Johanna Fernández, a Dominican American historian "whose authoritative book about the Young Lords helped revive the legacy of that leftist collective, a revolutionary Latino counterpart to the Black Panthers," died on July 30, the New York Times reported. She was 55. Fernández graduated from Brown University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in English and American civilization, then earned an M.A. in 1996, an M.Phil. in 1999, and a Ph.D. in 2004, all in history from Columbia University.
An associate professor of history at Baruch College, she "was unaware of the Young Lords until her junior year at Brown, when she took a class that covered the radical group and was angered that it had been effectively erased from public memory," the Times noted.
"I'd say that the children of migrants--especially from Latin America--connect more than anyone else with the history of the Young Lords," she said in a 2020 interview with CounterPunch. "Because you wake up and all you see is death and abandoned buildings and you start believing what people and the media say about you.... Then to see your own people take it and shred it and fight it in the streets--that's freedom on a profound personal level."
The Young Lords began as a Chicago street gang "and expanded to New York City in 1969," the Times wrote. "They were a confrontational, anticapitalist collective of Hispanic--mostly Puerto Rican--and Black activists who sought solutions to the deplorable conditions of neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem." Their history was the subject of Fernández's Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, which she completed in 2004 and later expanded into the book.
"She interviewed me three times over 15 years," journalist Juan González, a founder of the group's New York branch, said. "At first, she didn't know a lot, but she was determined to speak to everyone. She spoke to a lot of people who weren't speaking to each other because of past conflicts."
Her research was impeded by the supposed inaccessibility of extensive surveillance files, more than 500 boxes' worth, that had been accumulated by the New York Police Department's secretive special services division from 1954 to 1972, but in 2014, a significant portion of the records resurfaced during an inventory of a Queens warehouse. The files told the story of "thousands of people and organizations in New York City who fought to make the city more just and democratic and were systematically obstructed by the police," Fernández said in a 2016 interview with the Times.
She used information gleaned from the files in her book, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2020), which won the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 2005 to 2006, Fernández grew interested in prison abolition and the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and radio journalist then on death row. She told CounterPunch that visiting Abu-Jamal and other men on death row "transformed me, because you get a sense of a whole country of human beings who've been thrown away."
She wrote and produced Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2010), a documentary about his case; edited a book of his prison writings that was published in 2015; and brought a trove of his papers to a permanent archive at Brown in 2024.
An exhibition about the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s, which she organized with Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University, "was scheduled to open last year in Washington under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. But it was shelved after conservative commentators and members of Congress criticized a previous Smithsonian show about Latino history as Marxist," the Times noted. With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the project was revived in June at the Shed in Manhattan as an outdoor exhibition called "Latinx Freedom." It will be on display through this Sunday, August 16, before touring to several American cities.
"She was such a joy--a relentless hard worker who was never satisfied with one answer," Hinojosa. "She took great offense at the kind of anti-Latino sentiment that exists in this country and worked as hard as she could to make people understand the gifts that Latinos bring to the United States."