Denise Oliver-Velez

"So many things were changing in our world. We looked, and we searched in revolutionary literature. Maybe we found a few pieces, but there really wasnt much because the world had never really dealt with this. We did take as heroines of our struggle Lolita Lebrón and Blanca Canales because they had been in the Nationalist Party struggle in Puerto Rico. We looked to women like Angela Davis. There were two women in the Panther 21 case at the time, Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird, who had been arrested with the brothers. We were proud that women were going on posters. That was real important because this was new. The face of the civil rights movement had been male."

"if there is no unity within an organization as long as there is a disparity between men and women in the struggle, there will not be that ability to strive for change in the world."

"That last migration in 1947 spawned a generation who had one foot in the United States, and maybe they had dreams of Puerto Rico, but the reality of their existence was here."

"Ive walked through the streets in East Harlem, and people have said, "Dónde está los Young Lords?" Where did they go? People miss the Young Lords. They had been an integral part of that community in the South Bronx, the Lower East Side, Philadelphia, New Haven, Hartford, and New Jersey."

"But the racism in the island, nobody wanted to deal with because I was told "no hay racismo en Puerto Rico." But that was not true. Color, caste, class, were major contradictions, even within left-wing political groups."

"We are fighting against an enemy, the Yankee, and the Puerto Rican lombrices. The one major thing that holds us back in our fight to liberate Puerto Rico and all oppressed people is a lack of unity."

"Having slaves for ancestors is not something to be ashamed of; one should be proud to know that ones ancestors were strong enough to live through the horrors of slavery, strong because of the rich and beautiful history of Africa. We are taught that Africans were savages, and this makes us non-consciously ashamed of our past."

"Many marriages broke up because we were trying to be different, and we didnt know how to maintain marital ties, or even know how to define what marriage was. We looked at it as chains, cadenas. Youre not free! Youre this new, liberated woman, but your husband keeps telling you what to do."

"Capitalism is a system that forces us to climb over our brothers and sisters back to get to the top. It is like a race, in which the prize is survival....We fight against each other to live, and we are divided into groups that fight against each other. These groups are formed out of artificial division of race and sex, and social groupings....Many of these divisions that exist are a result of colonization...As a result of the oppression suffered for generations and generations, first under Spain and then under the amerikkkans, we all develop a "colonized mentality"

"Divorce is now par for the course in most families. Women are still trying to cope with how to run an organization, work a job, go to school, raise a family, and almost become superwomen. Maybe generations to come wont have to deal with these issues because we dealt with them then, and were dealing with them now."

"The destruction to the Lords and other movements was a traumatic experience. Ive learned similar to what Vietnam vets go though. They call it post-traumatic stress disorder; I call it post-traumatic revolutionary failure stress disorder-I have my own name for it. After the collapse of this revolution, many of us had to go on journeys of self-exploration. I had to bottom out. I got into drugs, alcohol, workaholism. The Young Lords were my family. It was my dream. I didnt know what to put there. I didnt know how to deal with it. And I did it in isolation. Many of us did it in isolation. Its only now, years later that I can look at it more comfortably and understand what happened. I did become very disillusioned and didnt want to have anything to do with organizing anything for a period of time. But that healed. Its taken twenty years. The wounds are not there anymore-as open wounds. And the scabs are no longer there. There is some scar tissue, but its not uncomfortable so I can look at things from a different perspective. And I keep returning to doing the kinds of things that I feel are necessary for social change. We need another Young Lords."

"Because of the Black Power movement inside of the united states, American Blacks are now able to hold their heads up high and be proud of their past. It is necessary that we study Puerto Rican history, much of which is African history, so that we can move on ridding ourselves of the barriers that exist between Afro-boricua and jibaro."