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Summary Of We Took The Streets By Miguel Melendez

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In the memoir, We Took the Streets by Miguel “Mickey” Melendez recounts the histories of the highly controversial activist group, the Young Lords and their battle for social equality for Puerto Ricans and Latinos in New York City. As a founding member of the group, Melendez gives an unprecedented historical perspective into the efforts of a marginalized community during the late 1960’s, anxious for equal economic, social and political status. The contributions of The Young Lords are vital to history because they demonstrate how a group of individuals bonded by a common objective can produce change through conflict and resistance. Although the memoir successfully highlights the essential inequities that provoked the group to take back the streets …show more content…

We Took the Streets serves as a personal reflection by Melendez, he contextualizes what the Young Lords were fighting for and what they tried to accomplish rather than a formal historical analysis of the group. Through this personal reflection, the reader feels the importance of the upheavals produced by the Young Lords by Melendez’s raw emotion. Although the memoir is not written in a formal scholarly fashion, it allows Melendez’s perspective to be accessible to a wide audience. Since other social justice movements of the 1960’s often overshadow the histories of the Young Lords, it is vital for people to know the contributions to society that this activist group accomplished. Before reading this book, I was ignorant to the achievements produced by these courageous Latinos. Therefore it is a shame, that we are not taught these upheavals in our History …show more content…

As a result, the magnitude of the accomplishments obtained by the Young Lords is not properly communicated through the author’s detailed memoir. Melendez’s writing is very fixated with recounting every detail of the Young Lords that he does not mention other social movements or events taking place at the time. This flaw leads the reader to ultimately overlook the monumental achievements of the activist group because they did not properly understand the historical importance of the Young Lord achievements. If Melendez mentioned other similar historical events like the massive Vietnam protest at Columbia University or the formation of the Black Panthers, the reader would have gained a better contextualization to the turbulent Period. In the late 1960’s, the Black Panthers also created community social programs similarly to the Young Lords but Melendez does not mention the accomplishment of the Panthers at all. With a better understanding of the overall explosion of social change and radicalization taking place in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the reader would understand the overall importance of the Young Lords as a grassroots

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