From the Young Lords to the Mainstream

I was standing at an LAX arrival gate, holding up a sign with a name, just like the dozen or so limousine drivers, waiting for my party to arrive. Out trooped Fran Drescher and other celebrities from the first-class section, some of whom I vaguely recognized from the pages of magazines.

But the sign I was holding read “Juan Gonzalez,” whose renown was first earned at a time when practically the only other Latino name in the news was Richard Nixon’s friend and confidant, Bebe Rebozo.

It was 1969, a momentous year for the U.S., roiled by the Vietnam War and home-grown rebels. Gonzalez and a handful of radicals in New York founded the Young Lords, a Latino empowerment organization patterned after the Black Panthers. Pledged to end discrimination, the group set up schools and free clinics for the Latino underclass, which in New York at the time was mostly Puerto Rican.

I had met him at New York’s Columbia University, at a demonstration on a lawn denuded by the violent clashes of the previous spring’s student campus takeover. A fiery speaker, like so many student leaders back then, he was 22 years old. Tall, slim, dressed all in black except for the Young Lords’ trademark brown beret, the Puerto Rican-born Gonzalez seemed the romantic personification of youth and radicalism, a kind of home-grown Che Guevara. But in just a few years, the Young Lords, hounded by the FBI and local police, disbanded and Gonzalez vanished into the mists of radical mythology. Still, to someone like me, who saw no Latino names in the annals of American history except for a long dead George Santayana and a distant Cesar Chavez, Gonzalez was the future, even if a benighted one.

Learning he was coming to L.A., I tracked him down in his current incarnation--columnist for the New York Daily News.

Gonzalez looked past me, and I didn’t recognize him as he walked by, middle-aged, with glasses and salt and pepper hair. I was expecting the radical past.

That afternoon, at a Taco Bell in the heart of Koreatown, Gonzalez sat down to discuss the current political situation of Latinos in this country, which he compared to that of African Americans in the 1970s, when blacks began to exert their electoral muscle. “In the next 10 years, you’re going to see Latinos elected mayors of several major cities in the country, not just Los Angeles and New York, but there’s a very big possibility also of Houston, Dallas and Chicago. You’re going to see major runs at the city halls of the major cities because the reality is: that is the growing population at all of these cities.”

His transformation over the last 30 years, from radical outsider to mainstream figure, is paralleled by many in the growing Latino establishment around the country, witness L.A. mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa. Gonzalez has made it his business to remember where this political journey began and where it is going.

“When I went to Columbia,” he says, “there were no Latino organizations. You could put all the Latinos in one phone booth. So I think the reality is that there’s been this explosion [of Latinos] and most people in the United States are still having problems grappling with the changing nature of this country.”

Warming to the subject, Gonzalez adds that the Latinization of America is to be found everywhere, not just in the big cities of the Eastern seaboard or in Southern California, creating new political opportunities for Latinos.

“Las Vegas, Nevada, went from having 133,000 Latinos in 1990 to 393,000 in 2000. The Latino population more than tripled in 10 years. Tennessee, South Carolina. The growing Latino and Asian population has created a third force in American politics that most of the time will vote Democratic but will sometimes vote Republican if they get the right candidate. As a result, Latinos are now an unpredictable factor in American politics and as a result we’ll be much more courted in much greater numbers.”

Gonzalez also points out that in spite of the vast differences between a Mexican Indian farm worker and a blue-eyed Argentine professional, once both migrate to the U.S., their differences are not just glossed over, they are usually ignored.

“Whether Latinos want to be seen as a single group, the rest of the society sees them as a single group. They really don’t make distinctions between Cubans and Puerto Ricans and Salvadorenos. It’s the cultural fusion and the intermarriage. People talk often about intermarriage between Latinos and whites, but to me the real intermarriage is among Latinos, Mexicans marrying Salvadorenos, Cubans marrying Colombians. The children of those marriages are more Latinos than anything else. That is creating the new Latino consciousness in this country.”

Gonzalez believes the Latino population in this country has become an alternative to the old black-white polarities that have prevailed for so long. But when I point out that close to 50% of the Latino census respondents put down their race as white, and I ask him what exactly, then, differentiates Latinos from other ethnic groups, Gonzalez is quick to answer:

“Some Latinos are white. But in New York, according to the latest census figures, 48% of Latinos, the largest group, identified themselves as neither white, black, Indian, Asian or mixed race. They identified themselves as ‘other.’ Over 1 million Latinos in New York refused to accept any of the racial categories that the Census Bureau gave them. That tells me that they have a much richer, varied definition of race.”

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Gonzalez sees no contradiction between his radical past and his work at the Daily News, a right-leaning populist tabloid. “They knew I was radical in a lot of my viewpoints, but they also knew I had a long history in New York, that I was well-known in the city. I guess they were looking to help their dwindling circulation so they hired me. Luckily, because of my involvement with the Young Lords, I knew practically all the Latino leaders in the city from the time that they were elected. We were all kids then.”

But Gonzalez doesn’t see himself as a sellout, as the phrase goes. He’s always been involved in union politics and many of his columns deal with labor issues, which keeps him on the respectable edge of leftist causes. “Most of the labor leaders know me or at least have respect for my work, so [the editors] feel I have two big constituencies that most of the other columnists don’t have, so that’s part of why I guess they tolerate me.”

Which means he can have his cake and eat it too--be the voice of radicalism in a rightward tilting newspaper. In fact, some of his columns practically accuse the white population of New York of blatant racism for deserting the city as a means of avoiding dealing with the growing nonwhite character of New York. His latest cause is the controversy over the Pacifica Radio network, the reason for his visit to L.A. Unhappy with a new board of directors that’s pushing radical Pacifica in a more mainstream direction, he resigned--on the air--from his weekly spot on “Democracy Now!” and is helping organize listeners in a national boycott of the network.

Before he became involved in politics, Gonzalez had wanted to be a journalist and was an editor at Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, the Spectator. When the Young Lords broke up, he was working at a printing plant in Valley Forge, Pa.

“I was a pressman because I didn’t want to be a professional. I wanted to be a proletariat. But my wife kept bugging me to make more money. So I ended up taking a journalism course at Temple University. It just so happened that the teacher was an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News and as soon as he saw my stuff in class he said, ‘Look, you should be working at our paper.’ So he sort of paved the way for me to apply to the Philadelphia News.”

Gonzalez stayed there for nine years before moving on to the Daily News. Since then, Gonzalez has become the dean of the paper’s staff columnists, has earned a George V. Polk award for journalism and published two nonfiction books.

Now, after more than 30 years of reflection, Gonzalez can summarize in one word the main attribute that Latinos are contributing to American culture: humility.

“Look,” he concludes, “to a large degree the culture of the United States is that this is a people destined to do great things. So if you occasionally have to take somebody’s land or exterminate a population, it was God’s will. Whereas Americans built the country in a sort of arrogant conquest, Latinos come here with their heads bowed, trying to survive. And of course none of the Latinos are coming in with guns. As one of my buddies says, the first undocumented immigrants were the Pilgrims, but everybody came with guns. They always came with guns. Latinos are coming unarmed, but the transformation that we’re making of the country I think is going to be profound.”

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Alex Abella is an author and journalist. His latest novel is “Final Acts.”