Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's wonderful episode we have Johanna Fernandez

on to talk about the young lords. Her new book The Young Lords Eratical History recently came out and it is

the work of scholarship on the history of this amazing organization. We cover so much ground.

She is an amazing historian with the mind of a historian that can constantly connect dots, pull out lessons from history for people organizing and fighting against this system to this very day.

Just an amazing interview with an amazing guest. The links to this to buy this book and support her work will be in the show notes so you can easily go and find that.

If you like what we do here at RevLeft you can always join our Patreon and get access to bonus monthly content. I'll also link to that in the show notes as well.

Without further ado let's get into this amazing conversation with the historian Johanna Fernandez on her newest book The Young Lords Eratical History. Enjoy.

My name is Johanna Fernandez and I'm associate professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York. And I'm the author of this new book The Young Lords Eratical History which has been long in coming and it feels like I left a little piece of the book.

I'm a little piece of my soul in it.

Well I heard about you originally from the Groundings podcast hosted by Devon Springer, a friend and previous guest of the show. And then I dove into the book itself.

Absolutely loved the deep rich history and the sort of narrative structure of it. And I knew I had to have you on to educate myself and my audience about this really crucial formation in the 60s and early 70s.

And especially given the sort of parallels that we're dealing with in our society right now to the 60s and the left trying to organize itself to meet the challenges of our time.

I think studying these organizations is a crucial thing that we all need to be engaged in. So I'm very honored to have you on. Before we get into the conversation about the Young Lords can you talk a little bit about your own politics and sort of how you became interested in the Young Lords?

You know that's a question that is always in the process of emerging and re-emerging.

What are my own politics? I think that there is something profoundly and structurally wrong with capitalism.

And I think that that is more manifest domestically and around the world today than previously. But I think that at a very young age I had a sense that there was inequality racially and economically that there was something off about society.

And perhaps it's the fact that my parents are immigrants from the Dominican Republic and I traveled to the Dominican Republic and saw a profound poverty there.

But also a different social and cultural society even though it too is a capitalist society. But but maybe travel to a different country.

It gave me a sense of comparative perspective. And maybe I intuitive that if things were different in the Dominican Republic perhaps nothing is set in stone in society and things are changeable.

And so I think that as a child I was inquisitive and my father was orphaned when he was a child and grew up in poverty in the Dominican Republic.

So there were lots of conversations in my household about poverty even though my father was not definitively political in the traditional sense.

But he definitely had what I think is a very sophisticated analysis of society even though he had no formal education at all. He might have finished the second or third grade.

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