The recent deaths of Denise Oliver-Velez and Dr. Johanna Fernandez that occurred just 15 days apart provide double significance to the history of the civil rights organization, Young Lords party.
Oliver-Velez was a founder of the Young Lords and Fernandez became one of its chief biographers. In a pamphlet about the Ideology of the Young Lords, Oliver-Velez, who was the party’s minister of economic development, wrote: “We are all fighting against an enemy, the Yankee and the Puerto Rican lombrices [earthworms]. The major thing that holds us back in our fight to liberate Puerto Ricans and all oppressed people is a lack of unity. If we are not united, like a fist, we are weaker in our battle. In unity there is strength, and a nation divided is a weak nation.”
Fernandez touched on the same topic in her book, “[The Young Lords: A Radical History](https://uncpress.org/9781469669328/the-young-lords/)” (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), in her recognition of the party’s fight against imperialism. “Over the course of their brief, yet productive life-span, the Young Lords won significant reforms and used local battles to expose the United States’ quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico, which became a U.S. territory in 1898. In just a few short years, the group grew from a little-known organization to the stuff of legend. In the process, their media-conscious urban guerrilla offensives, combined with the group’s multiethnic membership, redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular culture in the city,” she wrote.
Fernandez also allocated considerable space for Oliver-Velez’s stance against male chauvinism or “machismo,” which is just one element of her determination to embrace “the revolution within the revolution.” This was, Fernandez further observed, “a deliberate part of her struggle to deconstruct and challenge the manifestations of power dynamics, racism, and sexism in everyday life among movement participants. The effort was also a trademark of the radical wing of the women’s movement, articulated in the slogan ‘The personal is political.’”
Both were dedicated writers and teachers — Fernandez for many years a professor at Baruch College and Oliver-Velez at SUNY New Paltz. Shortly before she joined the Young Lords, Oliver-Velez taught Black American and Puerto Rican history at East Harlem Prep, a local school launched by the Real Great Society, a community youth collective. The institution offered an educational space to this new class of young people permanently expelled from the public school system. Having been suspended for her activism at Howard University, Oliver-Velez was startled by her success with what the school system perceived as “incorrigible students … a lot of kids in the community who weren’t in school at all. They were considered to be refuse, unteachable, unreachable; a lot of them were in gangs,” Fernandez wrote.
There isn’t time or space here to fully dissect the intersection of these two marvelously revolutionary activists, but that will and should be done by comrades more informed about their lives. It also shouldn’t be ignored that both succumbed to cancer after relentlessly battling the disease. During appearances on “Dialogos,” the Inti Media podcast, the two were separately interviewed last December. Fernandez expounded at length on the subject of fascism, while Oliver-Velez, because of her illness, offered a brief discussion of the origins of the Young Lords that stemmed from the city’s reluctance to remove trash and address other signs of municipal neglect.
