At 11 years old, Jiménez started a gang with a small group of mostly Puerto Rican and Mexican friends on the western edge of the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago. They called themselves the Young Lords, and they came together to defend their community against violence and resentment from white youths directed toward Black and Brown people for moving into “their” neighborhoods in the 1950s.
The Young Lords started as a street gang committed to defending their section of the neighborhood. But late-night hangouts on the corner of Halsted and Dickens, combined with a desire to gain status and truly have something to call his own, propelled Jiménez into a life of crime. Theft and drug possession led to more than 20 arrests in the early 1960s.
In 1968, against the backdrop of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Jiménez was imprisoned again. This time, however, he was placed in solitary confinement for trying to escape. He began to reflect deeply on his life, requesting a visit from a priest and reading voraciously, delving into Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain and the Autobiography of Malcolm X.
After his release and in light of escalating conflict in Vietnam, the rise of Black Power, and urban renewal’s bulldozer taking aim at Lincoln Park, Jiménez and his comrades took action toward social justice. The new, now politicized, Young Lords emerged within a constellation of radical organizations like LADO (Latin American Defense Organization), Rising Up Angry, the Young Patriots, and the Black Panther Party. Meeting and working with other brilliant organizers like Patricia Devine-Reed, Omar and Obed Lopez, and of course Fred Hampton, chairman of the Chicago Black Panthers, contributed to the political transformation of a street gang into the Young Lords Organization (YLO).
Coalition building
With Hampton, Jiménez helped build the first Rainbow Coalition in February 1969, bringing together Black, Latino, and white activists from across the city. As an antiracist, class-based movement, they worked together to stop the destruction of urban renewal. But a mere three months later, the YLO were rocked by an off-duty police officer’s murder of Manuel Ramos, who served as the Young Lords’ minister of defense.
The tragedy strengthened the YLO’s revolutionary fire, with Jiménez later confessing to journalist Frank Browning that “Ramos’s murder was the point that I became a real revolutionary.” Just days after Ramos’ murder, the Young Lords peacefully occupied McCormick Theological Seminary (now the DePaul School of Music) for a week and renamed the Stone Academic building “the Manuel Ramos building.” The YLO’s campaign secured a pledge for almost $700,000 and institutional support toward creating low-income housing, a Puerto Rican cultural center, and a children’s center—and bolstered the Young Lords’ influence on fights about social reform and gentrification throughout Chicago.