The Young Lords and Beyond: The Story of El Comité-MINP

Beyond the Young Lords: The Story of El Comité-MINP

Reviewed by Angelo Falcón

The NiLP Report (February 23, 2017)

Radical Imagination. Radical Humanity: Puerto Rican Political Activism in New York (SUNY Press), with a foreword by Victor Quintana, the first Secretary of El Comité. Muzio is an assistant professor of politics, economics and law at the State University of New York  at Old Westbury.

As we look at the history of Puerto Rican politics in New York City, that throughout the 20th century was the political center of the Puerto Rican diaspora, it has largely been dominated with a focus on the radical activism of the Young Lords. In 1998, Andres Torres and José E. Velazquez published their important reader, The Puerto Rican Movement: Voices from the Diaspora, in which they brought a more inclusive history that included El Comité. Muzio’s study is an important contribution to this history in presenting a detailed and objective discussion on the development of this organization within a broader political context.

El Comité, which Muzio describes as a radical community action collective, was founded in 1970 and was active through the early 1980s, based on Manhattan’s West Side. I remember as a student at Columbia College in the early 1970s the rise of the housing squatter movement known as Operation Move-In and the role that groups like El Comité played in that and related issues.

In this book, Muzio seeks to address some misconceptions about the history of Puerto Rican political activism in New York, First is its focus on this movement’s on Puerto Rico’s independence struggle to the exclusion of issues affecting stateside Puerto Ricans like housing and health. She also seeks to show that the notion of New Left movements has been too narrow in typically not including the role of Third World activists like El Comité. On both counts, Muzio is convincing.

There are some questions that the book does not adequately address (and perhaps was not meant to). One is the direct relevance of this history to current Puerto Rican and other radical movements. While the general lesson learned from this experience is Muzio’s warning against a focus on abstract ideological purity, she argues for the need to related the groups work more directly on the needs of the people they serve. Perhaps one of the most disappointing parts of the book is Muzio’s inability to explain why the petition that led to E; Comité’s decline was presented in the first place.

Another area requiring greater attention is the role of left electoral politics. While Muzio dismisses the importance of electoral politics as a strategy because it was not seen as effective, this argument seems too cursory. An alternative explanation could be that electoral politics were ineffective because if the absence from an electorally abstaining Puerto Rican left. Muzio also does not link this anti-electoral attitude to the anti-colonial politics of Puerto Rican nationalist. This is an ongoing debate on the left that is not a main issue for Muzio but remains an important question.

In going beyond the Young Lords, Muzio usefully expands our understandings of Puerto Rican radical politics in New York. At the same time, it limits that history to radical politics adding to a literature that has privileged this over a broader notion of Puerto Rican politics. This broader type of Puerto Rican history in New York City was undertaken in the older works of scholars like Father Joseph Fitzpatrick, James Jennings, Andres Torres and Lorrin Thomas. The result has been a distorted Puerto Rican history that, more often than not, seems to present the Young Lord as the only relevant player. This problem of a politics of left nostalgia is not a subject of Muzio’s book, but does indirectly reflect this continuing problem facing Puerto Rican historiography.

Muzio’s Radical Imagination. Radical Humanity: Puerto Rican Political Activism in New York is an important contribution to our understanding of the Puerto Rican experience in New York and of New Left movements. It nicely fills in a historical gap that perhaps took too long to be addressed and does so in critical and accessible ways.

Rose Muzio, Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity: Puerto Rican Political Activism in New York

Commentator: Andrés Torres

CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies

Hunter College
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