Willie Matos, friend and comrade

Photo source: Carolyn Gonzalez – ctpost

Willie Matos, who worked his entire adult life for Puerto Rican liberation and freedom for the working class around the world, died on October 14.

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

Although Willie lived most of his life in Bridgeport, Connecticut, his native Puerto Rico was always home in his 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 organization and the fight against the many manifestations of racism faced by Puerto Ricans. As an adult, Willie also came to better understand that the poverty and other problems faced by so many in Puerto Rico were directly linked to the American colonial rule of the island.

The Young Gentlemen

Shortly after the founding 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 establishing a chapter in Bridgeport and was soon elected to the organization’s national leadership body. The YLP leadership highlighted the creation of the Bridgeport chapter in their newspaper Palantenoting that chapters had previously been established exclusively in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other of the nation’s largest cities. The creation of a chapter in the predominantly working-class, much smaller city of Bridgeport was hailed as a major step forward.

While Willie played a leadership role, the Bridgeport Lords and their allies joined the fight against slumlords, police brutality, racial and sexual discrimination in schools and the workplace, and established a Free Breakfast for Children program modeled after similar efforts of the Black Panther Party. Internationalists through and through, they organized demonstrations and did educational work for the liberation of Puerto Rico and in their opposition to American aggression in Southeast Asia. They also organized in factories and union halls, stood up for the unemployed when Bridgeport factories began laying off thousands of workers, and helped found a statewide organization of Puerto Rican migrant farm 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, assembled a coalition in support of the strike. His outreach to area activists came after he learned of the company’s efforts to recruit Puerto Rican youth near the SAC office in a Bridgeport neighborhood especially ravaged by unemployment.

Because the support committee gave an important boost to the rather docile union leadership, the strike was settled a few months later on terms that were largely favorable to the workers. Willie and others sought to continue and expand the support committee by helping to establish the Plant Closures Project, a sadly short-lived and failed effort to hold corporations accountable for the capital flight and layoffs that wreaked havoc on working-class communities in the area.

In the early 1980s, Willie was instrumental in founding the Vieques Support Committee, a national group with a chapter in Bridgeport that organized opposition to the U.S. Navy’s decades-long use of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as target practice for its bombs. That effort ultimately proved successful when the Navy ceased 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 nature reserve.

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 with which he was involved most of his life. This included several youth-focused organizations where he worked closely with hundreds of Latino teens. And in one of the many ways he sought to celebrate Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, for years Willie gathered with friends on New Year’s Eve at a Bridgeport memorial honoring Roberto Clemente to pay tribute to the great baseball player on his birthday. dead.

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