In 1969, a group of New York City youth known as the Young Lords demanded change in the way the largest city in the United States handled sanitation. The initiative, known as the Garbage Offensive, wasn’t the group’s original plan of action, but it proved highly effective in calling out the needs and rights of the city's Latinx community
The Young Lords were an activist group of poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth who modeled themselves after the Black Panthers, donned their signature purple berets, called for Puerto Rico’s independence, and hit the streets in search of a lofty organizing agenda in their home of East Harlem. But as the organization’s chairman, Felipe Luciano, humorously remembers, they found trash talk instead.
“So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. "And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”
East Harlem Neighborhoods Faced Neglect
A New York Daily News special series on blight in East Harlem confirmed the grievances. The March 1969 report described the “horror” of tons of rotting garbage in the neighborhood’s 40-square-block zone, where uncollected trash lingered for weeks at a time. The 160 streets surveyed were rarely swept and had only six garbage receptacles in a district that yielded higher concentrations of household waste.
When sanitation workers finally showed up, they dumped half the garbage in the trucks and “left the other half strewn in the streets,” according to the News. Residents interpreted the negligence as an expression of racism held by members of the city’s ethnically exclusive, largely Italian American sanitation workers’ union.
But larger social forces were at work. East Harlem was 50 percent more densely populated than other neighborhoods in Manhattan. It had a disproportionate share of the city’s condemned housing units, including 107 abandoned buildings and 55 empty lots. These functioned as ad hoc dumping grounds and rat-infested repositories for all manner of refuse from rotting animal carcasses to washing machines, boilers, furniture, and other discarded bulk.
The problems went beyond East Harlem. The refuse and industrial waste popping up across the city during the 1960s was the fallout of a society whose capacity for garbage removal had not kept up with the explosion of American capitalist consumption in the 1950s. In the mid-1960s, when the Daily News opened up its phone lines to New Yorkers with the promise of forwarding callers’ sanitation concerns to the proper city officers, thousands overwhelmed its lines. The Young Lords heeded the call.