Revisiting Herstories: The Young Lords Party by IRIS MORALES

NEW YORK, NY | RED SUGARCANE PRESS | January 6, 2022 | 270 pages

Description:

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Young Lords organized for the rights of Puerto Ricans in the United States and to end colonialism in Puerto Rico. Revisiting Herstories: The Young Lords Party examines the rise of feminism in the New York organization from 1969 to 1972 and the factors that advanced or derailed it. The book centers on the activism of women and the battle of ideas vital to the group’s liberatory politics that charted new ground in the Puerto Rican diaspora.

Women in the Young Lords organized “serve the people” programs and fought institutionalized racism—lack of jobs, inadequate housing, police brutality, inferior education, and horrendous public health care. As nationalists, they mobilized for Puerto Rico’s independence. Importantly, feminist members also brought attention to gender inequality and the oppression of Puerto Rican and other women of color. The book traces their challenges to male supremacist ideas, methods, and institutions, the roadblocks and setbacks they encountered, and their achievements.

In this seminal period for US feminists of color, the women in the Young Lords united with Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous women, rallied for reproductive rights, equal pay, and childcare, and protested sterilization abuse and gender violence, among other issues. Insisting capitalism, racism, and sexism are interconnected systems of exploitation, they advocated for revolutionary, socialist feminism. They fought patriarchy, classism, racism, and imperialism to bring about systemic changes and a just society for everyone.

Iris Morales, a leading member of the New York Young Lords, shares an insider/outsider perspective, interweaving lived experiences, primary sources, and research. She chronicles the rise and decline of revolutionary feminism in the organization and its consequences, providing a more nuanced account of the Young Lords’ history. Grappling with a past whose social justice concerns are still present, the lessons gained continue to have relevance.

Scholars Comments:

“Iris Morales makes an important addition, giving due recognition to the transformative work that audacious visionary women can accomplish through unwavering determination, shared solidarity, and collective action. Morales continues to be an inspiring voice to new generations of Puerto Ricans eager to learn about their history and legacy of struggles for social, racial, and gender justice in US society and to forge ahead in giving continuity to those battles.”

EDNA ACOSTA-BELÈN, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University at Albany, SUNY

“Puerto Rico has been the site of resistance to colonial domination for generations, with struggles against racism and gender injustice intensifying in recent years. Iris Morales brings experience and talent to elevate the voices of Puerto Rican feminists. This book is about the heroic struggles of the Puerto Rican people but is a must read for all of us fighting, hoping, and working for a more just future everywhere.”

BARBARA RANSBY, Professor, writer, longtime activist, and author of the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement

“Iris Morales—organizer, writer, freedom fighter, filmmaker—offers us an expansive and illuminating herstory of the “revolution within the revolution” enacted by the women of the Young Lords. This book continues her decadeslong work of creating urgent feminist interventions in prevailing histories of the freedom movements of the 1960s and 70s. Revisiting Herstories is at once a vital documentation of the past and a roadmap guiding us toward a radical future.”

DEBORAH PAREDEZ, Poet, scholar, cultural critic, and author, teaches creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University

Author:

Iris Morales is a longtime activist, educator, and author. Her focus is on economic and racial justice, women’s rights, and the decolonization of Puerto Rico. Morales serves on the advisory board of the Instituto de Formación Política of Mijente, a political home for Latinx people who seek racial, economic, gender, and climate justice. She is the author of Through the Eyes of Rebel Women, editor of Latinas: Struggles & Protests in 21st Century USA and Voices from Puerto Rico Post-Hurricane Maria, and producer of ¡Palante Siempre Palante!, the award-winning documentary about the Young Lords. Morales holds a JD degree from New York University School of Law and an M.F.A in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.

Piety, compassion, lust, love… Feelings all the more potent when you are a Catholic priest confined to your hospital bed by an AIDS diagnosis, being comforted by the seminarian you sexually abused as an adolescent. It’s Holy Week 1987. The priest is Fr. Linus Fitzgerald, the young seminarian is Orlando Rosario. Both are shocked and shaken as they reflect on their desires and dreams, secrets and sins, hopes and faith, and the paths that brought them together.

In HOMO NOVUS, Gerard Cabrera illuminates with deep empathy and stark emotional honesty the journey these two men take separately and together — a journey that began with a violation of trust and leads them to places – sacred and profane — that they never imagined.

Praise for Homo Novus:

Martín Espada

Author of Floaters: Poems (2021 National Book Award)

“Gerard Cabrera weaves a compelling and terribly human story from the strands of sexuality, self-discovery, secrets, violations, hypocrisy, betrayal, and redemption. He paints vivid landscapes ranging from Boston to Puerto Rico, from gay clubs to the Catholic Church. In these days of fanaticism and fear, this tale could not be more relevant, an eloquent rejoinder to those who would dehumanize this or any community. As one character says: ‘Love is love.’ Yes.”

Booklife by Publisher’s Weekly

This stellar novel lays bare the heart and secrets of a priest with AIDS in 1987.

“A spirit of mercy powers this humane story of transgression, abuse, sin, and connection. Sexually frank, emotionally bold, and always arresting, Homo Novus digs deep into relationships most fiction shies away from, laying bare the toll of repression and secretkeeping, while charting a rich generational shift at an impossibly perilous moment for gay men. The final pages will stir tears from readers of serious fiction.”

Michael Bronski

Lambda Literary Award-winning Author of A Queer History of the United States

“Sex, grace, power, and commitment drive this powerful narrative to its shattering conclusion of personal transfigurations and fearful redemptions. In Homo Novus, Gerard Cabrera’s lucid and startling prose pierces the heart making us rethink our deeply held beliefs about faith, love, courage, and betrayal. The journeys that Orlando and Linus take – with one another, away from one another, and to new understandings – are specific to their lives, and always frighteningly relevant to ours. Homo Novus is a masterful, powerful work – the perfect balancing of the profane and sacred that strikes at the heart of what it is to be human.”

Mario Alberto Zambrano

Dancer, Choreographer, and Author of the Acclaimed Novel Lotería

“Cabrera’s Homo Novus wrestles with the desire of forbidden love. As the AIDS crisis begins to surface, the characters in this novel find themselves entangled within the undistinguished extremities of a religious vocation, vacillating between secrets and their own identities. In lyrical and often heartbreaking prose, Cabrera weaves a story that illuminates the unanswered questions surrounding morality, faith, lust and love, and what it means to forgive in the face of loss.”

Charles Rice González Author of Chulito

“A potent, pensive, and poignant novel in which gay priests delve into themselves as they navigate lust, love, theology, and the human condition. Filled with strong imagery and dialogue as biting as a bitchslap, follow along as their pasts destroy their present lives and threaten their futures in a time where the specter of AIDS draws the last card. Cabrera creates sexy, complex characters who lure you into the inner recesses of their psyches and libidos so that you end up incriminated through your own voyeurism. But don’t shut your eyes because you’re in for a wild ride with these men of the cloth who disrobe way more than just their bodies.”

About the Author

GERARD CABRERA is Puerto Rican born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Dr. Seuss, basketball, and the first American dictionary. His fiction has appeared in numerous online and print literary journals. He has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Writers Studio, and was awarded a Bread Loaf Camargo Foundation Fellow in Cassis, France. Gerard earned a degree in English and American Literature from Brandeis University, his Master’s Degree in Public Health from Hunter College, and his law degree from Northeastern University School of Law. He lives and works in New York City.

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