Political Origins: An Interview with Johanna Fernández

At the end of May, BCRW hosted its first Feminist Freedom School on the subject of feminist abolition. 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 Fernández 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 she 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. 

This interview has been edited for clarity. 

Ana Sofia Harrison: 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 Fernández: I studied literature in college. My interest in literature was connected to my determination to master the English language. I was born here in New York, but my parents are Spanish speaking only, so I didn’t speak English when I entered school and I was placed in bilingual classes. Despite the radical history of bilingual education in New York City, bilingual education was, unfortunately, stigmatized. I was very aware of that at a very young age. That’s why I was drawn to literature and English, to overcome a social stigma, which manifested as a psychological deficit in me, and which I unconsciously resolved through a desire to master the English language. But I was interested in historicizing literature, too. And 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 to a history PhD program, here at Columbia, and that’s the origin of my decision to become a historian. All of my work leads with this question: How does history illuminate the contemporary world and the structures that define our daily lives?

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

JF: 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 perceived to be defective. A radical dual language project of the sixties, fought for by Puerto Rican parents like Evelina López Antonetty, had been demonized and stigmatized by the time I was in school a generation later. And now it’s been gentrified.

ASH: Right.

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

ASH: 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?

JF: 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 1970, 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 must have loomed as a big question mark in the minds of some of the faculty. The person who knew about the Young Lords was Manning Marable, my advisor. He encouraged me, and so did others, but he encouraged me to write its 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.

ASH: When did you see that shift?

JF: Well, funny you should ask.

I felt a responsibility to amplify the Young Lords’ story in the public sphere in part because of pressure from the Young Lords to not just 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, or perhaps they were organizing me. I decided, well, let’s figure out how to amplify their story in the public sphere and over the years, I co-directed and directed a series of art exhibitions on the organization toward that end. The first was at the University of North Carolina. It was the first time that Young Lords and Black Panthers came together to have a conversation about their experience since the sixties.

After that, I was hired to curate an exhibition in collaboration with the Bronx Museum and art historian Yasmin Ramírez. We amplified the Young Lords’ incredible story to allow others to connect with and learn from their history. In 2014, while working on this exhibition, I sued the NYPD for its failure to release to me the surveillance records of the organization. That received an enormous amount of attention locally, in New York City, and around the country. That’s all to say that 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, and all of this public work has created a buzz about the organization.

There’s also this growing population of young people interested in tracing their ancestry to Latin America and understanding the history of Latinx people in this country. The Young Lords are important to these young people because the organization articulated in its literature that the presence of Latinx people in the US has always been tied to US foreign and economic policy in Latin America. The Young Lords gave their generation the lens with which to answer that existential question that’s quintessentially American for those of us on the outside: Who am I? And what’s my relationship to this country?

ASH: 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?

JF: Well, their multiracial and multi-ethnic organizing had a lot to do with the demographic transformation of cities like New York and 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. There were small pockets of Dominicans migrating to the city and pre-existing, small Panamanian communities. The Young Lords attracted this pan-ethnic conglomerate of people we call Latinos today. Around issues of sanitation, healthcare, joblessness, poverty, police brutality, 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 and ethnic lines that brought people together to fight for a revolutionary world, especially in the context of the wars and revolutions against colonial rule of the era.

ASH: Definitely.

JF: But the deliberate 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 white folks from Appalachia in an organization called the Young Patriots. And that really, again, captured the imagination of that generation. That work was replicated across the country and certainly in New York City and included Asians in the radical Marxist Asian American collective I Wor Kuen.

Another important element of the organization is that, especially in New York, it was led by Afro Puerto Ricans and Afro Latinx people, which was and still is a rare thing. So Black Americans were comfortable joining an organization that was led by folks in the Black diaspora. Despite the Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist impulse of the organization, everyone was welcomed. The emphasis was on fighting racism, poverty, 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.

ASH: 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.

JF: Common origins, absolutely. Political origins.

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

JF: Well, when I finished the dissertation, I started looking at the photography of the organization. The Young Lords had a resident photographer in New York, Hiram Maristany, and in Chicago, Luis Avila. That’s when I realized that the organization in New York was led by Afro Puerto Ricans. In this process, I gained a deeper appreciation for the importance of images in the study of history, and in the study of a period, its essence, its aesthetic. At each juncture, I was approached by folks connected to museums during talks I gave on the sixties. The most memorable was at the Bronx Museum many moons ago, where I was invited to speak on the southern civil rights movement as part of a traveling photography exhibition on the subject. At the very end of the conversation a timid voice in the very back of the room asked, “Were there any Latinos in the civil rights movement?” And I responded, “Funny you should ask.” At the end of that presentation the director of the Bronx Museum at the time, the late Holly Block, invited me to curate an exhibition on the Young Lords, which eventually became a big New York City exhibition in three different sites, including El Museo del Barrio, and was recognized by The New York Times as one of the “Top 10, Best in Art.” Photography was a significant vehicle of expression in 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 their audiences.

Again, the exhibition that got an enormous amount of media attention was the one hosted in three spaces. We applied for funding in the era before the rise of Black Lives Matter and we didn’t get it. The exhibition’s Young Lords and Black Panther politics were perceived to be controversial, namely the organizations’ self-defense politics and the imagery of the AK-47 that the Lords and the Black Panthers embraced. The AK-47, in the sixties, was the symbol of national liberation movements fighting against European colonial rule.

However, again, the exhibition didn’t garner funding, which is why we had to invite others to help us tell the story we wanted to tell, but in the end that postmodern spatial arrangement made it a big hit.

ASH: Wow. The politics of self-defense and the AK-47… that’s so different from now.

JF: Yeah. A completely different symbol than what we think of when we see that type of a gun today. We hadn’t predicted just how much of a splash we would make, but in the end that was a dynamic way of telling the story, moving around to multiple places where, in fact, the Young Lords were active.

ASH: 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.

JF: 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, David Demarest, approached me at some point and suggested that I visit 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 continued to work on the case, and 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 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.

ASH: How do you approach students with these subjects in the classroom?

JF: 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.

ASH: 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.

JF: 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?

ASH: 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?

JF: 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. Having people from affected communities involved is a crucial step. I know the Freedom School did that this summer with participants who were formerly incarcerated and instructors who have been organizing in abolitionist movements for decades. So, the work is to continue that, to make affected communities equal partners in these conversations.

Johanna Fernández is Associate Professor of History at Baruch College. She teaches 20th-Century U.S. History and the History of Social Movements. She is the author of the award winning book, The Young Lord: A Radical History, the editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2014), and the 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 its failure to release its surveillance records of the Young Lords. In June 2016, her suit led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X.  She co-curated an archivally rich 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.” Fernández’s next book is on the historical roots of US Fascism; her article by that title can be found online.

Ana Sofia Harrison is a junior at Barnard College. She is from New York City. She is majoring in Human Rights and Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and minoring in art history. She is a research assistant at BCRW and co-leader of direct support at the Reproductive Justice Collective at Barnard. She is a trained abortion doula and leads self-managed abortion workshops on and off campus. Reproductive justice and prison abolition are her two main academic interests as well as visual arts and how it can intersect with activism.