Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords. Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.

This is the first truly comprehensive study, in any language, of the writings of Louis Guilloux. It embraces all his fiction, including his short stories, to which little or no attention has previously been paid. The title refers to Guilloux's lifelong stance: an empathetic witness and listener to the lives of other people, who lifts anecdotes to the level of social and psychological life-studies. Highly valued by writers such as Malraux and Camus, Guilloux's work is studied here under several key categories (which represent overlaps and tensions rather than bleak opposites): memory and forgetfulness; the shifting relationship of individual and community; roots (stasis) and escape (movement); Guilloux and committed literature (La Maison du Peuple, Les Batailles perdues, and the trip to the USSR with Gide and Dabit). A long chapter is devoted to a close reading of Guilloux's baroque masterpiece, Le Sang noir, a much richer and less cerebral epic of an intellectual enmeshed in a provincial society than its successor, Sartre's La Nausée. Detailed attention is given to Guilloux's recycling of the model for the hero Cripure, the rogue elephant thinker Georges Palante. Le Sang noir is a haunted book. Guilloux's experiments with chronological dislocation (Le Jeu de patience), with narrative voices, essais de voix, (Coco perdu), with multiple personality (La Confrontation), and with the ambiguous pseudo-science of physiognomy (passim) are all fully analysed. Throughout, wherever called for, the culturally cosmopolitan Guilloux is compared or contrasted with writers from various countries: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Silone, Dickens, Vallès, Camus, and Sartre. This is a matter less of influence than of Guilloux's choice of companions.

"Cristina Beltran's powerful book The Trouble with Unity is timely for our age of Obama in which an ugly anti-immigrant spirit looms large. Don't miss it!"---Cornel West, Princeton University --

Interviews and photographic essays highlight the spirit of the 70's New York-based organization of Puerto Rican radicals, the Young Lords.

Interdisciplinary essays reevaluate the Black Panthers and their legacy in relation to revolutionary violence, radical ideology, urban politics, popular culture, and the media.