50th Anniversary of the Founding of El Comité-MINP
By Luis Cordero Santoni & Victor Quintana
Originally published in Comite Noviembre's 2020 Puerto Rican Heritage Month Journal.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of El Comité-Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño, one of the main organizations of the Puerto Rican left in the 1970s in New York City.
The people’s struggles of the 60’s and early 70’s for civil rights and against the Vietnam War spawned many grass roots organizations. El Comité was one of those organizations.
El Comité was born on the summer of 1970 in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, what was then the Urban Renewal Area. In that summer, a group of 200 families took over various buildings slated for demolition on the West Side. The courageous action of these squatters to secure decent, affordable housing motivated a group of young people, led by Federico Lora, from the community to take over a storefront on 88th Street and Columbus Avenue. Their goal was to convert it into an office and establish a place to discuss how to become active in the community’s struggles. Their idea was to build an organization that would serve the community. They named this group El Comité.
The Squatters Movement
During its early period, El Comité’s activity was among the squatters and the surrounding community in the Upper West Side. Its objectives were to bring about social changes within this immediate area. This early community work played an important role in developing a different type of organization–one whose goals were broader than improving conditions in the immediate neighborhood. They knew they needed to struggle not only for the immediate issues of better housing, education and health services, but also for social changes that would change the conditions that created and perpetuated these injustices. For several years they published the newspaper Unidad Latina to educate the community about these injustices and the solutions.
El Comité matured into an organization that prepared parents in communities to fight for bilingual education programs in public schools. Its members organized workers and was active in unions to make them respond to the needs of the workers they represented and for access to quality jobs. Student members of El Comité were active in the CUNY colleges fighting for a free, equal and quality education. In low income communities it’s members led opposition to budget cuts in health care and other vital community services. The organization mobilized support nationally and internationally to end the US Navy’s occupation of the island of Culebra and later Vieques, throughout its history it denounced the US colonial rule in Puerto Rico, fought for the freedom of the 5 Nationalist Puerto Rican political prisoners and opposed US aid to authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Africa.
An understanding and commitment to this work was influenced by the politics and experience with some of the other minority grass roots organizations of the period, such as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords–who then openly called for a society organized on socialist principles. El Comité was inspired by them and by the heroic struggles of the Cuban and Vietnamese peoples and their victories against U.S. imperialist domination to gradually embrace socialism. Early in the process of politicization and study, they came across the slogan that “Women hold up half the sky.” Since its beginnings, women have participated in the development and struggles which led to the transformation of El Comité into MINP (Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño).
This year as El Comité-MINP commemorates the 50th year of its founding, the former members pay tribute to the young people who formed El Comité-MINP and who were representative of the community they wished to serve. They were men and women, Puerto Rican and non-Puerto Rican, employed and unemployed. They were products of different experiences and had different skills; there were workers, housewives, students, ex-marines, ex-offenders. But they were all bound together by their determination–some more than others–to serve their community and to further El Comité’s goals. El Comité-MINP will be celebrated in a virtual event in December.
Members of El Comité-MINP lived and were guided by the words of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, “La Patria es Valor y Sacrificio,” and by Che Guevara’s “The present is struggle. The future is ours.”
You can read much more about El Comité-MINP in the book Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity: Puerto Rican Political Activism in New York by Rose Muzio. Available from Amazon
