José Jiménez Dies at 76; Turned a Gang Into a Voice for Puerto Ricans

U.S.|José Jiménez Dies at 76; Turned a Gang Into a Voice for Puerto Ricans

José Jiménez, a street-wise Puerto Rican who in the late 1960s transformed a Chicago gang called the Young Lords into a militant voice for expanded social services, fair housing and education for his people, died on Jan. 10. He was 76.

His sister Daisy Rodriguez announced the death on Facebook. She did not say where he died or cite a specific cause, though Mr. Jiménez had been living in Chicago and reportedly experiencing health problems.

Though the revamped Young Lords lasted less than five years, the group made a dramatic impact on the national conversation about civil rights and urban communities in the late 1960s and early ’70s, amplifying Puerto Rican and other Latino perspectives.

Mr. Jiménez, known as Cha Cha, modeled his group on the Black Panthers, the radical Black organization that used confrontational tactics to raise awareness about issues like police brutality and lack of adequate health care in the nation’s cities. At the same time, the Panthers opened clinics, schools and day care centers to provide the services they found lacking from the government.

The Young Lords began in 1959 as a gang on Chicago’s Near North Side, a clutch of neighborhoods populated by recent Latino migrants. In 1968, Mr. Jiménez changed the name to the Young Lords Organization and appointed ministers of defense and education, which followed in the Panther tradition, as did the berets he had his members wear, though the Young Lords’ were purple, in contrast to the Panthers’ black ones.

The Young Lords never released numbers, but they claimed to have 1,000 members at their height, around 1970. Under the leadership of Mr. Jiménez, they spawned chapters nationwide, notably in New York City and the Bay Area of California.