![]() “When I documented, I was not doing it from the outside in, but from the inside out,” he says. “It was ignited and more gasoline was poured as the flames shot up.”Īcutely aware of the tide of history welling up around them, Mr. “I was helping to flip a junked car into the blockade when I saw the gasoline being poured,” Mr. Maristany tells it, the group eventually returned to the sanitation depot and took the cleanup equipment. “All we had been trying to do after sweeping up the streets on previous Sundays was talk with Sanitation about once-a-week pickups and nonexistent trash cans, and about how to decently treat people asking for help instead of blowing them off,” he wrote.Īs Mr. In a 1995 article in The Village Voice, Pablo Guzmán, a founding member of the New York Young Lords, recalled the tenor of the situation. They provide service to the powerful, the people with political clout, not to us!” They asked for brooms and trash bags so they could do the cleanup themselves. “It’s not a mistake, the way they operate. Waste bins were nowhere to be found.Ī small contingent of Young Lords went to the local Department of Sanitation office to ask for better service. Sanitation pickups were irregular, and piles of trash accumulated on street corners, fouling the air and presenting a significant health risk. There’s garbage all over,” was the complaint Mr. Expecting lofty talk of revolution and systemic change, the Lords instead found that the community’s needs were very straightforward. ![]() The first thing they did was hit the streets to ask their neighbors what was needed. ![]() I saw the photos decades later, and for me and so many others working in the nonprofit world in the early 2000s, those images spoke of a movement that refused to ask permission or wait for grant money, one truly invested in its own freedom. His pictures of proud, angry, exuberant young Puerto Ricans taking over Third Avenue as flames rose from a barricade made of trash became emblematic of a global outcry from young people who were finding a voice for their rage as the ’60s drew to a close. Maristany is talking about the summer of 1969, when he was a teenager taking photos of his friends and neighbors, black-and-white images that captured joy amid the challenges of life in Spanish Harlem, and would one day, many years later, grace the walls of the Smithsonian. “Like so many things with the Young Lords, you got to go backward to go forward,” he says as the sounds of East Harlem rise around him: kids yelling, the cackling bochinche of old ladies, the heavy sighs and squealing brakes of the M103 bus. Hiram Maristany laughs when I call to ask him about the famous Garbage Offensive.
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