Portside

He was 84. Willie Matos was participating in a panel discussion for Hispanic Heritage Month at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven marking the 60^th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act when he suffered a fatal medical emergency.

While Willie lived most of his life in Bridgeport, Connecticut, his native Puerto Rico was always his home at heart. Born in Plantaje Toa Baja in 1940, he emigrated with his family to Bridgeport in 1951. He worked in several Bridgeport factories after graduating high school and soon became involved in workplace organizing and the struggle against the many manifestations of racism that confront Puerto Ricans. As an adult, Willie also came to better understand that the poverty and other problems of so many in Puerto Rico were directly related to US colonial domination of the island.

The Young Lords

Soon after the formation of the revolutionary Young Lords Organization (later the Young Lords Party) in Chicago in 1968, Willie became a member. He was a key figure in the founding of a chapter in Bridgeport and was soon elected to the organization’s national leadership body. The YLP leadership highlighted the formation of the Bridgeport chapter in their newspaper Palante, noting that chapters to that point had been established exclusively in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and other of the country’s largest cities. The founding of a chapter in the overwhelmingly working class, much smaller city of Bridgeport was hailed as a major step forward.

With Willie playing a leading role, the Bridgeport Lords and their allies participated in struggles against slumlords, police brutality, racist and sexual discrimination in schools and workplaces, and established a Free Breakfast for Children program modeled after similar efforts by the Black Panther Party. Internationalists to the core, they organized demonstrations and did educational work for the liberation of Puerto Rico and in opposition to US aggression in Southeast Asia. They also organized in factories and union halls, advocated on behalf of the unemployed as Bridgeport’s factories began laying off workers by the thousands and helped establish a statewide organization of Puerto Rican migrant agricultural workers.

SAC and the Vieques Support Committee

Willie remained as dedicated as ever after the demise of the Young Lords in the mid-1970s. When workers at a factory in the neighboring town of Fairfield went on strike in 1979, Willie, through a new organization he helped form, the Spanish American Coalition, pulled together a coalition to support the strike. The impetus for his outreach to area activists was his learning of the company’s attempts to recruit Puerto Rican youths very close to the SAC office in a Bridgeport neighborhood especially ravaged by unemployment.

With the support committee providing an important push to the rather docile union officialdom, the strike was settled several months later on terms largely favorable to the workers. Willie and others sought to continue and expand the support committee by helping to form the Plant Closures Project, an unfortunately short-lived and unsuccessful attempt to hold corporations responsible for the capital flight and layoffs wreaking havoc in the area’s working class communities.

In the early 1980s, Willie was instrumental in establishing the Vieques Support Committee, a national group that included a chapter in Bridgeport that organized opposition to the US Navy’s decades-long use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for target practice for its bombs. That effort ultimately proved successful when the Navy ceased its bombing and the island was turned over to the Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service. Today, Vieques is home to the Caribbean’s largest wildlife refuge.

Professional Life

Willie worked for many years for the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and as an adjunct professor teaching the Puerto Rican Experience at Housatonic Community College. He tried his hand at electoral politics by serving on the Bridgeport City Council but stepped aside after only one term, preferring to organize through activist groups that he was involved in for most of the rest of his life. Those included several youth-oriented organizations where he worked closely with hundreds of Latino teenagers. And in one of the many ways he sought to celebrate Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, Willie gathered for many years on New Year’s Eve day with friends at a marker in Bridgeport that honors Roberto Clemente to pay homage to the great baseball player on the anniversary of his death.

Willie was a friend, comrade and mentor to hundreds and he was honored by a wide spectrum of people at his death. His spirit lives on in those who walk in his footsteps and carry forward his legacy.

Andy Piascik is a long-time contributor to Counterpunch. His latest book is Radical Connecticut: People’s History in the Constitution State, co-authored with Steve Thornton. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com