Pablo Guzmán, Puerto Rican activist and TV journalist, dies at 73

Pablo Guzmán, who gained widespread media attention in the early 1970s as the leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group based in East Harlem, and then flipped the script to become an Emmy-winning TV news reporter, died Sunday in Westchester County, NY He was 73.

Debbie Guzmán, his wife, said the cause of death at a hospital was cardiac arrest.

The Young Lords, which Mr. Guzmán helped found in 1969, captured New York’s attention with high-profile street actions designed to highlight dire conditions in neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and East Harlem.

They built walls of trash in city streets to protest ineffective sanitation, then set them on fire; they took over a church and used it to offer free breakfasts to schoolchildren; and they briefly occupied a Bronx hospital, turning it into a free clinic.

Sanford Garelik, then chairman of the city council, derided the Young Lords as “terrorists.” Both the FBI and the New York Police Department spied on the group.

But thanks largely to the charismatic Mr. Guzmán, the Young Lords’ communications minister, the news media and large parts of the public regarded them as folk heroes.

He developed close relationships with reporters and gave them a warning of the next Young Lords action. He gave press conferences full of humor and quotable jokes. And he was a wizard on the stump, drawing on influences like Malcolm city.

“If the Young Lords were considered the darling of the New York press, it was because of the way Pablo organized the story,” Mickey Melendez, another founding member of the Young Lords, said in a telephone interview. “We were a good copy.”

Like many street organizations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Young Lords were short-lived. Undermined by law enforcement and riven by ideological differences, they went bankrupt in 1975, but not before leaving an indelible mark on the city.

Not only did their activism force the city to take action – improving waste collection, banning lead paint in homes and building a new hospital in the Bronx – but they also brought pride and awareness to New York’s Puerto Rican community. They contributed to the Nuyorican renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s and lent legitimacy to the wave of Puerto Ricans who poured into the city’s political and cultural establishment in the following decades.

“The Young Lords gave Puerto Ricans a kind of coming-out party in the city,” says Johanna Fernández, associate professor of history at Baruch College and author of “The Young Lords: A Radical History” (2019).

Mr. Guzmán took his media skills and street credibility to his next career, in journalism. He began writing freelance articles for The Village Voice and hosting and producing a series of radio shows before becoming a reporter for WNEW-TV, a FOX affiliate.

He subsequently reported for WNBC-TV and, from 1996 to 2013, for WCBS-TV as a senior correspondent. He won two Emmys, including one for his reporting on the murder of a New York police officer.

In these roles, Mr. Guzmán became a celebrity of a different kind, for a different generation of New Yorkers. Fatherly, witty and erudite, he interviewed children and gangsters, sanitary workers and diplomats at home.

He was John Gotti’s favorite reporter, the one who called the mob boss immediately after coming out of court during his trials in the 1980s and 1990s.

“People found him approachable,” Geraldo Rivera, who was a lawyer for the Young Lords before becoming a TV reporter, said in a telephone interview. “He could go where many aspiring journalists couldn’t go.”

Paul Guzmán was born on August 17, 1950 in Manhattan to Raúl and Sally (Palomino) Guzmán. His father was a department store manager; his mother was an office worker for Citibank. The family moved to the South Bronx when Paul was young.

He grew up straight and narrow. He was an altar boy at Lady of Pity, a Roman Catholic church in the Bronx. He graduated from the elite Bronx High School of Science in 1968 and then enrolled at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, on Long Island.

He married Debbie Corley in 1990. She survives him, as do their children, Daniel and Angela; his mother; and his sister, Tanya Guzmán.

During the second semester of his freshman year, Mr. Guzmán studied at a university in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The experience awakened in him an awareness of his Latino identity: he became Afro, started going by the name Pablo (he later legally changed his name), and returned more interested in street activism than in completing his studies.

“Most of us in the United States didn’t know what we were,” he wrote in The Village Voice in 1984, describing his generation of Puerto Ricans. “We tended to identify with ‘being white’ or ‘being black,’ depending on the color of our skin.”

Mr. Guzmán joined a small group of like-minded young activists, mostly Puerto Ricans, to form the Sociedad de Albizu Campos, named after a leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement.

Early on, the group read an article about a similar organization in Chicago, the Young Lords, which originated as a street gang in the early 1960s. But by the end of that decade, under the influence of the Black Panthers, they had reformed as political agitators.

In 1969, Mr. Guzmán and three others drove to Chicago to meet with the leadership of the Young Lords and returned with permission to start a chapter in New York. Less than a year later, however, they seceded from the Chicago branch, believing it was not revolutionary enough.

The Young Lords were militant but not militaristic; Despite their stated commitment to ‘armed struggle’, they rarely carried weapons and rarely sought confrontation with the authorities. Instead, Mr. Guzmán encouraged them to take dramatic actions to embarrass the city, such as the time they “liberated” — some say they stole — a truckload of equipment used to test for lead poisoning and tuberculosis, both scourges of the city. poorest neighborhoods.

The group always claimed inspiration from communist China, and over time their commitment to Maoism deepened. In 1971, Mr. Guzmán joined a delegation of 70 black and Latino activists on a months-long trip to China.

But he was also responding to the increasingly sectarian push among other Young Lords leaders, and to their growing commitment of resources to Puerto Rican independence—efforts, he believed, that were eroding their ties to ordinary New Yorkers.

After serving nine months in federal prison in Florida for opposing the draft, Mr. Guzmán returned to New York in 1974 to find the organization completely transformed. Even the name was different: it was now the Puerto Rican Workers’ Revolutionary Party. He left at the end of the year and in 1976 the party collapsed.

Thanks to his long career as a journalist, many New Yorkers who recognized him as a daily presence on the nightly news knew little about his time with the Young Lords. And while Mr. Guzmán never hid his history, he preferred to focus on his adventures in front of the camera.

He liked to talk about a visit by Nelson Mandela, then president of South Africa, to New York in the 1990s. At one point, a member of the Mandela delegation told him that Mr. Mandela wanted to speak to Mr. Guzmán privately.

“My ego jumped,” he said in an ad for WCBS. “All the other reporters thought I had an inside track. So I went up to him and he wanted to ask me about John Gotti.