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ABSTRACT
This paper explores the ways in which the Young Lords have been aesthetically rendered and politically endowed in recent retrospective works. It looks to Jennica Carmona's film Millie and the Lords (2015) and to the New York City museum exhibit ¡Presente! (2015) in order to tease out a collective memory I call "mujerista," one that bears witness to women of color as revolutionary subjects and that creatively envisions what Ada María Isasi-Dízz has called "fullness of life." That this revival of interest in the Lords correlates historically (and is in dialogue) with movements like Black Lives Matter, Dreamers, and #Say Her Name is, thereby, no coincidence. Yet, so too does it correlate with the revolutionary initiatives of the Bolivarian Americas. This article thus simultaneously explores the ways in which this memory has more ambivalently reckoned with the Lords' socialist and internationalist avowals. [Key Words: Young Lords, Politics of Memory, Mujerista, Internationalism, Socialism]
Although they were numerically small and historically short-lived (1968-76), the Young Lords have lived on in the Latinx imaginary as all but synonymous with radical politics. Their ensemble of militant aesthetic and sensationalist "offensives" and the romantically emplotted story of inner-city rebels who awoke the Barrio from its slumber has enthralled leftist academics, artists, and Barrio youth for years. Yet never quite as popularly as in recent years. New York University Press' The Young Lords: A Reader (2010); Haymarket's re-release of the manifesto Palante (2011); Sonia Manzano's novel The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano (2012); Universes' theatrical event Party People (2012, 2014, 2016); the dedication of "Young Lords Way" in East Harlem (2014); Darrel Wanzer-Serrano's The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (2015); the New York museum exhibit ¡Presente! (2015); Jennica Carmona's film Mille and the Lords (2015); and Iris Morales' herstory Through the Eyes of Rebel Women (2016) all cumulatively speak to a memory whose time, evidently, has come.
Yet why now and to what end? This article looks to this emergent "archive" in order to critically assess how the Lords memory has been aesthetically conveyed and politically endowed. In particular, it reads closely Jennica Carmona's Millie and the Lords (2015) and the New York museum exhibit ¡Presente! (2015) as works that "preferentially opt for" Latinas. It is...