The Young Lords and El Barrio: Puerto Rican New York Fights Back

East Harlem, which Puerto Rican New Yorkers call El Barrio, the neighborhood, had been the center of Puerto Rican life in New York City since the nineteen forties. Puerto Ricans had been American citizens since nineteen seventeen, legally entitled to migrate freely to the mainland, and they arrived in waves: first after the Second World War, then in the great migration of the nineteen fifties when Operation Bootstrap, a federally backed industrialization program in Puerto Rico, displaced agricultural workers and pushed hundreds of thousands north. By nineteen sixty, the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in New York City lived in East Harlem, the South Bronx, and the Lower East Side.

What they found was a city that offered the legal rights of citizenship and the practical conditions of exclusion. City garbage trucks collected trash regularly in white and middle-class neighborhoods. In El Barrio, the pickups were irregular, the streets piled with refuse, the lead paint in the tenements untested, the hospitals understaffed and Spanish-language services absent. The children of El Barrio had tuberculosis rates that had not been seen in white Manhattan since before the Second World War.

In the summer and fall of nineteen sixty-nine, a group of young Puerto Rican activists in East Harlem formed the Young Lords, modeled on the Black Panther Party, and decided to demand rather than request. In December nineteen sixty-nine, they occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church on East One Hundred Eleventh Street, transformed it into a community center with a free breakfast program for children, and stayed for eleven days until the church opened its doors voluntarily. Earlier that same year, in the summer of nineteen sixty-nine, they had seized a city garbage truck and dumped uncollected East Harlem trash in the middle of Third Avenue to make visible what the sanitation department refused to address. They occupied Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in nineteen seventy, demanding community control of healthcare and Spanish-language services.

The Young Lords' demands anticipated by decades what became standard in American public health: language access, community health workers, lead-paint testing, patient advocacy. They are not widely taught. El Barrio is still there, though the demographics have shifted as gentrification has moved the same community that was pushed to East Harlem by earlier displacements.