La Brega: I Have Puerto Rico in My Heart — Episode Transcript
Alana: Have you ever looked at a vintage photo or video and could almost feel what it must’ve been like to be there? And you just know that this old video captured something really important – something that was meant to be recorded for future generations. Something that even in that moment, decades ago, people knew had to be preserved for posterity.
That’s how I feel about this video that I recently played for the very person who is in it.
Iris Morales: My name is Iris Morales, I’m also known as Iris Morales. That’s my dual identity.
Alana: Iris is now in her late 70s. The clip I have is from 1969, when she was 21.
Alana: Well, can I ask you to about the – the clip?
Iris Morales: Do you wanna play it?
Alana: Yeah, I have it.
Iris Morales: Okay.
Alana: Iris winces a little when I bring it up, she’s seen it before. She even did the voiceover for it. The footage is in black and white, and she’s inside a church. Iris is sitting on top of a table. Several male activists are in chairs, looking up at her. She’s the only woman in the shot, she’s wearing bell bottoms and hoop earrings, smoking a cigarette – all eyes are on her.
Alana: Um let’s see. Boom.
ARCHIVAL – El Pueblo Se Levanta
Iris: We can go back to 1898. You know when there was sisters, you were involved in that struggle. We can, we can go to the nationalist party and see the different women that were involved in that struggle. We can go to 1950 and the uprising in Jayuya. And that uprising was led in part by a woman named Blanca Canales.
Alana: In the video, Iris is talking about Puerto Rican women throughout history.
ARCHIVAL – El Pueblo Se Levanta
Iris: We can bring it up to, uh, 1954. And Lolita Lebrón. She went into Congress, uh, when they were discussing the whole question of Puerto Rico, the whole status of Puerto Rico. And she went into Congress with three brothers and shot up the Congress, uh, with her little revolver. And she was a–
Young Lord Member: Little? It was a big, old 45 – it wasn’t little at all.
Iris: Uh, she was, she was considered little.
Young Lord Member: 45, a 45?
Iris: She was considered a little, little Puerto Rican lady. You know.
Alana: This footage is from the documentary, El Pueblo Se Levanta, and it captured a crucial moment from the Boricua experience in New York. But Iris – and other women – were almost left out of this history.
The reason the video exists is thanks to a woman involved in the film’s production.
Iris Morales: Hoy en día, yo le doy la gracia a Beverly.
Alana: Her name was Beverly, and she had insisted that there be a woman on camera. So, they called Iris.
Iris Morales: Yo le digo ella, si no hubiera sido por ti, no hubiera mujeres en ese documental. Estuviéramos totalmente borradas de la historia.
Alana: Iris is still grateful that someone thought to include women in this record, that we weren’t erased from that moment. Because it happens all the time. And you can hear how much it meant to young Iris to learn about those other Puerto Rican women in history.
Alana: Where were you learning about those women?
Iris Morales: You know, there was one thing for our learning, and then there was another phase of our disseminating that knowledge, which was part of that generation. And I say it was a generational effort as we struggled, collectively for us, we were grappling with this issue of identity, and we were learning wherever we could.
Alana: Iris had grown up as a Puerto Rican in New York City, with this dual identity she referenced: Iris and Iris.
And Iris, along with a group of young Boricuas in the ‘60s and ‘70s, were reaching back and trying to learn about this homeland many of them had never lived in.
Iris Morales: We used to call ourselves the Children of the Great Migration. Large numbers of Puerto Ricans coming, pretty amazing, primarily poor people, you know, people from the countryside, and then raising children in, one of the largest cities in the world…
Alana: Right.
Iris Morales: In another language. And being vilified.
Alana: It was a bit like these Puerto Ricans had been exiled twice. They were pushed out of their old home, and then rejected in their new one. And as though that wasn’t enough, they were also scrutinized back in Puerto Rico. Many of them didn’t exactly fit in anywhere.
Even so, many of the children of this generation joined together and organized to defend their communities. They embraced their Puertoricanness and they fought for Puerto Rico – all while facing that eternal challenge of the diaspora: trying to figure out where exactly you fit in.
Their organization had a name: The Young Lords. And Iris was one of them.
Alana: Have you come up with a pithy, sentence like what the Young Lords represent or what they were or how to identify them?
Iris Morales: One of my pet peeves is that the Young Lords in so many places are sanitized as, uh, social workers or something like that, reformers.
Alana: The Young Lords started out as a street gang in Chicago, and became a left-wing political movement in 1959. They were organized, with radio shows and a newspaper. Like the Black Panthers, one of their biggest allies, they also had programs like daycares and breakfasts for kids. And they were effective, staging strikes and occupations to force local policy changes.
Iris Morales: And we were reformers and we had elements of social work, but we were also socialists and revolutionaries.
Alana: They opened local chapters all over the country, including one in New York in 1969. That’s where Iris led their ministry of education.
Iris Morales: So depending who I’m speaking to, I might stress human rights organization or a militant organization that believed in the independence of Puerto Rico.
Alana: Iris is the first person to say she’s not speaking on behalf of all the Young Lords, or on behalf of the other Puerto Rican organizations at the time. But she’s done the research.
She’s written multiple books, produced an award-winning documentary on the women in the movement, and given countless talks. She’s an icon, activist and at her core: an educator.
Alana: Do you also, when you’re describing the Young Lords, focus in on the Puerto Ricanness?
Iris Morales: Absolutely. We were a primarily Puerto Rican organization. First generation, second generation. We did have some third generation folks. We were also a young organization. In the leadership group we had, 16-year-old, the oldest one was 22.
Alana: That’s young! (laughter)
Iris Morales: The other thing that was very important for me, was for people to recognize that we were an Afro-descendant people.
Alana: Mmm.
Iris Morales: And of course, that women were present.
Alana: Present and leading.
Iris Morales: And leading.
Alana: Iris’s documentary about the Young Lords is called Palante, Siempre Palante. When she’d do events, many people didn’t even recognize she was a leader in the movement. They assumed that the Young Lords were all men.
Iris Morales: People would often say, are The Young Lords coming? And I would say, the Young Lords are here. That would be me.
Alana: At the time, there was little to no education about Puerto Rican history. And many of the Young Lords had grown up in a society that taught them, either tacitly or directly, to be ashamed of being Puerto Rican. But they centered their roots in their mission anyway. Their motto was “Tengo Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón” – I have Puerto Rico in my heart.
Iris Morales: I never doubted I was Puerto Rican. I mean, we spoke Spanish. Everybody we knew was Puerto Rican. My, my family played dominoes every Sunday. We ate rice and beans.
I think that the challenge for my generation was that individually we didn’t doubt we were Puerto Rican. We were trying to figure out how we were related to one another. What it meant for us in terms of Puerto Rico. Where we fit in. So, what does it mean to be Puerto Rican in the United States? What does it mean to be Puerto Rican in a diaspora? What unites us? You know, it’s gotta be more than food.
Alana: And dominoes.
Iris Morales: And dominoes on Sunday.
Alana: The Young Lords were part of a larger movement that built a bridge between Puerto Rico and the diaspora in the 60s and 70s: like El Comité, Puerto Rican Student Unions, Vieques Support Network’s New York Committee…
But, while they were championing their home, they also had to learn their own history, and figure out what it meant to be Puerto Rican in the diaspora. They were trying to put the two sides of themselves together again at a time, like today, that felt like a touchstone moment for justice and change.
Iris Morales: It would’ve been a great embarrassment at the height of the struggle for social justice and, and global change for the Puerto Ricans not to be represented. Right? It would’ve been embarrassing. Where were you in the 1960s? Uh, I don’t know, at the beach.
Alana: From Futuro Studios, I’m Alana Casanova-Burgess, and this is La Brega. In this episode: Tengo A Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón.
BREAK
Alana: Iris is now 77. Her nose is pierced, and she wears heels and colorful glasses.
Her life’s mission has been building education and awareness about Puerto Rico. It’s all rooted in who she comes from.
Iris Morales: My dad is from, uh, Sabana Grande. He was raised in the countryside. And I got to visit, the first time when I was four years old. It was a wooden house that had been built by my grandfather and they had no running water. My grandmother cooked with, um–
Alana: Leña.
Iris Morales: Leña. Yeah. So, there was an outhouse, which I was not very fond of. And, um, I have fond memories of my grandmother, who felt so tall to me and so strong. She used to sit on the porch and she would serve me coffee and bread and, you know, we would just talk. And then my mom was from a small town outside of Aguadilla called San Antonio.
Alana: Even as a child, her visits to Puerto Rico reaffirmed her identity –
Iris Morales: Me sentí reafirmada en ser puertorriqueña y también orgullosa de que teníamos un país.
Alana: It made her proud to see that she had a country.
Iris Morales: And you know, my father would go with this sense of, giving everybody money like that he had been successful. I guess that it was part of the Puerto Rican pain of having to have left.
Alana: Hmm.
Iris Morales: And then having to go back and say that it was worth it. My generation grew up with our parents telling us we’re gonna go back. And so he did try, but he had to return. He couldn’t make it in Puerto Rico. So, my dad, in this country he had started as a dishwasher and then, started working in a hotel. And his last two jobs were at the Hotel New Yorker and at the Waldorf. I remember him saying he’d met every single president on that elevator ride up and down. And that at the end of the day, the workers at the hotel would give him whatever bread was left over from the restaurants. And then he would make buddin out of it. And so we were always, did you get bread? Because we loved his buddin.
My mom worked in, in, um, garment factory and she did embroidery work and she’d take us very proudly to show off her little girls, you know, at the factory. She was in ladies’ lingerie, so we always had great lingerie. And, since I was the oldest, I would be the one that did the translating. My mother never learned how to speak English. She knew a couple of words at the end, but I was the one that went with her to the social security office or to the hospital, to the emergency room, you know.
And of course, most of these places were primarily working class poor Puerto Ricans or African Americans. And I would see the disdain, how people were treated. So that started, I think, to develop kind of an anger and try and figure out, you know, whose fault was this? And it started to shape how I saw the world.
Alana: That sense of unfairness led Iris to become a tenant organizer in her high school years.
Iris Morales: And I discovered that I loved organizing, you know, I loved going to people’s houses and having meetings, bringing everybody together and filling out the paperwork.
Alana: I love paperwork, too.
Iris Morales: But it was what it represented, what it could do to change people’s lives.
Alana: And then Iris traveled to a social justice conference in Denver. And that’s where she met Cha Cha Jimenez, the founder of the Young Lords.
It was 1969, a defining year.
ARCHIVAL – C-SPAN – President Nixon 1969 Inaugural Address
President Richard Nixon: Each moment in history is a fleeting time,
Alana: Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president.
ARCHIVAL – C-SPAN – President Nixon 1969 Inaugural Address
President Richard Nixon: Precious and unique
Alana: We landed on the moon…
ARCHIVAL – NASA
Neil Armstrong: …one giant leap for mankind…
Alana: Mass people-powered movements protested for human rights – like gay pride…
ARCHIVAL – Making Gay History
Sylvia Rivera: Society keeps on saying, you can’t do this because this isn’t your role. Who is to tell who, what role we’re supposed to take?
Alana: And to end the war in Vietnam.
ARCHIVAL – Bryant Park Moratorium Rally
Protestor: Those who charge that this is unpatriotic, do not know the history of their own nation
Alana: And Nuyoricans were plugged into the protests that were erupting..
ARCHIVAL – Democracy Now!
Carlito Rivera: We have to begin to stand up as the people, the Puerto Rican people and say, that’s enough. That’s enough.
Alana: The New York chapter of the Young Lords stepped into the fray. The first action was the garbage offensive that summer. The Young Lords had asked the city for brooms so they could address the lack of street sweeping in El Barrio, in Upper Manhattan. When the city refused, they took matters into their own hands. Here’s Felipe Luciano speaking on Palante Radio at the time, describing their commitment.
ARCHIVAL – History is Revolting: Palante Radio
Felipe Luciano: Here we were with our purple berets, sweeping the streets every Sunday.
Alana: Then, they started blocking traffic on Third Avenue with garbage the city hadn’t picked up in weeks. Residents joined in, sometimes burning the piles. It brought attention to the lack of sanitation services during a heated mayoral race.
Alana: Maybe we should establish that the Young Lords were successful.
Iris Morales: Yes, of course.You know, we started from the streets in East Harlem, then opened an office and then opened another office in the Bronx and then had a Newark branch and a Bridgeport branch and a Philadelphia branch.
Alana: They occupied a church to do the breakfast program. They occupied a hospital in the Bronx to demand a patient’s bill of rights – which is actually the one that we all have today. From 1969 to 1971, The Young Lords were BUSY.
Iris Morales: …and forced changes and influenced and created new programs and forced politicians to clean the streets, to take care of the lead poisoning in the buildings, to deal with the question of poverty, to deal with the question of prisons. You know, that was at the height of the Young Lords.
Alana: It sounds very exciting and energized and just the way you’re describing it.
Iris Morales: It was, and it was very intense also, which is sometimes I say, I can’t believe this was in the matter of three years.
Alana: And, while they were doing all this locally, they were also studying up on their roots. How could this group – many who had never been to the archipelago – claim Puerto Rico?
Iris Morales: One of the big questions that came up immediately was, well, you’re not born in Puerto Rico, so you’re not Puerto Rican. So that’s one question that came up. The other one was, well, do you speak Spanish? If you don’t speak Spanish, you can’t be Puerto Rican.
Alana: I think a lot of these tests are still given.
Iris Morales: Exactly. We began to fuse politics and culture, and we said essential to the Puerto Rican experience is colonization.
Alana: What would it mean to, to support the independence of Puerto Rico from here though?
Iris Morales: Everywhere we went, we raised the issue of Puerto Rico. Our newspaper raised the issue of the colonial status of Puerto Rico. We had-
Alana: So education, essentially.
Iris Morales: Education, money, supporting campaigns on the island. Fundraising for, people perhaps that had been, arrested as a part of university struggles, and we had a demonstration at the United Nations, 10,000 people demanding the decolonization of Puerto Rico. And importantly, I feel that the Young Lords helped put the issue of the colonization of Puerto Rico on the US left agenda.
Alana: Coming up – The Young Lords head to Puerto Rico, where they face tension and division.
BREAK
Alana: There’s more to that clip of Iris as a Young Lord in her 20s, the one we heard at the beginning. It’s the part that made her flinch when she realized what piece of tape we had dug up.
ARCHIVAL – El Pueblo Se Levanta
Iris: Pero yo siempre pensaba que era culpa de mis padres…
Iris Voice Over: But I always thought that it was my parents’ fault, that my parents were the ones that had made this oppression that, that they had made everything so dirty that they were not giving me a better education. And that all of the problems that I saw with my parents’ fault.
Iris: Bueno, entonces me puse a pensar porque yo siempre pensaba…
Iris Voice Over: Well then I started thinking why I always thought that Puerto Ricans had no culture, that Puerto Ricans had no history, and that Puerto Ricans had nothing. But that cannot be because we have to have something.
Iris: Tenemos que tener algo, porque mi mama siempre me hablaba de Puerto Rico…
Iris Voice Over: Because my mother always talked to me about Puerto Rico, and when I went there I saw a very beautiful island. But at the same time, I saw the conditions were very ugly.
Iris: Entonces fue que me dio…que yo me dio…
Iris Voice Over: And then I, I was confronted with the conflict that I wanted to be an American, and at the same time I saw that Puerto Ricans were poor and it wasn’t the fault of the Puerto Ricans. That’s when I began to examine the history of Puerto Ricans.
We have a role to play in the American Revolution because we won third here, the nation. We got a stake here. Our parents have sweated here. We have, uh, died here so that we have a stake here and for that revolution is within the United States. We see ourselves hooking up with, with Black people, with Native Americans, with Asians, with other Latinos to form a united front as oppressed people to wage against the real enemy.
Iris Morales: It’s interesting hearing that it always makes me a little nervous because first of all, it was a long time ago, and what I, what I feel is the ambivalence in that moment.
Alana: Right. And ambivalence in the actual sense of the word, which is feeling two things, not feeling nothing.
Iris Morales: Exactly. Feeling everything that I said about family and the island, and at the same time feeling like wanting to be American, whatever that meant, which I translate as wanting to feel like belonging. You know, not being othered, at that moment.
Alana: You know, I know earlier you said that you flinch about the clip. but I heard like a tenderness in it, right? Because you say at a certain point, I thought that we had no history and no culture, but I would hear my mother talk about Puerto Rico. So we must have, you know, so that shows that you, that you were getting something from your mother that was a source of pride for you, like a source of understanding.
Iris Morales: I was getting a lot from my mom, my dad, my aunts, you know, we had big family, the tias, and very woman centric family so I was surrounded by women and I was getting a lot from my mom. You know my mom, she went to the third grade and one of my earliest memories, I’m the first born, so you can imagine, and she said to me, I will teach you everything that I know how to read and write. She stressed education. And she had a difficult life. She was an orphan, by the time she was in the third grade.
Alana: So you were, you were close?
Iris Morales: I was very close to my mom, although we were very different in a lot of ways. And I think that, um, in my most political period, she didn’t understand me. But I was 17 when I left home. So I was, I was young. And I felt very oppressed by the expectations of me as a woman.
Alana: Hmm.
Iris Morales: But she never stopped loving or supporting me.
Alana: And she didn’t try to fight you on what you were doing or say get out of the street or –?
Iris Morales: She didn’t really say that. She’d just say, es es una locura…I guess that’s the same as saying that, (laugh fades down) You know, she didn’t fully understand what I was doing, but she never closed the door on me.
Alana: Iris kept searching for more proof that Puerto Ricans had culture, Puerto Ricans had history… that Puerto Ricans had something.
Iris Morales: So, you know, there were few books from a Puerto Rican perspective, let’s say. There were more books on African American history, and so the Black consciousness was awakening my consciousness.
Alana: About your own identity.
Iris Morales: About my identity and my history. You know, and the struggle for justice. Remember the African American migration from the south to the north was present and we were growing either in those same communities or adjacent to those communities, and certainly going to the schools and the hospitals and all the institutions together.
So learning that history, I wanted to know more about my history. Then when I got to college, you know, I was looking to learn, but there were no Puerto Rican history classes at that point. There were no Black history classes, but there were little pockets. Like I remember there was a course called, um minority groups in New York City. I said, oh, for sure. We’ve gotta be in that. No, no. So I said to the professor, “well, what about Puerto Ricans?” And he says, “well, you’ll have to write that.”
I wasn’t happy with that answer because I felt it was putting a burden on a student where it should have been part of the official curriculum there. If it was important, it would’ve been included.
Alana: Well, there was a sort of ad hoc curriculum that you made in The Young Lords right? A way to come together and learn about yourselves.
Iris Morales: Yes. We were hungry. We were hungry. Right? And everybody, no matter what your educational level was, whatever we could find, we would share with each other. Oh, I have this great art artwork. Make sure you give it back to me. Whatever we could pick up, this book, this will be good for you. Or newspaper clippings, so it was a time where, talk about, DEI being wiped out. There was no DEI.
Alana: You were making it.
Iris Morales: We were creating it. So we had weekly classes and they were mandatory.
Alana: Wait, mandatory?
Iris Morales: Mandatory. If you were going to be a member, you had to attend political education classes and general meetings.
Alana: The Young Lords followed what they called a “13 point program and platform.”
Iris Morales: We start with Puerto Rico, you know, and we move to point 13, which was: we want socialism. And then everything in between.
Alana: The 13 points included demands like liberation for all third world people, opposing capitalism, community control of all institutions and lands, opposition to the US military. Point 10 was originally: We want equality for women. Machismo must be revolutionary, not offensive.
That language didn’t sit well with Iris and the other women leaders of the Young Lords. They got that re-written to: Down with machismo and male chauvinism.
But the very first point… was self-determination for Puerto Ricans. Liberation on the island and inside the United States.
And this was the platform that The Young Lords focused their education efforts on.
Iris Morales: And it could look different ways, different times, it was intuitive. You know, we hadn’t studied like teaching methodologies or, you know,
Alana: Socratic method.
Iris Morales: Right.
Alana: Right.
Iris Morales: We just knew like, well let everybody participate, see where people are at. In other words, it was very fluid and it had to convey a sense of pride. It had to convey a sense of our capacity.
Alana: The slogan of The Young Lords was “Tengo Puerto Rico en Mi Corazon.”
But for some reason, that line just wouldn’t stick with me – in our interview, I remembered it as “Llevo Puerto Rico En Mi Corazón.” And Iris corrected me –
Iris Morales: Tengo, Puerto Rico.
Alana: Tengo-
Iris Morales: Yeah. That came out of Chicago. That was early on. Chicago said: “Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazón,” and we adopted it. And I talk about Puerto being part of what was connecting us and also part of what was reflecting our yearning for our homeland. So we heard this from our families, and now we were also yearning for our homeland. You know, understanding this essential question of that we’re colonized people.
Alana: And we’re separated from that home.
Iris Morales: And we’re separated from that home.
Alana: Spanish-speakers would be inclined to say “llevo.” So, Iris says the mistake I’m making of remembering it was “llevo” not “tengo” is actually a meaningful one.
Iris Morales: We were using the Spanish that we had learned from our families. You know, so, like if you, if you read Palante, for example, we committed to having a bilingual newspaper.
Alana: In 1970, a year after The Young Lords New York Chapter started, they published their first issue of their bilingual newspaper, Palante.
Iris Morales: But if you read that Spanish, right. So everything was, written, sorry,
Alana: It’s a little janky.
Iris Morales: Everything. I was one of the translators. Right. And my Spanish is not like up there, but everything was written in English. And then depending on your grade level or your facility with writing, that also reflected in English. And then you had to translate into Spanish. So…
Alana: That’s a lot of work!
Iris Morales: And it’s all by hand and you have to cut out the letters. I mean, today is very different. We would spend hours, you know. Doing that just to produce a newspaper.
Alana: Palante had color and art. For example, in an issue from the summer of 1971, Uncle Sam appears as an octopus, with one tentacle around Puerto Rico, and another around the Dominican Republic. And they covered news from the Bronx to Puerto Rico to all over the world.
Alana: What do you think a reader of Palante was learning about Puerto Ricanness through Palante?
Iris Morales: I think the spark of the young Lords was that we said, look, we’re coming out of living in the United States, living in the diaspora and the poverty, and we need to organize to change that. And also to deal with the issue of Puerto Rico, and then understanding that, the diaspora was a result of the colonization of Puerto Rico. And that’s why we said that you know, colonization was part of our identity. That was core.
Alana: It also is this object of art. Like, I’ve seen people with framed pages of Palante in their homes because it is beautiful. Yeah. Like it’s, it’s art.
Iris Morales: In the first couple of years, it certainly was, and remember, this is the generation that also gave rise to the Nuyorican movement of artists.
Alana: Mm-hmm.
Iris Morales: Writers, poets,
ARCHIVAL – History is Revolting: Palante Radio
Pedro Pietre reciting poem: Monday morning, the end of the world returns. The river sends the clouds for a bottle of bay aspirins. Flowers become artificial again. Alarm clocks ring. There is no sun, no air. 30 cent Subway fare…
Iris Morales: And so that, that whole generation, everybody was participating. You know, we were selling the newspaper 25 cents, maybe up to 10 or 15,000 copies.
Alana: Wow.
Iris Morales: You know, which is a lot.
Alana: Yeah.
Iris Morales: You know, And we had a, a weekly radio show,
ARCHIVAL – History is Revolting: Palante Radio
SOURCE Denise Oliver: This is Palante, the radio show of the Young Lord’s organization.
Iris Morales: And we had these classes and we had these offensives and you know, how could that happen? We weren’t. thousands strong. What it was, was that you had a core group of folks, highly committed and highly talented in whatever their area was. So everybody was disseminating, this moment. It was a short moment, but it was like a spark that brought all of this energy together and all of this commitment and love for the community and love for Puerto Rico.
Alana: Well, there was urgency, right?
Iris Morales: We had the sense of urgency and, and we were also in a time, like now–
Alana: Mm-hmm.
Iris Morales: –a time that was urgent.
Alana: It also, what, what you’re describing is the, the supply, but there’s also this intense demand if so many people were so plugged in and so nurtured by what you were doing, right? Because you couldn’t have done all of that if nobody was listening.
Iris Morales: Exactly. But also, the other thing is that you have to speak to people where they are. There’s a story that somebody tells of a Young Lord being on a corner speaking and people just walking right past. And then somebody said, “you need to put out a Puerto Rican flag.” He put a Puerto Rican flag, and then you knew he was getting a circle of people and people were listening. You know there are moments that we have to capture by the time that the Young Lords changed direction. The covers weren’t so artistic.
Alana: Hmm.
Iris Morales: They weren’t so beautiful. They were more dogmatic, politically dogmatic. And, there was less art in the newspaper. All indications of, you know, a removal from the community, and what changed over time was the question of what is our relationship to Puerto Rico? Where should we be organizing? And that was actually the downfall of the Young Lords.
Alana: In 1971, The Young Lords opened a branch in Puerto Rico, and sent members, some who’d never even visited, some who didn’t even speak Spanish.
It immediately caused a rift within the movement, and between Puerto Ricans from and on the island, and those in the diaspora. Pablo Guzman and Juan Gonzalez reflected on this in Iris’ own documentary, Palante, Siempre, Palante –
ARCHIVAL – Palante, Siempre, Palante
Pablo Guzman: It became if you are Puerto Rican enough, you know, you will go for this. And it was a way of brow beating, um, the rest of us who disagreed. And this technique of brow beating into submission and to play upon your guilt, uh, was used successfully.
Juan González: One of the biggest mistakes I think that, the Young Lords ever made, was trying to think that just because we supported the independence of Puerto Rico, that we could figure out how to organize, an independence movement on the island.
Iris Morales: It was a mission that was doomed from the beginning.
Of course we supported the independence of Puerto Rico. There was no doubt about that. But when that decision was made, there were two points of view:
One was that, you know, close some of the branches here, shift the organizing, make Puerto Rico a priority and send members there, from here. But, you know, the roots of the Young Lords were here and, you know, we were filling the vacuum.
The other was, if people feel that that is their primary fight, go and live among the people and unite with the revolutionaries there to bring about the independence of Puerto Rico.
Alana: I get the sense of where you were sitting in this.
Iris Morales: Oh, absolutely.
Alana: Yeah.
Iris Morales: Um, that’s what banished me to Philadelphia actually.
Alana: How were the Young Lords received in Puerto Rico?
Iris Morales: Not good. You can imagine what the Puerto Rican movement in Puerto Rico said. The nicest thing they called the Young Lords was “left wing infantilism” or something like that. They were not happy. Like, you know, “who do you think you are? We’ve been struggling for years, and you think you’re gonna come from New York and you’re, you’re gonna, liberate Puerto Rico?”
And then of course, that intersects with the woman question, because at that point, the position that the women’s caucus had been fighting for in the women’s union was that women’s rights and the liberation of women had to be part of the revolutionary struggle. It couldn’t be an afterthought, but with the move to Puerto Rico, it was declared–
Alana: mm-hmm.
Iris Morales: –officially as secondary, as, uh, we’ll deal with the women’s issues, you know, once Puerto Rico is free. We’d still be waiting.
Iris Morales: People were asking, why are we going to Puerto Rico? You’re talking about reunifying Puerto Ricans. What does that mean? Moreover, you can’t have the same strategy and tactics for the struggles in the United States and the struggles in Puerto Rico. The conditions are different. So I felt that, um, it was a mistake. And by the end of 1971, we were trying to course correct and we lost.
Alana: I wonder if that felt kind of painful for, for people at the time, yourself included, to want to be a part of Puerto Rico. And having that yearning, but also understanding we’re not the same.
Iris Morales: No. For me, by trying to make it all one thing, dishonored both.
Alana: Did that whole experience complicate for you the idea of Puerto Ricanness and what Puerto Rico meant for you specifically?
Iris Morales: I felt there was a mistake, a huge mistake that was made, but I never wavered, never, never wavered on that Puerto Rico needs to be decolonized. I did question what some people meant by independence, because there’s so many, you know, anti-colonial struggles that result in an independent nation that has the same structures and same oppression that they had with the colonizers, except now it’s the native folks.
Is that independence? That’s not the independence I wanted. Because one of the things that we used to say in the Women’s Caucus is, what kind of a world do we wanna create?
And I carry that with me still, what kind of a world is it that we want to create? It requires, rebel imagination. It requires us to think, in ways that maybe we’ve never thought before.
I think that it is very, very important to create unity in the sense of understanding and appreciation. We’re part of the same history. You know, it’s got different chapters and paragraphs and things like that, but we’re part of the same history, which is what makes us connected.
I felt that when Maria happened, I came back and I said to people, we need to be learning from what’s happening in Puerto Rico. The activists there are way ahead of where we are at.
Alana: What do you mean by that?
Iris Morales: They understand the conditions and what it takes for people to come together in order to be able to surpass that and survive that it’s raw. They have learned the lessons that we’re still not even imagining.
For me, one of the significant things about the Young Lords, or of that generation, was that we understood that Puerto Ricans were a colonized people. And that has shaped who we are. And we’re a culture of resistance! We said: who is a Puerto Rican? We said: a Puerto Rican is anyone that is descended from Puerto Rico, whether or not they were born there, whether or not they speak English and Spanish, whether or not they’ve even visited the island, and whether or not they eat rice and beans on a daily basis.
Alana: You had the rice and beans thing in the newspaper?
Iris Morales: I just threw that in. But the point being is that we had a very expansive view and I just wonder what you think about it
Alana: I like the expansive definition of Puerto Ricanness because it’s so boring to police how other people identify themselves. You know, like I’m half Puerto Rican, my father’s English. You know, it also punishes people twice, right? First, you, you force people out of their home – that’s like one exile. And then to exile them again is, is, mean, you know? Like how, how much more fulfilling it is to see more of us than fewer of us.
Iris Morales: Exactly. How much more, part of that rebel imagination of the expansiveness of who we are as a people and what different peoples contribute? Yeah. And I felt, you know, Puerto Ricans, like we, we like go everywhere, but we maintain a certain essence.
Alana: Do you, do you see the Young Lords as champions of Puerto Ricanness?
Iris Morales: I would say yes. You know, it’s amazing how people still contacting us to talk to them.
So what is it that attracts young people to this history, you know, 50 years plus later? And I think it’s that sense, one of an affirmation of Puerto Ricanness for those that are Puerto Rican, but not only Puerto Ricans, young people. I think it’s also the defiance of, saying to oppressive systems, you know, we’re not gonna tolerate it. We believe another world is possible. And I think that really attracts and then some of the tactics because our response was direct action, you know, and fearlessness. And so that also is attractive.
Alana: And also you guys were all really hot, gotta say.
Iris Morales: That’s what people say, you know, I said, that’s ’cause they’re out there exercising and they have good values. And–
Alana: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also the leather jacket, you know, the beret.
Iris Morales: But you know, it all depends on the eye of the beholder. Because I was speaking to a fourth grade class and one of the young students said, “why did you wear those funny hats?” And I said, “good question.”
Alana: Iris, thank you so much.
Iris Morales: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
THEME MUSIC
Alana: This is the final episode of our season on Puerto Rican champions, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing the show. If you want to hear more of La Brega, we have bonus episodes available to Futuro Plus members. This week, we hear what it feels like to wear the jersey for Puerto Rico’s women’s ice hockey team. Yea, ice hockey. Don’t miss it. Go to futuromediagroup.org/joinplus
This episode was written and produced by our senior producer, Nicole Rothwell, with reporting from me and Ezequiel Rodríguez Andino. It was edited by Maria Garcia and Laura Pérez. Additional editorial support from Marlon Bishop.
Original art for this episode is by Raysa Rodriguez Garcia of Colectivo Morivivi. Special thanks this week to Jay Tee Takagi, Shu Wang and Roselly Torres of Third World Newsreel, Yasmín Ramírez…and of course, to Iris Morales.
The La Brega team includes Nicole Rothwell, Ezequiel Rodríguez Andino, Laura Pérez, Liliana Ruiz, Roxana Aguirre, Maria Garcia, and Marlon Bishop.
Our production managers are Jessica Ellis and Victoria Estrada with support from Francis Poon. And our marketing team includes Anhelo Reyes and Luis Luna with support from Paloma Perez and Jackie Hill.
Fact checking this season is by Laura Moscoso and Tatiana Díaz Ramos.
Sound design by Jacob Rosati.
Mixing by Stephanie Lebow, Julia Caruso, Jacob Rosati and JJ Querubin
Scoring and musical curation by Jacob Rosati and Stephanie Lebow.
Our theme song is by IFÉ. Original music is by Balún.
Our executive producers are Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia and me, Alana Casanova-Burgess.
Legal review by Projourn and Clearance Counsel by Fisher Legal Arts; Jonathan Fisher.
Futuro Media was founded by Maria Hinojosa.
La Brega is a production of Futuro Studios. This season of La Brega was made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
Check out our website, labregapodcast.org, for transcripts and more information about this episode.
Talk to you soon, bai.
