I was a Young Lord

Emblem above of the Young Lords offices in Chicago.


Pablo "Yoruba" Guzman addressing an audience during one of the NYC's Young Lords takeovers.


So while many of my fellow Boricua's have taken this weekend to celebrate pride and glee in our cultural heritage, I find myself feeling differently. I can't help but be in a contemplative mood. As I hear horns honk, flags wave and see people revel in their pride in my very Boricua Bushwick neighborhood, I find myself contemplating what it all means, why we cling to the smallest of things and how I wish we had so much more to rejoice over. I'm sitting here thinking about how the island's government recently shutdown, read about how and why its economimc status is worse than the poorest state in our nation--Mississippi, and wonder why we are still fighting this fight. I find myself at a loss for immediate words--something that would reflect my concerns, questions and general pensiveness about the status of mi isla. A land I've seen three times in my life, but which reminds me of who I am whenever I set foot on its soft earth.

Sometimes I feel like my beliefs and ideas are not fit for the time in which we live. That I was meant to be alive during the 70s, the decade in which I was born, so that I could have participated in so many wonderful changes that occurred. I joke that I was a Young Lord in a former life. For those that don't know they were a socio-political Puerto Rican civil rights group which made inroads for the rights of all Bori's and Latinos. Thus, the photos above which make my heart sing and pride exacerbate. What I've included below is something I wrote several years ago after I learned that thousands of government documents and files that had been kept on groups like the Young Lords, the Macheteros and other Puerto Rican political groups, had finally been declassified and shared with the public. They detailed the minutia of their daily lives and are record of the surveillance that Hoover's FBI kept on these groups. It speaks to this government's attempts to dismantle anything and anyone who got too much done outside of the system. This isn't what I'd call a 'finished' piece, because I don't feel like any of my poetry is ever done but it's the best thing that captured my mood on this cool June evening.


FBI
March 2003
Paris

Yellow faded,
water marked pages
that smell of must,
and are brittle to the touch.
Thousands of sheets--8 and a half by 11 pages--legal pads, memos and notebooks
filled with insignificant notes:

“Red chevy impalla parked on Halsted across from Spanish American offices. Walked in and walked out”

Comments and criticisms
Surveillance files of what the insurgents were up to around Daly’s Chicago
How many trees died to keep secret files circulating and
an entire nación under oppressive
government thumbs?

Red squad, COINTELPRO, FBI, CIA
With the derth of teams trained to carry out the government’s dirty deeds,
Mami wonders why I wince
When she calls herself Americana
It is, after all, a status imposed by blood tax and lost lives (WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, Desert Storm I, Desert Storm II, Afghanistan, Iraq...)
Grave sites that testify to the “mainland’s” quest
to use la isla’s people as soldiers but nothing else,
to farm our bodies that bend from back breaking labor:

Cane cutters
cotton pickers
fabrica workers
vegetable pickers
seasonal field hands

With such a necessary labor force
There was no way they could be lost or converted
Which is why,
Organizing?,
that just couldn’t be allowed
And anything/anyone that questions
the status quo is labeled lazy, ungrateful, anti-American or communist

Eagle eyed officers
remained vigilant at their
superior’s orders
to ensure that no one
Not Juan, Jose, Maria or Pepa
Could read too much,
think too much
Talk to much
or
God forbid
do too much.

But we did not listen or comply or pay mind
We kept meeting, talking, thinking and discussing.

Until much like our black brothers--
Eldridge who was ambushed as he slept, Assata who was forced to flee, and Mumia who still sits in prison--
there was a sudden and thunderous halt.

Too many people talking, too many people watching
anonymous threatening calls,
unidentified vehicles outside their doors
and suspicious looks
made the revolution crumble
and the spirit behind it
extinguished.