Content:

Join us for a conversation featuring historians and members of the Young Lords as they reflect on its roots in Chicago and connections to New York, from organizing against displacement and police violence to building collective power in Puerto Rican and Latinx neighborhoods. Moving between past and present, the conversation centers the voices, strategies, and political vision that shaped the movement, and what it means to shape how that history is understood. Together, they revisit how the Young Lords transformed their conditions and what it means to build on that legacy in the present.

Jacqueline Lazú is a professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at DePaul University and the author of numerous scholarly articles on the Young Lords in Chicago.

Juan González is a Senior Research Fellow at Great Cities Institute at UIC and co-host of the beloved Democracy Now! He was a staff columnist for New York’s The Daily News for nearly thirty years and a professor at Rutgers University. He is the author of many books including Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America and News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.

Lilia Fernández is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago and author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago, focused on the migration and settlement of these two populations in the city’s central neighborhoods and the communities they formed.