I took the journey with the Young Lords from the group's beginning in New York through its painful decline and saw the organization crumble. We canno… - Iris Morales

At its best, the Young Lords offered revolutionary ideals and examples of movement-building strategies and tactics, and tough, hard-hitting, and painful lessons from its setbacks and failures.

We considered ourselves "revolutionary nationalists." This idea expressed the intersecting and complex histories of Puerto Ricans exploited both in a US island colony and in the urban ghettos of the United States. Puerto Ricans suffered colonialism, class exploitation, and racism, and the Young Lords pointed to the US capitalist-imperialist system as the source of the problem. This view was distinct from that of other nationalists, who did not necessarily focus on a class analysis or on organizing the most economically disenfranchised, and from that of cultural nationalists, whose concerns were to promote and preserve Puerto Rican culture rather than transform the socio-economic-political system. For the Young Lords, revolutionary nationalism also meant internationalism-collaboration with people similarly exploited in the United States and throughout the world. The first point of the Young Lords' Thirteen-Point Program and Platform declared, "We want self-determination for Puerto Ricans: liberation on the Island and inside the United States." These were dual and simultaneous demands. The Young Lords not only organized for the rights of Puerto Ricans in the United States but also mobilized thousands to support the decolonization of Puerto Rico

In reviewing the history of sterilization in Puerto Rico, we learned that Native American, African American, Chicana, and Puerto Rican women across the United States were also being sterilized in great numbers. In New York City, Puerto Rican women were sterilized at seven times the rate of white women and twice the rate of black women.