Latino Voices

New ‘Chicago Stories’ Documentary Traces History of The Young Lords of Lincoln Park Through ‘60s Gentrification Fight to Modern Activism


The Young Lords of Lincoln Park went from a street gang to revolutionaries focused on supporting their community. 

The group became the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party, acting as the first Latino youth resistance movement of the 1960s as they fought against gentrification. A new “Chicago Stories” documentary outlining their history debuts Friday, October 11, at 8 p.m. 

The Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago is currently known as one of the most affluent areas in Illinois, but it wasn’t always that way. 

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During the 1950s and 1960s the community stood as one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, mainly occupied by ethnic White people, until more than 30,000 Puerto Ricans arrived in the city — with a majority of them residing in Lincoln Park. 

However, the Puerto Ricans faced hostility from their White counterparts and became racial targets to established White gangs. As a result, the Young Lords formed as a means of protection and as a street social group. Their founder Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez eventually worked to transform the group into a political organization. 

“Cha Cha was trying to convince members to become more active in community politics. The young members put up a lot of resistance to them. I think they were more interested in just the social aspect of the organization,” said Omar López, the former minister of information for the Young Lords Organization and currently the executive director of CALOR.

López was in charge of disseminating the group’s message to the masses — a task that was heightened after the killing of Manuel Ramos, a fellow member of the organization who was shot by an off duty police officer. 

“They didn’t have a recourse. They felt that ‘yes we have to start taking some actions’ that would give them solutions to the problems they were facing,” said López. 

From there, the organization went on to collaborate with other groups of oppressed people working to change the status quo, the first being the Black Panther Party. The Young Lords quickly adopted their political style and formed the Rainbow Coalition movement. 

They focused on confronting police brutality and substandard housing, issues that are still prevalent in certain communities today as organizations like the New Era Young Lords continue working on rectifying those problems. 

“When we go back to historical archives of what the Young Lords were fighting against, we see that a lot of those issues are still the same,” said Paul Mireles, deputy chairman of the New Era Young Lords of Chicago. “Actors and structure of those issues may have changed. The renaming of policies may have changed, or the wording around gentrification may have changed, but the problems are still there.”

Mireles joined the organization in 2021 and spoke with previous members throughout his process. He has worked with several other organizations, such as Lolitas Bodega and the founders of Casa Hernandez. They worked together handling food and clothing donations and eventually progressed to looking at projects for houseless communities — a growing issue in Humboldt Park, says Mireles. 

As a DePaul graduate student, Mireles was also involved with the encampments that took place last spring in protest of the Israel-Hamas war. 

“These are just normal college students that have a right to protest or to voice their opinion on the campus that they are paying tuition for, and yet, the way that the institutions and the police were used as a military force to disperse and create fear amongst the students, many of them being Black and Brown, or minority groups within the Muslim community,” said Mireles. 

He notes these were things the Young Lords and Black Panthers were facing in the 1960s and says they are still relevant. 

Occupying and taking over institutions comes straight from the Young Lords handbook. In 1969, the group took over the McCormick Seminary building. In the process of fighting against urban renewal, another term for gentrification, they believed the building was not just an institution in the community, but also a slumlord. 

“They were an institution that was exploiting families that were living in poor conditions,” said López.

During the takeover they created a list of demands generated by the Poor People’s Coalition. 

The group also developed a free health clinic.

Cha Cha eventually stepped down as leader, left Chicago and went underground. He later came back to turn himself into the authorities, served a year in prison and ran for alderman of the 46th Ward. 

“We felt that that was a way of continuing our work, of politicizing the community that gave us a platform to talk about the same issues that we were fighting before,” said López. “But it gave us a different platform. We felt right, right behind Cha Cha in his candidacy, but the change was that we needed to survive as an organization, that we needed to have a platform to continue politicizing the community, and the conditions didn’t call for the type of actions that we did in the 60s.”

Though Cha Cha did not win, the work and he and the Young Lords did pave a way for new organizers to pick up the torch. 

Mireles and the New Era Young Lords currently have a delegation in Puerto Rico working in Yabucoa rebuilding infrastructure from the damage of Hurricane Maria. They are continuously fundraising and looking for more support.

“As long as there is a conflict between the people that have and the have nots, there’s work to be done. I tell young people, get involved,” said López.


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