Edna Acosta-Belén

"How the past is unveiled and represented by an oppressed group or community is an essential component of constructing a collective historical memory that inspires their present and future spheres of activism and resistance. Building a historical memory, however, is always a rugged and convoluted terrain of contesting claims, but moreso for those populations that have endured the coloniality of being silenced and are seeking to voice their untold stories and, in this way, contribute to the production of new decolonial knowledge."

"When referring to the masses, must men always be reminded that women represent slightly more than half of the worlds population?"

"Oppression will always breed different forms of mobilization and organizing, protest and resistance. Building a historical memory of Puerto Rican struggles against different forms of subjugation is an indispensable component of envisioning those new paths and moving forward."

"it was important to revisit and decolonize the dominant historical record, and envision new emancipating knowledge and decolonial imaginaries."

"Morales unveils what was until now, an unaccounted counter- narrative of the Young Lords. Painstakingly, what is historically a common pattern within these movements reveals itself: there is a tendency for women members to be pressured into acquiescing to a male leadership that claims that discussion of any issues related to womens subordination must always be subsumed to the ostensibly "wider" or "more important" class-based liberation struggles of "oppressed peoples."

"After all, la lucha continúa (the struggle continues). It is hard to ignore the fact that the civil rights struggles that we were part of during our younger years to eradicate all kinds of inequalities, are being eroded in the present by unleashed backlashes in a US society still afflicted by a widening gap between the poor and the wealthy, and between the white population and rapidly growing populations of color. A swarm of right wing politicians and the corporate capital that controls their political campaigns want to turn back the clock on the most significant changes and accomplishments that came out of the US civil rights movement-whether by enacting legislation to limit or suppress the electoral power of Latinos/as and African Americans, gerrymandering districts to favor white voters, demonizing immigrants and fostering xenophobic, racist, and undemocratic discourses, infringing upon the reproductive rights of women, weakening unions, opposing increases in the minimum wage, curtailing all the government programs that benefit the most needy sectors of US society, diminishing opportunities to climb the socioeconomic ladder and thus shrinking the middle class, refusing to accept the catastrophic effects of climate change, and favoring laws that facilitate and perpetuate an insatiable accumulation of wealth by the white privileged elites and the corporate sector. A complicitous right-wing media only adds fuel to these ideological crusades by propagandizing similar positions, and fostering demagoguery and fearmongering against culturally and racially diverse populations and immigrants."