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Abstract
This essay is an attempt to come to terms with the Young Lords’ popular liberation rhetoric in the church offensive. Building from Michael Calvin McGee's observation that “‘the people’ are more process than phenomenon,” I explore the ways in which the Young Lords’ craft “the people's repertory of convictions” from diverse rhetorical resources in their verbal, visual, and embodied discourse surrounding the church offensive. In highlighting such a performative repertoire for “the people,” I extend research related to ideographs by articulating a link between ideographs and what Charles Taylor and others call the “social imaginary,” which is “not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of society.” In making this connection between ideographs and social imaginaries, I read the Young Lords’ rhetoric of “the people” as a radical, decolonial challenge to the modern social imaginary. Specifically, I argue that the Young Lords’ rearticulation of “the people” as a pluriversal collective, demanding material and epistemological liberation, delinks and denaturalizes hegemonic constructions of a liberal/Western “people” that “totalize A reality” in the modern social imaginary.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to extend special thanks to Suzanne Enck-Wanzer, Richard Pineda, Raymie McKerrow, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful comments and guidance seeing this essay though to publication
Notes
1. Quoted in Robert L. Wilson, The First Spanish Methodist Church and the Young Lords (New York: United Methodist Church, 1970), 15.
2. There is no single convention for noting ideographs. While some scholars use angle brackets (e.g., <equality>) to denote the ideographic usage of particular terms, I find that such brackets can be cumbersome and risk interrupting the reader. Thus, I use quotation marks (e.g., “the people”) to draw attention to a term's ideographic functionality.
3. Meg Starr, “‘Hit Them Harder’: Leadership, Solidarity, and the Puerto Rican Independence Movement,” in The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 139. For a more detailed introduction to the group, see Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Introduction: Toward Understanding the Young Lords,” in The Young Lords: A Reader, ed. Darrel Enck-Wanzer (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 1–7.
4. For the rhetoric of the garbage offensive, see Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization's Garbage Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 174–201; Johanna Fernandez, “Between Social Service Reform and Revolutionary Politics: The Young Lords, Late Sixties Radicalism, and Community Organizing in New York City,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980, ed. Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 255–85; Agustín Laó, “Resources of Hope: Imagining the Young Lords and the Politics of Memory,” CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 7 (1995): 34–49.
5. Fernandez, “Between Social Service,” 255–85; Jack Newfield, “Young Lords Do City's Work in the Barrio,” The Village Voice, December 4, 1969.
6. Quoted in Wilson, First Spanish, 15.
7. Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 242, emphasis in original.
8. Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 133–50; Fernando Pedro Delgado, “Chicano Movement Rhetoric: An Ideographic Interpretation,” Communication Quarterly 43 (1995): 446–54.
9. McGee, “The People,” 249, emphasis in original.
10. On the intersections of the verbal, visual, and embodied in Latin@ communication scholarship and marginalized discourse, see Bernadette Marie Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies: Theorizing Performance (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 1–9; Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Rhetorics of Possibility: Challenging Textual Bias Through the Theory of the Flesh,” in Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods & Methodologies, ed. Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 104–17; Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review 46 (2002): 145–56; Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 174–201.
11. Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 106. See also Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 1–19; Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
12. Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 7.
13. Taylor, “Imaginaries,” 106.
14. Kevin DeLuca, “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 32 (1999): 334–48; Joshua Gunn and Shaun Treat, “Zombie Trouble: A Propaedeutic on Ideological Subjectification and the Unconscious,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 144–74. While DeLuca advances an argument against focusing on ideology, Gunn and Treat argue in support of a more (psychoanalytically) robust formulation of ideology and seek to explain why rhetorical scholars have turned away from ideological critique. I take no position, here, on the merits of either normative position.
15. I am very specific in my usage of terms here. I use “decolonial” and “decolonizing” instead of “postcolonial” because I am engaging a literature that operates on a different theoretical register and in contradistinction to postcolonial theory. The literature I engage has specific roots in Latin@ and Latin American politics, history, and theory. Furthermore, the scholars I cite throughout the essay reject postcolonial scholarship as undergirded by modernist rationality. In making the distinction, Walter Mignolo writes:
Coloniality and de-coloniality introduces a fracture with both, the Eurocentered project of post-modernity and a project of post-coloniality heavily dependent on post-structuralism as far as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have been acknowledged as the grounding of the post-colonial canon: Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Hommi Bhabha. De-coloniality starts from other sources …. The de-colonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking while post-colonial criticism and theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy.
Honoring this distinction, I decline to cite the literature on postcolonial theory in rhetorical studies. Unfortunately, rhetorical critics, even in Latin@ communication studies, have neglected the coloniality literature. Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 452.
16. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 243.
17. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 453.
18. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 459, emphasis in original.
19. McGee, “Ideograph,” 1–16.
20. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xiii.
21. McGee, “Ideograph,” 15.
22. Celeste Michelle Condit, “Democracy and Civil Rights: The Universalizing Influence of Public Argumentation,” Communication Monographs 54 (1987): 3.
23. On visual ideographs, see Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the US War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285–306; Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 289–310; John Louis Lucaites, “Visualizing ‘The People’: Individualism and Collectivism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 269–89; Michael M. Osborn, “The Invention of Rhetorical Criticism in My Work,” in Critical Questions: Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of Discourse and Media, ed. William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair and Gary A. Copeland (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 92–94; Catherine H. Palczewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 365–94. While not exclusively on visual ideographs, DeLuca also makes a significant contribution to this scholarly literature. Kevin DeLuca, Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999). Finally, one could also read Hariman and Lucaites's work on iconic photographs as an extension and reworking of the ideograph in the context of visual culture. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Altogether, ideographic theory has moved beyond McGee's focus on terms and phrases to address more fully the functionality of ideographs in discourse broadly considered.
24. On stranger relationality, see Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown V. Board of Education (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
25. Gaonkar, “New Imaginaries,” 5.
26. Gaonkar, “New Imaginaries,” 12.
27. Lefort and Castoriadis are invoked implicitly and explicitly in the contemporary literature on social imaginaries. For an explicit attempt at recovering Lefort and Castoriadis on the subject, see John B. Thompson, “Ideology and the Social Imaginary: An Appraisal of Castoriadis and Lefort,” Theory and Society 11 (1982): 659–81. For the contemporary discussions, see Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 191–213; Taylor, “Imaginaries,” 91–124; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries. While invocation of an “imaginary” cannot escape psychoanalytic considerations (e.g., Castoriadis turned to Jacques Lacan), I will not make such a move in this essay.
28. Gaonkar, “New Imaginaries,” 4.
29. Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 195.
30. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23.
31. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 24.
32. Gaonkar, “New Imaginaries,” 11.
33. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 25.
34. Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
35. Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41; Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse As Oxymoron: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of communication 58 (1994): 141–63.
36. Maldonado-Torres, “Coloniality of Being,” 244.
37. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 169. Flores refers to this as the “lite colonial” in Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). See also, Maldonado-Torres, “Coloniality of Being”; Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Mignolo, “Delinking.”
38. Quijano, “Coloniality,” 169.
39. Mignolo, Local Histories, 38.
40. Michael Calvin McGee, “Power to the (People),” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (87): 436 and 434.
41. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 456, capitalization in original.
42. Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 19–46. The example Ono and Sloop work through is of a Japanese American newspaper published during World War II. Newspapers (like the Young Lords’ Palante) are particularly well suited for such an analysis. See also Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando P. Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 1–21; Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies; Fernando P. Delgado, “When the Silenced Speak: The Textualization and Complications of Latina/o Identity,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 420–38; Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Gender Politics, Democratic Demand and Anti-Essentialism in the New York Young Lords,” in Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz?, ed. Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette Marie Calafell (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 59–80; Michelle A. Holling, “Retrospective on Latin@ Rhetorical-Performance Scholarship: From ‘Chicano Communication’ to ‘Latina/o Communication?’” The Communication Review 11 (2008): 293–332; Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell, “Tracing the Emergence of Latin@ Vernaculars in Studies of Latin@ Communication,” in Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz?, ed. Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette M. Calafell (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 17–29.
43. Mignolo, Local Histories, 67.
44. The Young Lords had numerous programs in place, starting in late-1969, which focused on issues of health, food, clothing, and addiction. These “Serve the People Programs” were modeled after similar programs the Black Panthers established, but they targeted and were unique to the needs of people in Latin@ communities, particularly East Harlem/El Barrio. See, for example, Darrel Enck-Wanzer, The Young Lords: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 218–30; Johanna Fernandez, “The Young Lords and the Postwar City: Notes on the Geographical and Structural Reconfigurations of Contemporary Urban Life,” in African American Urban History Since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 60–82; Fernandez, “Between Social Service,” 255–85; Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 200–44.
45. The Black Panthers had been similarly harassed the previous week. Yoruba and Graciela M. Smith, “Interview with Yoruba, Minister of Information, Young Lords Organization, Regarding Confrontations at the First Spanish Methodist Church in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem); December 19, 1969,” in Young Lords Organization, ed. National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (New York: NCC Communication Center, December 19, 1970), 28.
46. See, for example, Walter D. Mignolo, “Huntington's Fears: ‘Latinidad’ in the Horizon of the Modern/Colonial World,” in Latin@s in the World-System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire, eds. Ramón Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and José David Saldívar (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005), 57–74.
47. The FSMC also became an institution of interest because one friend of the Young Lords, founding Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri, had grown up attending the church.
48. Yoruba and Graciela M. Smith, “Interview with Yoruba,” 27.
49. Spokesman for the United Methodist Spanish Church in Spanish Harlem, “Unofficial Statement of First Methodist Spanish Church in El Barrio; Re: The Confrontation by the Young Lords,” in Young Lords Organization, ed. National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (New York: NCC Communication Center, December 19, 1970), 41.
50. Michael T. Kaufman, “8 Hurt, 14 Seized in A Church Clash,” New York Times, December 8, 1969. While Kaufman does not identify the police as already waiting for the Lords, numerous interviews by the author confirm this was the case.
51. Kaufman, “8 Hurt, 14 Seized in A Church Clash,” 53.
52. Liberation school was an educational program for youth that focused instruction on political, cultural, and social history of Puerto Ricans and other Third World peoples. There was also an emphasis on critical thinking and community political consciousness. It was a core part of their efforts to transcend their colonial imaginary.
53. Felipe Luciano and Graciela M. Smith, “Speech by Felipe Luciano, New York State Chairman, Young Lords Organization, at the First Spanish Methodist Church in El Barrio (11th St. & Lexington) on Sunday December 21, 1969,” in Young Lords Organization, ed. National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America (New York: NCC Communication Center, December 21, 1970), 1.
54. Michael T. Kaufman, “Puerto Rican Group Seizes Church In East Harlem In Demand For Space,” New York Times, December 29, 1970.
55. Quoted in Wilson, First Spanish, 15.
56. Arnold H. Lubasch, “Young Lords Give Food and Care at Seized Church,” New York Times, December 30, 1969.
57. Quoted in Miguel Padilla, “How N.Y. Young Lords Developed,” The Militant, January 30. 1970
58. Quoted in Wilson, First Spanish, 15.
59. Mignolo makes the connection between organized religion and coloniality in multiple places. See Mignolo, Local Histories; Mignolo, “Delinking,” 449–514.
60. Michael T. Kaufman, “105 Members of Young Lords Submit to Arrest, Ending 11-Day Occupation of Church,” New York Times, January 8, 1970.
61. Enck-Wanzer, “Introduction,” 1–7. In 1972, the Young Lords transformed into the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization in 1972, a decidedly internationalist organization guided largely by their interpretation of Maoism.
62. Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1987), 80.
63. Rodgers, Contested Truths, 84.
64. Kenneth Burke, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” in American Writer's Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International Pub., 1935), 87–94.
65. McGee, “The People,” 235–49; McGee, “Power to the (People),” 432–37.
66. We could probably turn to numerous other Young Lords examples and arrive at a similar point of analysis about “the people.” I root my discussion of ideographs generally and “the people” in particular in a case study of the church offensive because it is the most overt example and was a defining moment in the history of the Young Lords.
67. Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 139.
68. Yoruba and Smith, “Interview with Yoruba,” 28, emphasis added.
69. A similar rationale explains why the Young Lords saw a large part of their role in the community as being focused on education (e.g., “We're educating the people to what it is to be born in Kenya, what it is to be Puerto Rican, and also to the contradictions in the society”). See Yoruba and Smith, “Interview with Yoruba,” 28.
70. McGee, “Ideograph,” 10.
71. See footnote 23 on visual ideographs.
72. Lucaites, “Visualizing,” 281–84.
73. Lucaites, “Visualizing,” 274.
74. Yoruba and Smith, “Interview with Yoruba,” 29.
75. On markers or “keys” of performance, see Richard Bauman, Verbal Art As Performance (Cambridge, MA: Newbury House Publishers, 1978), 16–24.
76. See Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 185.
77. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 499–500.
78. El Pueblo Se Levanta offers the best documentation of these activities.
79. Quoted in Wilson, First Spanish, 15.
80. Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, “The United Front Against the People,” Palante 2, no. 1 (1970): 3, capitalization in original.
81. Photo by Michael Evans in Lubasch, “Young Lords Give Food.”
82. This idea of moving the social is consistent with Michael Calvin McGee, “‘Social Movement’: Phenomenon or Meaning?” Central States Speech Journal 31 (1980): 233–44.
83. Luciano and Smith, “Speech by Felipe Luciano,” 2.
84. Another good example of this deployment is in Jose Yglesias, “Right on with the Young Lords,” New York Times, June 70, 1970.
85. On jaiberia in the garbage offensive, see Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 190. Also see Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel, Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 30–31.
86. See, for example, Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 3–20.
87. Mignolo, Local Histories, 67. Mignolo's understanding of borders and border thinking is informed greatly by Gloria Anzaldúa's scholarship. See, especially, Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
88. Mignolo, Local Histories, 23.
89. Luciano and Smith, “Speech by Felipe Luciano,” 3.
90. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 460.
91. Whether ideographs circulate amongst a public, counterpublic, or both is not at issue here. Whatever one wants to call the audience of the Young Lords, the fact remains that ideographs are circulating and are addressed. For the distinction between public and counterpublic, see Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 65–124.
92. José Ramón Sánchez, Boricua Power: A Political History of Puerto Ricans in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 171–209. Sánchez demonstrates some of the ways in which the Young Lords were media savvy and got their images to circulate.
93. In what has become a far-too-regular ritual, people continue to gather at the FSMC to commemorate the lives of former Young Lords as they pass away.
94. Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 396.
95. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 109–10.
96. On the garbage offensive and instrumentalist frameworks, see Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System,” 186–91.
97. Luciano and Smith, “Speech by Felipe Luciano,” 4.
98. McGee, “Power to the (People),” 434.
99. McGee, “Power to the (People),” 436.
100. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 450.
101. Quijano, “Coloniality,” 172.
102. Quijano, “Coloniality,” 177.
103. Quijano, “Coloniality,” 177.
104. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 497.
105. Mignolo, “Delinking,” 497–98.
106. Mignolo, Local Histories, 68.
107. Mignolo, Local Histories, 67.
108. Michelle A Holling and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Identities on Stage and Staging Identities: ChicanoBrujo Performances As Emancipatory Practices,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27 (2007): 78.
109. Holling and Calafell, “Tracing,” 22.
110. Although he does not talk about Latin@ vernacular discourse or decoloniality, Fernando Delgado's work on Chicano movement ideographic challenges could be another example of the kind of decolonial work in which the Young Lords and other Latin@ vernacular discourses engage. See, Delgado, “Chicano Movement Rhetoric,” 446–54.
111. Calafell, Latina/o Communication Studies, 7. See also Calafell and Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images”; Enck-Wanzer, “Trashing the System”; Holling, “Retrospective”; Ono and Sloop, “Vernacular Discourse.”
112. Mignolo, Local Histories, 38.