Everyday Environmentalism Episode 2 - Trash Talk: The Young Lords' Garbage Offensive & Protesting Environmental Racism in El Barrio (with Dr. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano) | Otter.ai

Everyday Environmentalism Episode 2 - Trash Talk: The Young Lords' Garbage Offensive & Protesting Environmental Racism in El Barrio (with Dr. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano)

Amanda Hardin41min

Prem Thakker

00:00

It sounds like, if you listen to this podcast, you might become the next AOC.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

00:17

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Everyday Environmentalism, a podcast that tells past and present stories about urban nature in New York City. I'm Amanda Martin-Hardin. I am an environmental historian studying at Columbia, and I'm joined today by my co-hosts, Prem Thakker, a journalist who also studied history at Columbia, and Maddy Aubey, an archaeology PhD student at UCLA. Today, we're super excited to be joined by Dr. Darrell Wanzer-Serrano. He is a Professor of Communication at Texas A&M University--shout out College Station, that is actually my hometown. But, he is a core faculty in the Latino and Mexican American Studies Program at Texas A&M, and he specializes in rhetoric, media, culture, identity and public affairs. More specifically, he also focuses on cultural studies, critical theories of race, ethnicity, de-coloniality, and Latinx Studies. He also has a podcast called "Imagining Latinadades," where he is the co-host. I believe that is sort of tandem with a conference he put together this past spring called "Imagining Latinidadaes: Articulations of National Belonging." So definitely check out all of that online. Today we're going to be discussing his book, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation. And specifically, we're going to be talking about the Garbage Offensive, which--we'll get into all of this in more detail as we talk with Professor Wanzer-Serrano. But just to give you a brief overview, prior, this was an incident in 1969 in New York City organized by the Young Lords, who were New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent, organizing politically in East Harlem to bring about better qualities of life and political organizing for their community. And the garbage incident was a really fascinating protest staged to highlight what we would now call the environmental racism and inequities that East Harlem residents faced, because the New York City sanitation department simply was not picking up the garbage in their neighborhood, whereas the wealthier white communities were receiving regular sanitation upkeep. So the Young Lords, along with the community members, decided to organize and put huge heaps of garbage in the street, sort of like a barricade, and even escalated to setting it on fire when the city tried to ignore them and wouldn't meet their demands. It's a fascinating story of what I would consider environmental protest in New York City. But what we talk about with Professor Wanzer-Serrano is why the Young Lords have not really been considered environmental activists by many, and what we can learn from them regarding coalition-building and thinking about more equitable environmental resources today. So let's just get into it!

Amanda Martin-Hardin

03:05

Your book was the first full length scholarly publication about the history of the New York Young Lords. What prompted you to begin this project?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

03:12

It was really an accident. I write about this a little bit in my book. I had been planning to write a dissertation basically focused on Election 2000, because that's the kind of time period I was in grad school. And it was going to be a psychoanalytic interpretation of ballots, because you know, who didn't love Jean Jacques then? And in what was supposed to be my last semester of coursework, I stumbled upon some stuff by the Young Lords. I was reading an anthology called Boricuas: Influential Puerto Rican Writings -An Anthology, and it has an entry on the Young Lords. And once I read that, I was just kind of--I was kind of taken aback. And I realized that this needed to occupy my intention and my time. And so that's what got me started doing work on the Young Lords. Anyone who's in graduate school will learn this: you work on a project for awhile, and most of the time, you need to step back a little bit. And I reached a point where I was stepping back and I wasn't going to do a book on The Young Lords. And then I just kind of like wrote myself back in and put this book together.

Maddy Aubey

04:17

So for those who might not be familiar with the Young Lords, briefly, can you explain their history? Why did the group originally emerge? How did it evolve? And what were some of the social conditions that they sort of originally organized around?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

04:30

Sure. I mean, originally, they emerged as a street gang in Chicago. And so they were, you know, they were organizing around the protection of turf and the people in their community. They were facing a lot of instigation, basically, from white folks in the community, and sought to kind of organize, and organize along a gang model. It was a little while later, I think close to about a decade later--that I think started in the late 1950s, 1959 maybe. And it was in 1968, that the leader of that gang, a guy named José Cha Cha Jiménez, had a conversion experience while in prison--he uses those terms. And the conversion wasn't a religious conversion so much as it was a political one. And it was at that point that he realized that he needed to take this organization make a political turn, and form coalitions with others who are doing political work in their communities, too. And so he changed the group from the Young Lords--right, just straight up the Young Lords street gang--into the Young Lords Organization, and started organizing with Fred Hampton, and with others, right to form the original Rainbow Coalition. This is something that's been really big in the news lately. And then in New York, you know, it was a slightly different experience, it was a couple of different groups of folks more from a kind of like, college type background, and they started meeting to discuss, basically Puerto Rican history and culture because they weren't learning about it in school. You know, a couple of different groups did this. And they kind of eventually merged together and decided to seek the permission to become the East Coast chapter of the Young Lords. People will consistently tell a story of loading up in a Volkswagen bug, and driving from New York to Chicago to meet with Cha Cha Jiménez and and ask his permission. And so that's what they did. And he granted permission and kind of came out and helped them make that organizational formation in New York.

Maddy Aubey

06:31

Awesome. Yeah, I think perhaps this applies more to the Young Lords before they were in New York. But what were the connections between this group and other social movements at the time, as you mentioned, like the Black Power movement with the Black Panthers? Or the feminist movements of the time?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

06:45

Yeah. So you know, in Chicago--and I think this transferred to New York as well--there was a tight coalitional connection between the Young Lords the Black Panthers, and a group called the Young Patriots, which are kind of leftist Appalachian folks. And they work closely together on some core issues related to poverty and other forms of kind of systemic oppression. In New York, the Young Lords worked really closely with the Panthers, in part because they were just like a couple of blocks apart, their offices were. And so they were always going to each others' things and supporting each other in various rallies and stuff like that. In terms of connections to feminist movements, you know, that's really interesting, and also really complicated. At one level, there was in New York, this fascinating connection to a group of kind of separatist feminists who published a newspaper called The Rat. I don't know if you've ever heard of The Rat before?

Amanda Martin-Hardin

07:43

That's a great name!

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

07:44

Well, The Rat had been kind of like, from what I can tell a typical kind of like leftist newspaper of the time that had this transformation within its organizing committee. It was taken over by women, and really advanced a kind of a more separatist feminist cause. The Young Lords basically got permission to publish to print their newspaper out of The Rat's office, because they had a printing press. There were those kinds of like, loose logistical kind of coalitional things that happen. But you know, there are other more ideologically informed coalitional and commitments and moments as well. So I don't know how much detail you want me to get into on this. But there was a whole thing with a group called Third World Women's Alliance, which actually formed after the Young Lords formed, and numerous members of the Young Lords were invited to become part of the founding group of Third World Women's Alliance, and turned it down. They would work with them in the end, but they turned it down, because they saw it as kind of counter-revolutionary. They thought the work of gender equality needed to be the work of everyone, not just women who are organizing around the issue. And so they saw transformations within the organization within the Young Lords Organization to bring those issues to the forefront.

Maddy Aubey

09:04

That's super interesting. I've never heard of that. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, I guess relating more to streets, even though I could have run with that for like, another hour!

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

09:11

You should check out the chapter in the book. I think you'd find it interesting.

Maddy Aubey

09:15

I definitely will. So one of the chapters in your book is devoted to the Garbage Offensive, which was an act of civil disobedience and protests in East Harlem that was organized by the Young Lords. Can you tell us a little bit about how they first got the idea for the Garbage Offensive? And like, explain what happened thereafter?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

09:32

Yeah. So I think the idea came from two places. One of them people will acknowledge readily in interviews, the other one seems to be one that I would claim as an influence, but I don't recall ever anyone ever talking about when I interviewed them. So the first influence was just from the people of El Barrio. When the Young Lords were kind of in that early formation process, they still weren't kind of officially publicly The Young Lords yet in New York. But you know, they were preparing to kind of launch themselves as that. They've been operating in a lot of ways as a study group--I don't want to minimize what they were doing--but that's a lot of what they were doing. And so, they were reading lots of history and theory, and had these kind of grand revolutionary desires, and went to go talk to some people in El Barrio who are like, "Well, what are the big problems?" And, you know, people sitting on the corner playing dominoes or whatever, were like, "What, are you stupid? Like, look around, smell the air! Garbage is a huge problem here. That's what we need help with." And so that's what they ran with, right, is seeking to clean up the streets. And of course, that escalated. And I'm sure we'll talk more about that. The kind of less acknowledged, or unacknowledged, influence was another group of organizers called the Real Great Society, and they'd run garbage protests and other groups had run garbage protests prior to the Young Lord's in New York, especially down on the Lower East Side. And so it is likely that the people who were forming the Young Lord's--right, this founding leadership collective central committee--would have known about that, and would have seen it also and realize that this was a key and important potential issue to organize around. Especially if it if it got to the point where it needed to kind of escalate. But they started real low key about it, right. They just started with cleaning up the garbage.

Maddy Aubey

11:25

As you mentioned the people on the corner playing dominoes, and like being like, "Look around, smell the air!" We recently had an interview where we were talking about 19th century Manhattan, and we had Catherine McNeur, who was the author of a book (Taming Manhattan) about it, sort of just take us through a sight/sound/smell-scape of what that would have been like. And I was just wondering if you had any like, descriptors of what it was physically like to be in East Harlem in 1969?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

11:52

There's just one quotation that I've used by Pablo Guzmán. And this is written, you know, years later--25 years later--in a piece that he did for the Village Voice, but he describes it like this: he says, "I had never done anything like this before the garbage offensive. Twelve other guys, one woman, myself and a small handful of people who until moments before had been spectators, were about to set a barricade of garbage on fire. Garbage in the ghetto sense: rusted refrigerators from empty lots, the untold carcasses of abandoned vehicles, mattresses, furniture, and appliances off the sidewalk, as well as the stuff normally found in what few trash cans the city saw fit to place in El Barrio." And there's some great images that the Young Lords used in their newspapers too, which are hard to convey on a podcast. I'm sure it's all this like old stuff, like this big stuff like refrigerators, cars, rusty metal things stacked up in lots. This is where kids are playing. And beyond that, you just have to imagine I mean, anyone who's lived in New York City or any other city, you know what it gets like in July in the alleys. Especially if maybe it's missed a day for garbage collection or something, right? Things are spilling into the streets. It gets funky, right? It can get pretty bad. And so you know, multiply that times I don't know how many, because in East Harlem, the garbage trucks just weren't stopping there on any kind of regular basis, right? And so trash was, y'know, there weren't that many trash cans. It's not like today where, you know, you got a trash can in every corner, right? The city wasn't doing that there. They weren't stopping the trucks there. And so garbage was just piling up. And that gets, that gets nasty.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

13:47

It gets extremely nasty, to your point, even today, where we have a lot more infrastructure for it. So I can imagine!

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

13:54

Yeah, for a while I would go to New York pretty regularly on research trips and stuff. And I was always struck by how, in some ways, how little things have changed. Right? Like the difference between being down on Hunter College on 68th Street versus up, you know, in El Barrio on 110th Street. You know, the city just kind of took care of the street better, right? And this is, you know, in contemporary time, where it's much easier to draw attention to inequities. In 1969, in a lot of ways people weren't paying attention to East Harlem. And so they get away with even more, right--"they" being the city--get away with even more.

Prem Thakker

14:32

And you know, one thing we're kind of walking around, but I think is pretty important to just say explicitly, is: could you maybe speak to the demographics of just East Harlem generally, at this time? You know, not just people involved directly with the Young Lords, but just the neighborhood generally?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

14:49

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the neighborhood generally in in 1969 is predominantly Puerto Rican, but also Italian American. So like, East Harlem had been a kind of an Italian American stronghold. In fact, one of the best slices of pizza you can get is still up in East Harlem, on I think it's Second? Is it First Avenue or Second Avenue? Old coal oven pizza.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

15:13

Is it Patsy's?

Maddy Aubey

15:14

Yeah, that's where Patsy's is.

Prem Thakker

15:16

Noted.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

15:16

That might be it, yeah. So you still have the kind of like, there were still like, elements of it being a kind of Italian American stronghold. But it was predominantly Puerto Rican by this point. And then today, it's a bigger mixture of Latinos. So you've got--I don't think Puerto Ricans are the dominant group in the neighborhood anymore. There's also a lot of Mexicans, Dominicans. So it's a much more kind of like, broader Latino neighborhood now.

Prem Thakker

15:45

And, you know, one of the things that Maddie mentioned was that we talked to historian Catherine McNeur. And in her book Taming Manhattan she kind of shows how, since the 19th century, garbage in the streets has not just been a material problem, of just how it sucks to have garbage in the streets and how much it smells. But it also highlights certain social tensions around class, racism, sentiment surrounding immigrants. Similarly,you have this phrase that you use in your book that the Garbage Offensive was the Young Lords' way of, you know, not only cleaning up the streets, but "trashing the system." Yeah. So, could you kind of speak to what you're going for there?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

16:20

Yeah, you know, part of that comes from another quotation from the Young Lords. Let's see if I can find that here.

Maddy Aubey

16:29

Side note: also, I was walking up from Hunter College to East Harlem over the weekend, because I used to go to Hunter College High School. So I was like, "Oh, let me walk past and relive the olden days." And it really is such like a wild difference. There's like this moment at like, 97th I think where the train comes above ground. And from that point onward, it's like the city just does not care in the same way because it's officially no longer the Upper East Side.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

16:57

Yeah. And I mean, you know, that'll start to change as East Harlem continues to gentrify. I don't know anyone that lives in East Harlem anymore, because they've been forced out. Okay, I finally found that the quotation. So part of this idea for "trashing the system" for me is kind of rooted in this quotation from, again from Pablo Guzmán, from his kind of retrospective look on his time in the Young Lords. And he writes, "We hope to show that our object as a nation should not merely be to petition a foreign government, Amerikkka, (spelled with three K's) to clean the streets, but also to move on that government for allowing garbage to pile up in the first place. By questioning this systems basic level of sanitation, our people would then begin to question drug traffic, urban renewal, sterilization, etc, until the whole corrupt machine could be exposed for the greedy monster it is." I love that quotation, which to me is really rich, because it suggests some different ways of kind of understanding the system. And part of this, like you could go back to where it was really kind of popular at the time, which would be Herbert Marcuse, his work on One-Dimensional Man, which helped to inform this broader systemic analysis that groups like the Young Lords and others were engaged in. One of my favorite things about this time period, especially in New York, is just how much the groups the different activist groups were informed by, like what we think of today is kind of great works of political philosophy. Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, etc. Like, these are things that that we teach in the college classroom, especially the graduate classroom today, that they were just kind of reading together and figuring out kind of what it meant for their specific circumstances. And so I read this as one way that the Young Lords were kind of operationalizing this broader systemic analysis, and offering a challenge to it.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

18:58

Your answer is making me think, what's so interesting, too, about the Young Lords--both in the context of if we think about garbage or the streets. There's this really nuanced double meaning between the literal reality of streets and garbage in New York, but also there's a really symbolic meaning that the Young Lords were able to deploy. So, just building on that in terms of the streets a little bit: the Young Lords deployed this strategic understanding of the streets in the 1960s in New York. And you explained in your book that when the Garbage Offensive took place, there was this stereotype that scholars and government officials perpetuated about Puerto Ricans. They portrayed them as passive and dirty and sort of responsible for the dirty state of East Harlem, basically.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

19:41

Yeah.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

19:41

And so how did the Young Lords, many of whom had been working and middle class college students, attempt to use street sweeping as a way to subvert these stereotypes?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

19:51

Yeah, I mean, to me, it's very powerful to see a Columbia University student--because like, Juan Gonzalez, who we all know today as one of the voices of Democracy Now, former columnist for New York Daily News. Well, he was a founding member of the Young Lords, right? And so, to see Juan Gonzalez and others in the streets, sweeping it up while some other folks in the neighborhood just kind of watch and think like, "What the heck are these college kids doing?" Right? That was powerful, that started to subvert expectations. And it started to, I think, demonstrate to people the capacity to be able to take power back for themselves in the streets. Because, you know, when push came to shove, when--when literally push came to shove--and the city quit, you know, wouldn't pick up the trash, and the Young Lords decided to start dumping it in the streets. And when that didn't work anymore, it wasn't the Lord's, but it was other members of the community who had been watching what they were doing, who started lighting it on fire. Because they knew that, that was the next step, right? Buses are gonna push away piles of garbage in the streets, because a big bus can easily push a pile of garbage, light it on fire. A bus full of people isn't going to push a burning pile of garbage out of the way. Tbhat's going to be able to be disruptive. So to me, it was the Young Lords--through their acts in the community and their demonstration of what a politically engaged active life looked like--that helped to empower people in the community who were already feeling like "Enough is enough." But they weren't sure what to do about it. And so the Young Lords were able to model that and they took it off in their own direction.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

21:48

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, speaking of sort of engaging with the larger community, you also explain how the Garbage Offensive drew from the Puerto Rican tradition of jaibería, which you defined us, and I'll quote you this time, "the extreme adoption of dominant and ruling ideologies, beliefs or actions in order to demonstrate their shortcomings and instigate movement." So can you elaborate a bit on how the Young Lords use this practice of jaibería against the Department of Sanitation and in the Garbage Offensive?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

22:16

Yeah. So like, another way to put this is that it's a form of kind of complicitous critique, which, which probably doesn't clarify things anymore. So let me explain exactly what that looks like. You know, the Young Lords basically, when they set up to this, "Like, okay, we're gonna play by the book, right? We're gonna do exactly what they--what the system, what the city--says we should do. And so we're gonna pick up the streets, you know. The city is supposed to provide certain resources for doing this. And so we expect them to give us when we need it, the brooms, etc." And so when they reached a point where they couldn't clean up the street anymore, because they didn't have the supplies to do and they went to the Department of Sanitation, they made the demand the department sanitation, they're like, "Hey, give us the stuff." Because, like, it's your responsibility, you know? They're adopting the ideological position of the city and saying, "Okay, if this is going to be your position, then we're going to hold you to that." And when the city wouldn't comply, then they took the brooms, so they keep doing what they needed to do. And they did that they did kind of the same thing. In other moments of activism after the Garbage Offensive, to the most notable being the lead poisoning testing program that they ran, where the city, you know, agreed that they needed to do lead poisoning testing, they had all the testing kits to do it. And they were just sitting in their offices, right? And so the Young Lords liberated those testing kits, and enlisted the help of medical students to help administer those testing kits. Because what they knew--but they didn't have the evidence for at the time--was that there was an epidemic of lead poisoning in the community.Tuberculosis is another example. And all of these are significant environmental concerns, right? That are rooted in the neglect of the community, by the city and essentially, in the empowerment of slumlords to barely maintain properties in such a state that people are being poisoned on a daily basis, and people are getting sick on a daily basis. Because, you know, they're not able to kind of take, or they're not willing to take public health into consideration.

Prem Thakker

24:22

I really like Amanda's prior question, because the idea of the Garbage Offensive drawing from Puerto Rican tradition reminds me of what you said these activists at the time were deriving their own strategies from what we would consider great works. They were closing that distance and that gap that we, as people in 2021 just study. Puerto Rico, of course, has been colonized by the United States since the late 19th century and by Spain for centuries prior to that. So given this, how does this factor into what you would call the "decoloniality" in both rhetoric and action of the Garbage Offensive?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

24:57

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, for me, the Garbage Offensive is one example of some of the specific ways in which activists can practice decolonial commitments and help to kind of transform the minds of the community. So part of that is the refusal to enact that docility, if that makes sense. Also, in the very act of listening to the people of the community--to go to the people, the community to ask, "Well, you know your life, your existence best. What is the problem?" And to then respect that local knowledge, because the old folks playing dominoes and sitting gossiping on the corner are so often dismissed, but they've been through it! They've been around a long time. And they know that when everything's dirty, that creates conditions that are not just uncomfortable. But those are the conditions under which people get sick. And kids can't live the playful lives they deserve to live without fear of getting tetanus or bitten by a rat. And so to elevate that knowledge, and to elevate those practices of listening, I think is one of the key lessons of the Garbage Offensive that helps to demonstrate what one aspect of decolonial praxis might look like. I think another part of it, though, is the kind of critique that is in some ways implicit in the Garbage Offensive, which is a critique of the excesses of modern life that lead to the production of all this trash within the community. And to really center that as the first issue that they're engaging in, I think implies an acknowledgement that, you know--I'll put myself into their position for a moment, right? That we've played a part right in creating some of this problem. Like, it's not our fault that the city is ignoring us, and that racist policies are put in place that the put our lives at risk. But maybe we are too focused on being consumers of products that generate so much waste. And maybe that is something we ought to be attentive to, as well, that as we become complicit in quote-unquote "modern life," you know, that we enable it to continue in ways that are damaging to us as well. You know, I think that's another part of the lesson here, that people unwittingly, through various implied acts of consent, become participants in that system that's unsustainable, but will nevertheless continue as if it can forever.

Maddy Aubey

27:33

Just another question, sort of as an extension of premise previous one on rhetoric. Can you help us understand a little bit more about how the rhetoric that the Young Lords actively used about the Garbage Offensive influenced a new political paradigm, or at least activist paradigm?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

27:49

So I have a very broad understanding of rhetoric, that that makes me a bad rhetorician for a lot of rhetoric folks! Because for me rhetoric can be basically any discourse. And I think almost anything can function discursively. In this case, I think trash functions discursively: the way that it's situated and addressed in certain kinds of ways. So I define rhetoric as the study of situated public discourse. So, in thinking about how that influences a new political paradigm, what's important to me is understanding the ways in which these various symbolic acts--which are also very material acts that the Young Lords are engaging in the Garbage Offensive--is addressed to a particular audience within a particular context. And this case, really, most locally to the people in East Harlem, but also more broadly to Latinos in New York and beyond. And it makes some propositional kinds of claims, right, about the city essentially being racist in the ways that it was ignoring the needs of that community. But more importantly, it helps to constitute new political subjects. And that's where the real kind of power of rhetoric is, to me. Yes, one way to understand rhetoric is as a goal oriented activity, where arguments are made and people are persuaded or not. But only some of that's going on in the Garbage Offensive, and the much more powerful stuff is the ways in which their symbolic action bound people together in common cause and really activated new political subjects. And I think as a communication professor, as a rhetoric professor, that's the kind of stuff I really want people to be able to grapple with, especially in this day and age when like, you know, sound bites and TikTok--and now I feel like I should be like, "You know, in my day!" But in an era in which communication is hypermediated and remediated, the ability to make sustained in depth argumentation is kind of minimized, right? That is not a significant affordance of contemporary mediation. But, you know, forging those bonds of identification, and enacting and demonstrating the potential of new political subjectivities--that is within the affordances of contemporary mediation.

Prem Thakker

30:21

You know, one thing that we're generally concerned with on this podcast is how we see people who have been involved with their environments, and how we deem certain people to be activists for the environment and other people not to be. And you know, the Young Lords, from our perspective, we would see them as pursuers of environmental justice in a certain way. For example, they focused on lead poisoning impacting children, and tenant housing, along with, being concerned with trash, which is a part of one's environment. Do you think the Young Lords in general have been recognized as environmental activists? And do you think they should be?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

30:57

I absolutely think they should be! This is a great question. It's a project that a former colleague and I were planning to work on at one point, actually drawing connections between the Young Lords and all their different forms of activism around the issues that you just mentioned. And also, the activism in places like Vieques in Puerto Rico. So yes, absolutely. I think the Young Lords ought to be acknowledged as an environmental justice organization. This is before that term was really in popular use, right? And so I think that there hasn't been a lot of recognition of the work that they did, from within that environmental justice lens. One person who does do it, though, is has an excellent book called Concrete and Clay is Matthew Gandy, and he has a chapter on The Young Lords. The focus is a little bit on the Garbage Offensive. He was I believe the first one to write on the Garbage Offensive, so you should interview him if you can!

Amanda Martin-Hardin

31:53

I know we should, we should absolutely reach out. That's a great idea.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

31:57

But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, aside for him, I think I might have used a little bit of the language of environmental justice, and probably could have more. Next time.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

32:08

You also write about how technically, if we're thinking in purely materialist forms, the Garbage Offensive could be considered a failure, because New York eventually returned to inconsistent garbage removal in East Harlem. But you have this really intriguing argument where you say there are ways in which we should actually consider it a success. So can you tell us more about that?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

32:29

Yeah, you know, I think that a lot of folks who do work in social movement studies and even more folks who do work in rhetorical studies tend to have a very goal-oriented perspective on the importance and efficacy of rhetoric and social movement rhetoric in particular. And if we operate within that framework, then, you know, then the garbage offensive is a failure because the claim that they're making is that the city should be picking up the trash. And the city does for a little bit, and then basically stops again. And so they didn't achieve their goal, if that's how we want to measure it. But like I was saying earlier, I think that there's a lot more to rhetoric and to social movement than just achieving specific, precise goals. I mean, that's obviously always a part of it. But what happened in the Garbage Offensive, despite that specific failure of the garbage not being cleaned up on a regular basis, was that the community was started on that path to transformation, that it animated and activated people in the community and new political subjectivities. That brought them to the point where, you know, we're just a short period later, you had thousands of people marching for Young Lords causes. Going from a few or just a handful of members, right--most visibly a small Central Committee and a few kind of cadre--to be in a much larger organization, but more importantly, an organization that whatever its size, had tremendous support within the communities in which it operated. And that I think that's where the Garbage Offensive shines, that it helps to constitute politicized Puerto Ricans at a time when many Puerto Ricans themselves had a hard time seeing themselves as political subjects.

Prem Thakker

34:28

You talk about these different frameworks of assessing movement success. And, you know, when we study environmental history, we're often confronted with the former goal-oriented framework in which we reflect on upsetting stories of injustice that seem to offer a blueprint for what contemporary activists environmentalist should not do. And as you say, in the latter, the Garbage Offensive actually seems to offer the sort of transformational and transcendent visions about equitable organizing, building coalition's, bringing people together building up grassroots movements, and essentially just building a better world. So in today's case, how can the garbage offensive be instructive to environmental challenges we're facing?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

35:13

I think that it can be instructive on a couple of levels. One is that, as you mentioned, the various kinds of coalitional politics that were formed, and I'd say also intergenerational coalitions that were formed. The young lord were a group of young folks of college age, and even younger. I think the youngest member of the central committee was Juan Fi Ortiz, who was the Minister of Finance, he was 15 years old. 15 years old! You know, so you had this group of young folks who was listening to elders in the community, and was getting the support of people who were kind of middle-aged, and then people who were older. And building that kind of broad cross-generational support was really what made the Young Lords strong for the years in which it was strong. I think that's one lesson to learn. And part of that kind of sub lesson is, young people really know where it's at, that young people do a really good job of identifying problems and mobilizing themselves and mobilizing their communities, especially in a world in which forms of mediation are changing so rapidly. I think it's younger generations that really have their fingers on the pulse of what the affordances of those different media are. That's one lesson that I would draw from that. Another lesson I would draw, thosugh, is one that I haven't talked about yet. And that is the kind of transnational dimension of the Young Lords activism around garbage as well. You know, while it's started with this focus on the Garbage Offensive in East Harlem is this very specific local act, that their analysis of garbage continued. And they drew the connections to what was happening in Puerto Rico, for example, and around the globe. In making all these connections, they're able to show how this isn't a teeny, tiny, small, isolated problem. This is part of a bigger systemic problem. And we have to address the causes of that as well.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

37:20

You know, it's so interesting hearing you talk about that, because I just can't help but think of AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and how it doesn't seem to me to be coincidental that she's Puerto Rican, she's from New York City. And now she's sort of one of the people pushing forth the green New Deal, which seems to me almost like a new iteration of environmental politics that is much more attuned to these human social issues.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

37:43

You're right. I don't think it's coincidental. And I think that part of what enables AOC to be able to make those connections and push for that kind of policy is her awareness of history. Right? She knows about what the Lords did, right? She knows about what the Black Panthers did. And she sees that the kind of work that they did in their communities, for people in the communities, but also how that translated into broader visions for justice. And I'm not saying that we wouldn't have AOC if we didn't have the Young Lords. But I think other people have made have made these connections, because she's talked about it before, right? It helps to inform that kind of consciousness that she does have.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

38:26

I mean, I honestly can't think of a better way to conclude our podcast. You just gave us a beautiful thesis statement for the power of thinking through history and activism and how to tie those together. So I feel like that was a beautiful bow you just wrapped the episode in.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

38:42

Great! Thanks

Prem Thakker

38:44

It's like, if you listen to this podcast, you might become the next AOC it sounds like.

Maddy Aubey

38:51

Great selling point.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

38:53

For a lot of people. For some people, that's gonna be like, you know..

Prem Thakker

38:55

For some people.. Well, yeah.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

38:58

Yeah. Is there anything else you would like to add, though?

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

39:01

No, I don't think so. Y'all had really thoughtful questions. I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

39:06

Thank you. I mean, your your book gave us so much to think through! Truly.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

39:12

Well, thank you. Good luck with the project.

Prem Thakker

39:15

Cheers. Thank you.

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano

39:17

Take care, bye y'all.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

39:18

Bye, thank you.

Amanda Martin-Hardin

39:27

Well, that's our episode, folks. Thank you for joining us. And of course, special thanks to Dr. Darrell Wanzer-Serrano for sitting with us for this fascinating interview. You can find more about his work online. He has a website, wanzerserrano.com. And by the way, this is all in our show notes, so feel free to click over there for the links. But he's also on Twitter @DoctorDWS. And that's Dr. spelled out D-O-C-T-O-R-W-S. Thanks as always to my fantastic co hosts Maddy Aubey, Prem Thakker, and to the Society of Fellows and Haymen Center at Columbia University for funding. You can find more about our podcast online: we have a website, everydayenvironmentalism.org Find us on Twitter at @everyday_enviro, or Instagram at @everydayenvironmentalism. We're not yet on Tik Tok. I don't know if we'll make the leap, that kind of intimidates me, but we'll see. Stay tuned. You never know. We hope that you have a fantastic week. And in the meantime, we also hope to see you outside!

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