Revolutions Lost and Found: Migration and the Meanings of Race and Cross-Ethnic Membership in the Young Lords Party

Dominicans began to settle in New York City in large number in the late 1960s at a moment that gave birth to both radical, local struggle and government repression of activists. Those Dominicans left behind a nation in the throes of an aborted revolutionary process and a conservative restoration. Having been radicalized by their nation’s revolutionary process, upon arrival in New York many Dominicans joined existing civil rights and black power organizations or formed their own. This talk will examine Dominican membership in the Young Lords Party in New York as a point of departure from which to address the YLP's ethnically diverse membership, its analysis and critique of racial ideology among Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the US, and the legacies of slavery in Latin America.

The Young Lords had a phenomenally diverse membership. The YLP attracted Chicanos, African Americans, and other Latinos. Puerto Ricans made up the majority of the members, but African Americans “made up about 25 percent of the membership. Other Latinos – Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Panamanians, and Columbians – also joined.

The paper examines the historical conditions that produced, among Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago, a more enlightened race discourse than that which emerged among other Latino groups, like Dominicans. The genesis and meaning of the kind of solidarity, among oppressed minorities, that Young Lords activism produced will be examined in the context of Fred Hampton’s call for a Rainbow Coalition. The absence of a political critique of racism among Dominicans in the 20^th Century is tied to US intervention in that nation’s revolutionary process in 1965, which among other things aborted an emerging struggle against race and gender oppression in the Dominican Republic.