José Jiménez, a street-wise Puerto Rican who in the late 1960s transformed a Chicago gang called the Young Lords into a militant voice for expanded social services, fair housing and education for his people, died on Jan. 10. He was 76.
His sister Daisy Rodriguez announced the death on Facebook. She did not say where he died or cite a specific cause, though Mr. Jiménez had been living in Chicago and reportedly experiencing health problems.
Though the revamped Young Lords lasted less than five years, the group made a dramatic impact on the national conversation about civil rights and urban communities in the late 1960s and early ’70s, amplifying Puerto Rican and other Latino perspectives.
Mr. Jiménez, known as Cha Cha, modeled his group on the Black Panthers, the radical Black organization that used confrontational tactics to raise awareness about issues like police brutality and lack of adequate health care in the nation’s cities. At the same time, the Panthers opened clinics, schools and day care centers to provide the services they found lacking from the government.
The Young Lords began in 1959 as a gang on Chicago’s Near North Side, a clutch of neighborhoods populated by recent Latino migrants. In 1968, Mr. Jiménez changed the name to the Young Lords Organization and appointed ministers of defense and education, which followed in the Panther tradition, as did the berets he had his members wear, though the Young Lords’ were purple, in contrast to the Panthers’ black ones.
The Young Lords never released numbers, but they claimed to have 1,000 members at their height, around 1970. Under the leadership of Mr. Jiménez, they spawned chapters nationwide, notably in New York City and the Bay Area of California.
The group grabbed headlines in May 1969 when it occupied the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood for a week, demanding $601,000 in support for community activities. They left when the seminary agreed. A few months later, they took over a local church, where they operated a day care center and a free clinic.
“The survival programs were not reformist, but structures created to provide services while constructing the new world,” Mr. Jiménez told the website Fight Back News in 2019. “We are never a not-for-profit, but revolutionaries.”
José Jiménez was born on Aug. 8, 1948, in Caguas, P.R. His father, Antonio, had already moved to Massachusetts for work, sending home money to his mother, Eugenia Rodriguez. When José was 1, family members joined his father outside Boston, where Mr. Jiménez picked vegetables for a soup company. They moved to Chicago a few years later.
The city’s Near North Side had just 300 Puerto Rican inhabitants in 1940; by 1960, it had 32,000, attracted by its inexpensive if decrepit housing. The neighborhood was also a target for government urban renewal programs, which promised new and better housing for residents but in practice often displaced them to make way for middle-class apartments.
The Jiménez family moved nine times when José was a child, and he attended four different elementary schools; he dropped out of school early. He joined about a dozen other boys and young men to create the Young Lords in 1959; by 1964, he was running it.
The gang was about self-defense, but also petty crime, and Mr. Jiménez was repeatedly behind bars for theft and fighting with other gangs. During one stint, in 1968, he discovered a book by Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and learned about the life of Malcolm X; in both he saw a lesson about turning his life around.
He began volunteering as an interpreter in jail, and after he was released, he circulated the idea of turning the gang into something positive for the community. Many of his buddies were skeptical, but some joined him, as did waves of newcomers, inspired by the idea of self-defense and self-improvement.
Like the Black Panthers, the group announced itself with marches, fliers and bold public statements. In 1969, the Young Lords joined with the Panthers and a far-left organization of white migrants from the South, the Young Patriots, to form the Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial advocacy organization (unrelated to a group of the same name founded later by the Rev. Jesse Jackson).
The Young Lords drew the attention of the Chicago police and the F.B.I., which targeted the group through its secret Counterintelligence Program, known as Cointelpro, an effort to surveil, infiltrate and disrupt left-wing organizations.
Mr. Jiménez was arrested 18 times during his years running the Young Lords. In 1970, he was charged with stealing lumber from a supply store; he jumped bail and went into hiding in Wisconsin. He returned in 1972 to serve a nine-month sentence.
By the time he emerged, the Young Lords, absent his leadership, had largely disintegrated, while the Near North Side neighborhoods were rapidly gentrifying. Still, he rallied the area’s Latinos in a 1974 campaign for alderman, to serve on the Chicago City Council. He lost the race but received 40 percent of the vote.
Along with his sister Daisy, his survivors include two other sisters, Jenny and Mirna Jiménez; his children, Jacqueline, Sonia, Melisa and Alejandro Jiménez and Jodette Lozano; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Mr. Jiménez later moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., where he worked as a substance abuse counselor. He received a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies from Grand Valley State University, outside Grand Rapids, in 2013; an associate degree in business administration from Grand Rapids Community College in 2017; and a master’s degree in public administration from Central Michigan University in 2020.
He also spent considerable time preserving the history of the Young Lords. Mr. Jiménez helped establish archives and oral history projects dedicated to the group at Grand Valley State and DePaul University, in Chicago.
And he spoke frequently about his group and its legacy, insisting that while its life span might have been short, its impact continues to be felt.
“We call it a 40-year struggle,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2008. “We want people to know the struggle is still going on.”
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