Saying goodbye to José "Cha Cha" Jiménez
A founder of The Young Lords Organization, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, died in early January. He was 76. I went to his public funeral last week in Chicago, at the Pietryka Funeral Home, to pay respects to someone who dedicated his life to fighting for justice as he saw it—for Puerto Ricans, for Puerto Rico, against gentrification, and for poor people in general.
It was an intergenerational gathering of activists—his contemporaries, with silver hair, walking with canes, and younger people with army green button down shirts and purple berets, a signature of Young Lords. Jiménez himself lay in his casket, wearing his purple beret.
Fred Hampton spoke. So did members of the Jiménez family. So did a historian from DePaul University named Jacqueline Lazú, who’s writing a biography of Jiménez. The giants of the civil rights era are aging. Many of them have passed already. The battles they fought are still being waged—especially for the decolonization and independence of Puerto Rico.
Teachers: If you want to teach the history of The Young Lords, there’s a lot of recent excellent scholarship out there, including Johanna Fernández’s The Young Lords: A Radical History; Darrel Wanzer-Serrano’s The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation; and The Young Lords: A Reader, edited by Wanzer-Serrano, with a foreword by Iris Morales and Denise Oliver-Velez, former members of The Young Lords. Also very excited for Lazú’s work to come out, because it’ll add to what we know about the Young Lords in Chicago.
This morning, I also went to an immigration rally in Chicago, at Federal Plaza. It was super duper cold, but there were still a few hundred people in attendance. ICE is rumored to begin raids in Chicago tomorrow. Stay tuned for more on that. In the meantime, here are a couple pictures from the rally.
