Yesterday was the 40th Anniversary celebration of the Young Lords Party here in NYC. As amiga Bianca wrote, some peeps, myself included, couldn’t be there. It really bummed me out that I couldn’t be there because if it weren’t for the Young Lords, Mamita Mala wouldn’t exist. And I don’t mean that in some abstract homage to movement forepapis and foremamis kind of way. I mean it in a real physical, tangible way.

I have a worn out black tee shirt from when Iris Morales was still finishing her film, Pa’lante Siempre Pa’lante and the quote on the back says something about each generation moving the struggle forward and I was fortunate enough to see this in action even after there was no more YLP thanks to federally sponsored flame fanning of normal internal organizational conflicts.

I wasn’t even alive when the YLP was formed pero when I was just a teenager myself, their legacy and lesson marked me forever and opened the path on which I walk.

There has been lots of talk inside the Latino community and specifically the Rican community about point #10 on the 13 Point YLP platform, the point on Revolutionary Machismo. It should be noted that this point, wasn’t written by the mujeres of the party and now many, especially those of us who came of political age under the leadership of Richie Perez (RIP), were struck/stuck with the idea that something so repressive, machismo could be revolutionary. We learned on our own, that it couldn’t and trying to frame the interpersonal relationships between men and women inside the struggle from a framework of domination was not in sync with the idea of change. I remember at an event, a fellow Congress patch kid (as we who worked with Richie in the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights were called) yelling at a former YLP member “Revolutionary Machismo” pero not as a rallying cry. It was a point of embarrassment.

What revolutionary machismo allowed for was for men within the party and now to treat mujeres in a certain way, in their private lives and political lives, a way that always painted them as a little less, not different pero less. Gracias to amazing mujeres like Morales and Denise Quiñones (who I had the pleasure of meeting at Netroots Nation) the idea of revolutionary machismo was challenged inside the YLP. it wasn’t resolved, pero it was dealt with. And I think about myself, a wide eyed, somewhat lost 16 year old Rican who thought at first that she was just stuffing envelopes and handing out flyers in Richie Perez’s office with other former YLP members, members of the Black Liberation Army, and former political prisoners. I was sitting with history and practicing it. I learned how to do security for rallies, plan civil disobedience actions, run meetings, make phone calls and flyers all in the context of a living revolutionary classroom. Even though the majority of my mentors were men, I never once was told that I couldn’t do anything. Even when I was a pregnant single young mujer in the summer of 1997, I can remember maneuvering my pipa between police pressing against a crowd of people supporting mamis who had lost their children to racist police murderers in brooklyn.

It was that pregnant belly as security moment, it was bringing my now 12 year old hija to rallies so that he first sentence would be no justice no peace, it was her coloring during political education sessions and planning meetings, it was my unabashedly sexual poetic voz that I debuted at a fundraiser for our anti-police brutality work that led to Richie naming me Mamita Mala.

So you see, this anniversary is more than just something to read about in a book or see in a film. The Young Lords Party and how it helped to form a new direction in political thought and organizing tied to the history before and the history yet to be made, is part of my own story too. I wasn’t at the celebration yesterday, pero I celebrate everyday, though my actions, words and thoughts.

Gracias Young Lords Party y pa’lante siempre.