Dreaming in Black: The Political Aesthetics of the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party

• In Event: Being and Blackness

Abstract

This essay explores the foundational importance of blackness in the intellectual and political aesthetics of the 1960s- 1970s Puerto Rican nationalist group, The Young Lords Party. The majority of what has been written about the Young Lords has emphasized their anticolonial rhetoric and help in the reform of public policies. However, scholars have often eschewed the Lords’ relationship to blackness in favor of these themes. Some leading scholars studying the Young Lords have acknowledged the influence of the Black Panther Party on this political group. Yet, rather than centering the implications of this relationship as a point of analysis, their work often takes for granted the fundamental nature of this mutual kinship to the ideological foundation of the Young Lords. The recent underestimation of this important history does a disservice to both scholars of the field as well as activists currently attempting to adapt models previously used by organizations such as the Young Lords.

Using an interdisciplinary archive of photography and memoir, I will argue that the Young Lords Party turned to the aesthetics of blackness as an imagined space through which to communicate their freedom dreams at the exact moment when they were grappling with a need for autonomy from the neo-colonial and often racist U.S. nation-state. They reclaimed their blackness and used it as a instrument to divorce themselves from the U.S. empire, creating new national ties that did not replicate previous models of imperial abuse. While these embraced wisps and traces of blackness can be nearly indescribable, they were nonetheless very real and palpable. The Young Lords Party used performances of hair, fashion, photography, poetry, and similar creative outlets in order to communicate the integral importance of blackness to their visions of a new future. These purposefully used tools not only sought to dismantle the amorphous idea of Latina/o, they also called attention to anti-black racism within the Latina/o community. Furthermore, it helped to break apart the entanglement of blackness to African Americanness in the U.S. imagination, a struggle that continues in present day.

How does one create a nation without land? How can a scarred community build anew in the face of past injustices brought against them? What are the greater implications that, right the very moments of articulating forms of nationalism, re-imagined citizenship, and belonging, African American and Latina/o racialized communities have been overlapping one another, turning to blackness as a common cipher or route of discourse? This essay attempts to answer these broad questions while simultaneously providing new inquiries that pull apart multiple intersections of race, political thought, and the tension of belonging to an empire nation while being seen as an outcast.

Author

• Carmen Laura Phillips, New York University (NY)