Political Origins: An Interview with Johanna Fernandez

Ana Sofia Harrison

At the end of May, BCRW hosted its first Feminist Freedom School. The subject was feminist abolition, and the Freedom School was facilitated by Sarah Haley, Associate Professor of History at Columbia University, and co-organized by Premilla Nadasen, Ann Whitney Olin, Professor of History at Barnard College, and Co-Director of BCRW. I joined with ten other students to have conversations filled with ideas of revolution and how to dismantle a system that has for so long been fundamental to the inner workings of American society. Each day, we were welcomed into the classroom with food and a new guest speaker who would open up an analytical framework to discuss their research and ways of thinking about abolition. 

Johanna Fernandez came to speak with us on a Wednesday, halfway through the Freedom School. As she sat with us and shared her own political genealogy, I felt captivated by her tall presence and clear, low tone of voice. She seemed to hold each note, enunciating each word clearly and with a sense of seriousness. She had a confident and graceful presence. She pushed us to ask tough yet fundamental questions and invited us to share our political genealogies. 

I had never heard this phrase before, political genealogy, but it excited me. 

Political genealogy is a method of tracing our lived and inherited experiences to map the history and present shape of our political identities. When asked to think about my political genealogy for the first time,, I reflected on how my identity is inherently political and how that has manifested into action in my life. The question goes beyond “Where are you from?” or “Who are your parents?” It asks, “What forces brought your parents together? What was the quality of their relationship? Who cared for you as a child and why? What were your social relationships at different stages of your life? Where is your cultural home, and where do you feel its fractures? What do you do for a living? How do you organize?

Since that Wednesday with Johanna, I have thought about how the project of prison abolition requires one to think about the myriad forces that create the system, like puzzle pieces, and how the self, too, is like a puzzle that must be examined, understood, and analyzed piece by piece in order to see how it fits into a bigger social picture. 

Struck by the experience, I wanted to continue the conversation. A month later, I sat down with Johanna to ask about her political genealogy, her research on the Young Lords, and her thoughts on the impact of the BCRW Feminist Freedom School.

[INTERVIEWER]: Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. So, let's start with how you began your career as a historian and how you feel it has formed you as a person.

Johanna: So I studied literature in college. My interest in literature was connected to my determination to master the English language. I was born here, but my parents are Spanish-speaking only, so I was put in a bilingual school. I didn't speak English when I entered school and, unfortunately, despite the radical history of bilingual education in New York City, bilingual education was stigmatized. I was very aware of that at a very young age. That's why I was drawn to literature and English, just to master the language. But I was interested in historicizing literature, too. So at some point I realized, huh, I think I'm drawn to history because I want to understand the world and society. And so I applied for a history PhD and that's the origin of my decision to become a historian. In all of my work I lead with this question: How does history illuminate the contemporary world and the structures that define our daily lives?

[INTERVIEWER]: Was the bilingual program a K-8, or was it through high school, too?

Johanna: It was during my first two or three years of elementary school. It was obvious to me, even at that age, that to be in a bilingual program was to be a child of a lesser God. Even as a child, it was clear that we were defective. This radical project of the sixties was demonized and stigmatized in my generation. And now it's been gentrified.

[INTERVIEWER]: Right.

Johanna: And not for migrant children who desperately need it. 

[INTERVIEWER]: Right. It's become this exclusive thing now. Taken and made harder to access. 

I know that you've done a lot of research on the Young Lords. What would you say piqued your interest to do this research? 

Johanna: Well, I grew up in the Bronx in the period after the Young Lords were active and I didn't learn about them until I went to college. And the only reason I did is because  during my junior year the university hired a Latino studies professor at the eleventh hour and this professor taught a class that exposed me to this history. I was shocked to learn that these very young people had a structural analysis of inequality. They were Marxists who were radicalized by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the US War in Vietnam. In the 1970s, they occupied a hospital in the Bronx to dramatize the horrific conditions under which Black Americans and brown people were given healthcare. And that just captured my imagination. It was such a dramatic discovery for me. Years later in my PhD program, I decided to write a master's thesis on the organization. No one knew about the Young Lords then at all. It was a big question mark. The person who knew about the Young Lords was Manning Marable, Dr. Manning Marable, my advisor. He encouraged me, and so did others, but he encouraged me to write the history since it hadn’t really been written. And I'm glad I did because the Young Lords are the most popular thing in the world right now.

[INTERVIEWER]: When did you see that shift?

Johanna: Well, funny you should ask.

I felt a responsibility to amplify the Young Lords’ story in the public sphere in part because of the pressure they put on me not just to take the oral histories I'd conducted with them and do what academics do, write their books and get all the acclaim. So in subtle and not so subtle ways, they tested me. So I decided, well, let's figure out how to amplify their story in the public sphere. I co-directed and directed a series of art exhibitions on the organization. The first was at the University of North Carolina. It was the first time that Young Lords and Black Panthers came together since the sixties.

After that, I was hired to curate an exhibition in collaboration with the Bronx Museum. I led a project to amplify the Young Lords’ incredible story and allow others to connect with and learn from their history. In 2014, while working on this exhibition, I sued the NYPD for the surveillance records of the organization. That got an enormous amount of attention locally, in New York City, and around the country. So I've been working on this project for a very long time, not just as a scholar and professor but also as a public intellectual.

There has also been this growing population of young people interested in tracing their ancestry to Latin America and really interested in understanding the history of Latinx people in this country. The Young Lords are important to these young people because they understood that the explosion of Latinx people in the US has always been tied to US foreign and economic policy in Latin America, and they gave their generation the lens with which to answer that quintessential and existential questions: Who am I? What's my relationship to this country?

[INTERVIEWER]: The Young Lords were also a profoundly diverse organization connected with the Black Panthers and other marginalized groups of Latinx people. So how did groups such as the Young Lords organize in a way that connected with so many groups of people?

Johanna: Well, their multiracial and multi-ethnic organizing had a lot to do with the demographic transformation of cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, where they were active. East Harlem, which was the mecca of the Puerto Rican community, was, in fact a third Puerto Rican, a third Black American, and a third Italian, something that few people know. Around issues of sanitation, healthcare, police brutality, and the rising and expanding carceral state—and the same was true in Chicago, where the organization originated—there was a profound sense of solidarity across racial lines that brought people together to fight for a revolutionary world.

[INTERVIEWER]: Definitely.

Johanna: But the conscious coming together of people across racial lines to amplify shared class interests was the initiative of Fred Hampton—you probably know about the Rainbow Coalition—and he brought together Black Americans in the Black Panther Party, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans in the Young Lords, and poor whites from Appalachia in an organization called the Young Patriots. And that really, again, captured the imagination of that generation. And that work was replicated across the country and certainly in New York City.

Another important element of the organization is that, especially in New York, they were led by Afro-Puerto Ricans and Afro-Latinx people, which is a rare thing. So, Black Americans were comfortable joining an organization that was led by folks in the Black diaspora. But everyone, you know, was welcoming. The emphasis was definitely on fighting racism and police brutality, but also identifying the root causes of racism, the ties between slavery and capitalism, and a critique of capitalism and its impact on local communities and the world.

[INTERVIEWER]: And that finding of an identity, like you're saying, it goes back to that question of who am I. Even if these people came from different places or had different identities, they identified with this common struggle.

Johanna: Common origins, absolutely. Political origins.

[INTERVIEWER]: The art exhibitions also intrigue me. What inspired you to amplify these voices later on with art?

Johanna: Well, when I finished the dissertation, I started randomly looking at the photography of the organization. They had a resident photographer in New York and in Chicago, Luis Avila. That's when I realized that the organization was led by Afro-Puerto Ricans. I gained a deeper appreciation for the importance of images in studying history and understanding the period, its essence, its aesthetic. At some point, I was approached by folks connected to museums. So photography was a major vehicle toward those exhibitions. I think museums tend to be spaces–colonial spaces for sure–that are in many ways, antiseptic. But we found a way to broaden and open up these spaces and tell a more dynamic and critical history of the United States. The media attention that all of these exhibitions garnered definitely helped expand the audience. 

The major exhibition that got an enormous amount of media attention was hosted in three spaces, including Museum El Barrio on Fifth Avenue. This was a controversial exhibition that took place right before the rise of Black Lives Matter. It was controversial because of the politics of the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. Their self-defense politics. The imagery of the AK-47 that the Lords and the Black Panthers embraced. And the AK-47, in the sixties, was the symbol of national liberation movements fighting against European colonial rule.

[INTERVIEWER]: Wow. So different from now.

Johanna: Yeah. A completely different symbol than what we have today. So we didn’t get any funding and we ended up inviting other museum spaces to help us tell the story. We literally told the story in three museums in New York City. That got an enormous amount of attention that we hadn’t predicted just because it was a dynamic way of telling the story, moving around to multiple places where, in fact, the Young Lords were active.

[INTERVIEWER]: At the Feminist Freedom School, we talked mainly about incarceration and the expansion of the carceral state. I'd like to know how your work with the Young Lords connects to the carceral research you've done.

Johanna: Well, my work on abolition and incarceration in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther, is distinct from my academic work on the Young Lords, even though the Young Lords and the Black Panthers did a lot of important abolitionist work that is rarely acknowledged. 

I started to work on the case of Abu-Jamal when I was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon. A professor emeritus there approached me at some point and suggested that I start visiting Abu-Jamal, who was on death row at the time. I wrote a letter to Mumia and before long I started visiting him and other men on death row. I visited weekly. That was a transformative experience for me. And I volunteered to continue to work on the case, but on abolition generally. After almost fifteen or twenty years of doing this work, I started teaching a course called “Police, Prisons, and Repression in the United States of America” covering the early, early period in American history to the present.

So my work around political prisoners and abolition didn't begin in the academy, but certainly my academic work and the knowledge and analysis that comes with being a historian influenced my abolitionist work.

[INTERVIEWER]: How do you approach students with these subjects in the classroom? 

Johanna: I think people generally and young people in particular wonder about the state of imprisonment. It raises all kinds of questions for people from different walks of life. Political or not. So there are philosophical questions that drive students' interests in the subject.

[INTERVIEWER]: Punishment is a concept introduced to us at such an early age. We are taught that bad people get punished. It’s very black-and-white thinking. And you're right, it does get very philosophical to question whether this is the only way.

Johanna: Absolutely. When students discover that prisons are a recent phenomenon in human history, it really opens up a critical conversation in the classroom. And a historical conversation, right? Like, how and why did these institutions emerge at the moment in which they did? And why do we think of them as ever-present in history?

[INTERVIEWER]: Yeah, that really resonates. The last question that I’d like to ask is how you see the impact of the Feminist Freedom School. And do you think that, even just within the small Barnard and Columbia community or the New York City community, can it have enough momentum to really make an effect? And if it’s just circles of people talking and thinking about these subjects, what is the impact?

Johanna: Well, in the last number of weeks, I thought that the Freedom School could function potentially like the Highlander School functioned in the Civil Rights movement of a different era, as a training ground and site for deep thinking among abolitionist organizers. This is a place where deep analytical and historical debate and discussion is happening among people who seem to be very interested in taking these ideas and this analysis into the streets. So the potential is definitely there for this to be a springboard for action and organizing that's deliberate and thoughtful and driven by an analysis of the problem. Especially if people from affected communities are involved. This might be the next step, right? For the Freedom School to make affected communities equal partners in this conversation.

Johanna Fernandez is an Associate Professor of History at Baruch College. She teaches a course titled “20th-Century U.S. History and the History of Social Movements.” She is the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2014), and writer and producer of the film “Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” (2010). In 2014, Fernández filed a lawsuit against the NYPD for failing to release their Young Lords surveillance records. In June 2016, her suit led to the recovery of the "lost" Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records of New York activists dating back to 1905. Using these materials, she co-curated an archival exhibition called “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York” in 2015, cited by the New York Times as one of the “Top 10, Best In Art.”