Boricua Girl Activism: The Chicago Young Lords Fight for Educational Justice

• In Event: Of Archives, Unstably Housed Families, Languages, and the Chicago Young Lords: Community Cultural Wealth Connections

Abstract

The assemblage of Chicago Young Lords (ChYLO) was a critical and self-affirming act of resistance and organizing first taken on by young Puerto Ricans in Chicago seeking to free themselves from a colonial existence. The work of ChYLO addressed overarching social issues (e.g., police brutality, educational inequities, lack of access to health care, social services, etc.) across a myriad of populations, facilitating our understanding that the struggles of Puerto Ricans were intertwined with the struggles of many other marginalized and oppressed peoples. “The Young Lords were a product of their local social environment and a rich anticolonial heritage and traversed a complicated and volatile political terrain” (Fernandez, 2012, p. 204). For this paper, I will focus on the role young women played in the educational justice movement building of ChYLO. Within this story of educational justice movement building, I aim to reveal the cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) of these young Puerto Rican girl/women activists from Chicago (referred to as Boricua Girl Activists in this paper). Their activism demonstrates the power of leveraging community cultural wealth to resist the deficit and racist ideologies that tend to inform the policies and practices of schooling and education of Puerto Rican youth in Chicago. As Yosso (2005) states, “one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary racism in US schools is deficit thinking” (p.75). This data for this paper was collected as part of a larger research project that explores the educational contributions of ChYLO as well as other community activists focused on education in Chicago (see Aviles et al., 2019); which includes archival research conducted at the Chicago Historical Society, Grand Valley State University and DePaul University and the research team interviewed key leaders of the Chicago Young Lords. This set of data was analyzed utilizing the framing of community cultural wealth in an effort to better understand the critical role these Boricua Girl Activists played in the fight for a just education. In this paper, I will provide narratives from the data collected and research literature that illuminate the various forms of capital outlined by Yosso (2005); Aspirational, Linguistic, Familial, Social, Navigational and Resistant. However, as Yosso (2005) explains, “these various forms of capital are not mutually exclusive or static, but rather are dynamic processes that build on one another as part of community cultural wealth” (p.77). For example, the intersection of navigational and linguistic capital demonstrated by these Boricua Girl Activists is highlighted in Fernandez’s (2012) research, she states; “The YLO women who volunteered served as translators for patients and made sure that doctors’ and nurses’ instructions were communicated clearly. They provided pamphlets and medical information in Spanish as well” (p. 197). Anchoring the ChYLO story to community cultural wealth offers a space for scholars and practitioners to reveal the beauty of the work of these Boricua Girl Activists and the implications for other movement building folks, especially other young folks of color.

Author

• Erica R. Davila, Lewis University