bronx environmental groups​ because of their use of terms like “environmental justice.”

Maybe it’s okay to move away from the specific terms, but the Young Lords had the courage to share their view of the full problem.

They were unafraid to connect the issue of trash to the fact that Puerto Ricans were treated as second-class citizens on the “mainland,” where they were driven away from the island because of the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico.

The U.S. seized the land, reshaped the island economy around export crops and U.S.-owned industry, and then pulled out its investments, leaving widespread poverty. The parents of the Young Lords migrated in search of work, only to face the new forms of discrimination.

Today in These Neighborhoods, People Fight the Same Fight

In the South Bronx, 1 in 5 children have asthma. This is due to the legacies of racism. “Urban renewal” barreled highways through these communities, and these Puerto Rican immigrants, along with other people of color, were blocked from buying homes due to government and private banking policies.

Children in the areas the Young Lords fought to defend continue to inhale poisoned air, enforcing the cycle influenced by racial discrimination. That’s environmental racism.

I say this echoing the Young Lords. In a 1969 press release, they wrote, “The average life expectancy of Blacks and Puerto Ricans is seven years less than for whites. The white drop-out earns more than the Puerto Rican high school graduate. Twenty-five percent of all housing in El Barrio is listed as deteriorated or dilapidated.”

Radical = Root Cause

The word “radical” originates from the Latin word “radix,” meaning “root.”

RADICAL LEFT has become an insult. I think we should start owning it.

Yes, I am a radical: I believe that children should not have cognitive setbacks or asthma because they were born too close to a highway.

Yes, I am a radical: I believe that ​people fleeing poverty caused by the United States​ should not be imprisoned or deported for it.

Yes, I am a radical: I believe that ​destroying our planet and the ecosystems​ that we need to breathe for the massive wealth creation of a small number of people is a bad idea.

The Young Lords were self-professed radicals. It’s time that more of us were too.

Pa’lante (a Puerto Rican contraction of “para adelante”).