The Young Lords, Puerto Rican Liberation, and the Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract

José “Cha Cha” Jiménez was born into a peasant family in Caguas, Puerto Rico in 1948. After father Antonio Jiménez Rodríguez had worked for two years as a tomatero, or migrant tomato picker, in Concord, Massachusetts, José and his mother, Eugenia Rodríguez Flores, joined Antonio in Boston, and they moved to Chicago in 1950. At that time, most Puerto Ricans in the Windy City lived in run-down neighborhoods just north and west of downtown. As José came of age on the mean streets of Chicago, working-class turf gangs—black, white, Mexican, and Puerto Rican—defended their neighborhood territories against perceived outsiders. At the same time, a growing movement for “urban renewal” pushed working-class Puerto Rican families northward to Lincoln Park, and in the 1960s, further northwest to the Humboldt Park and Wicker Park neighborhoods. Colonized by the U.S. in 1898, Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth” of the U.S. in 1952, but as an “unincorporated territory” its residents had limited rights. The 1950s saw a burst of activism among Puerto Ricans on the island and mainland in support of full independence. Yet Jiménez and a handful of friends were more concerned with developments in their new neighborhood of Lincoln Park. In the late 1950s, they formed their own turf gang to defend against racist harassment by area whites. By 1962, they were calling themselves the Young Lords.