Becoming Indigenous to Ourselves With Ethnic Studies
An Interview with Johanna Fernández, Author of The Young Lords: A Radical History
When the tension in Chi-Town came to a head during the uprisings for black lives and justice this past spring, I reached out to Johanna Fernández, the author of the book I was reading — The Young Lords: A Radical History. I had been reading her book, which was released in February, for several weeks already trying to prepare lessons for my daughters who needed more than a virtual learning experience from school. And on June 2nd, I woke up in the morning with an instant revelation; the Young Lords, my people, gave us blueprints for this moment in time. I needed to create space for a discussion around the book and wouldn’t it be amazing if Johanna Fernández could join us and share the stories of these beautiful revolutionaries. Johanna did join the July book discussion and we have been in community around the vision of the Young Lords ever since.
In a recent podcast about her book, Johanna shared that it was when Brown University hired a Latino Studies teacher her senior year that she learned about the Young Lords. As a firm and passionate believer in the transformative power of ethnic studies bringing us home to ourselves, I couldn’t help but want to know more.
Johanna & Lilly Talk
(This interview script has been edited for length and clarity.)
Lilly: In the last three months that I’ve gotten to know you, it’s become pretty clear that you are always busy and doin’ the work, whether it’s teaching at Baruch College: The City University of NY, organizing protests, promoting and discussing the story of the Young Lords through your book or collaborating with our grassroots organization, El Griot & Areito Project. What is at the epicenter of all of these social justice activities? What drives you?
Johanna: I’m going to start crying! I guess it could be because I’m a child of migration. I think my father has a very typical migrant story. He came from the Dominican Republic in 1968, fleeing a disruption in the political life. There was an opportunity to come to the United States because ironically, whenever the United States intervenes abroad, it uses migration as an escape valve. My father was also orphaned when he was a very young child and he also lived under dictatorship. So those were the stories that I heard growing up. And even though my parents were not expressly political, in the context of the Bronx, where I grew up, that means something, because we were kind of occupied territory by the police. Still are.
There was an enormous amount of poverty that I didn’t understand and wanted to. Who knows what makes children ask questions about what’s wrong with society and their environment. I could also say when I encountered this word “minority” as a child, I thought that it meant that we were inferior. So that’s all percolating and I was the only girl and I’m sure that there was different treatment. I remember in junior high school, I felt some kind of way about that. I started wearing boys' shoes to say that I could do whatever my brothers did and even beat them. That’s how that was manifested, that unequal treatment. And then, you know, I grew up during the crack epidemic in the Bronx. That was fucking crazy.
I think that most young people ask questions until those questions are eviscerated or drilled out of you. But I have the privilege of going to Brown University and was afforded the luxury to continue to explore or find answers to these questions. And it was a very racial quest initially for me because my father’s term of endearment for me was “la negrita”. So I was aware that I was black, with all of the misgivings that come with that in this society. And so I think that for me, figuring out how to decolonize the meaning of black was part of my existential meeting with myself.
Lilly: That’s really powerful; how you saw the world, experienced it and made meaning of it. You recently shared in a podcast about your book, The Young Lords: A Radical History, that it was during your senior year that a Latino Studies teacher was hired. Before we talk about the Young Lords, can you share more about the hiring of this professor or the start of this class? Was it already a class or was it something new and was it the result of any organizing by students or did (Brown) just decide it was time? How did that happen?
Johanna: What’s fascinating is that I hadn’t even thought of this until you just asked the question. So I was part of a movement at Brown called Students for Aid and Minority Admission. That movement started when I got to Brown because I was part of the first class at Brown that was admitted “need-blind”. So prior to our class, the previous classes were admitted on a “need-aware” policy, which meant that the school looked at your ability to pay as part of admissions. This was something that the admissions office and financial aid did independently and they got in trouble. I mean, people got fired. Because if you accept these students who are unable to pay tuition, then you were going to have a deficit because you’ve not planned for this financial aid. Our class was the most diverse class economically, ethnically and racially and immediately the next year, the policy reverted to “need-aware”. And so this was a very politicizing thing on campus. I joined the movement of students who were raising consciousness and making recommendations to the school about how to change this, how to raise funds or prioritize this. This was an issue of priority, not funds. That’s what we argued. And my junior year, we had conducted all kinds of studies, created a report of over a hundred pages outlining how the university could move toward “need-blind” in stages. This was like a whole coalition of students engaged in this movement and the issue proceeded us.
We had an appointment to see Vartan Gregorian who was the president of the school at the time. He was a “no show” so this meeting that was to happen with him turned into a sit-in when he didn’t show up. We had planned a demonstration outside at noon. We went into the meeting at nine and when they told us he’s wasn’t there, we said, “Okay, “we’re gonna wait for him!” Then the administrator started getting nervous and they started shutting down the building. I was one of the leading members, and at that point, at around noon, I decided that I need to go to the bathroom. I go to the bathroom that I know is facing the main green and I open up the window and I gave a speech to students gathered there about what was going on inside. That turned into an occupation. All of the students who were outside bum-rushed the building. We had over a thousand students occupying University Hall, which is also a state landmark. So by midnight, we’re given papers and told that if we don’t evacuate the building, we’re going to get felonies and get arrested. And that’s exactly what they did. About 275 students remained in the building and were arrested.
I’m telling you all of this because then that created a struggle around the legal battle around “blind admission”. It was during that period that the school hired a Latino studies professor and even though we were not fighting for ethnic studies, we were raising issues about the ethnic, racial and class composition of the university.
Before I took classes with the Latino studies professor hired, I took classes in African American history and I was a literature major, in part because of language. Spanish was my first language, so I felt that there was a deficiency that needed to be fixed. So I took literature with the black professor who taught a class called Black Women Writers and African American Literature. I took that and it was transformative. I remember reading The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon. The literature transformed my life, fed my spirit and my soul, but also decolonized my mind and helped heal the sense that black is ugly, bad and unfit.
Then I took Latino Studies. We read In the Line of the Sun by Judith Ortiz Cofer. She talks about this relationship between (Puerto Rico) and New York and the experience. It was an incredible book! I remember that was just transformative. What a rich experience to be able to read literature that connects with all of my unanswered questions about who I am and who we are. We also read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.
Lilly: So that was personal for you being that Julia Alvarez is from the D.R. Did you like it?
Johanna: I didn’t connect with it. I connected with the Puerto Rican writers, not with a middle-class Dominican writer. Although I did love In the Time of the Butterflies. I had come to terms with my blackness, so this was like the cherry on top, right? Then she introduces us to the Young Lords and that was it!
Lilly: There are so many ways the Latino Studies class could have gone and you’ve basically named all authors from the Caribbean. What was it about her class?
Johanna: There was a Cuban experience. There was the Puerto Rican experience and there was the Dominican experience. So she did bring the diversity of Latino voices and experiences to this class.
Lilly: But even then, it’s all the Caribbean!
Johanna: Yeah, it’s really all the Caribbean! These must have been the writers of the moment but she didn’t have to introduce us to the Young Lords. Few people in Latino studies teach the Young Lords, which is insane to me. The professor knew her audience. I mean, there were Puerto Rican students, there were a number of Cuban students and a growing number of Dominican students at Brown because of this “need-blind” year of admissions. These are people from the Northeastern Corridor, the Bronx and Philly. And all of us were first-generation college kids. She knew how to butter her bread!
She gave us the Young Lord’s Pa’lante narratives. That’s all you need to become enamored and to have your mind blown. What’s amazing about the Young Lords is that they were incredible storytellers of their own process, history and coming of age. Politically, in many ways, they gave their generation the language to explain the mass displacement their parents experienced after Operation Bootstrap in 1947. This is why I wrote about the Young Lords.
I didn’t know if I was going to go to graduate school or law school. I applied to both and decided that I wanted to do more of what I was doing at Brown. Then I decided to apply to a Ph.D. program without really knowing what that meant. I decided to go to Columbia because I wanted to be close to my family. I had been an exile for long enough! So I decided to stay close to home and write about the Young Lords. It changed my life.
The Young Lords were the perfect subjects for me because I was also the child of migration. I grew up in New York and I was also a budding revolutionary. But what I love so much about the Young Lords is the organic way and the common sense way with which they explained the world. I grew up thinking that I was inferior, that we were less and here are these intrepid, brilliant revolutionaries who thought differently and did incredible things. There’s a fire that needs to be there to do revolutionary work. Like you need to care enough and get fired up enough.
Lilly: I found out about the Young Lords as an adult which is awful because I’m in Chicago and I’m Puerto Rican. Their stories never lived in any of the school materials that I engaged with and my parents never told me stories. Who knows what they knew about them. And I never had a Latina or Latino teacher. You’re my first Latino studies teacher!
Johanna: That’s beautiful!
Lilly: When we talk about decolonizing learning, I think of everyone in El Griot & Areito Project and everything we’re learning with each other, from the book, from you. That is learning to me.
Join El Griot & Areito Project on Wednesday, October 7 for The Revolution Within: In This Time of Uprising, Who Will We Be?, an online, interactive conversation with Johanna Fernández about what the Young Lords can teach us. This is the first in a series of interactive discussions, planned through June 2021.
Listen to this unedited 9 minute clip of Johanna Fernández reflecting on her personal “why” for doing social justice work. She’s a captivating storyteller.
