Organizing the ACT UP Latinx Caucus

For years, the AIDS epidemic was largely ignored by the United States government, leaving the public uneducated about the disease and how it is transmitted. People living with HIV and AIDS faced stigma, violence, and discrimination by employers, healthcare providers, insurance companies, and landlords. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded in 1987 at the LGBT Community Center in New York City. Activists used protest and direct action to fight for meaningful change in public policy and social justice for people living with AIDS, including quality healthcare, expanded medical treatment, and legal protections against discrimination.

ACT UP members recognized that the experiences of people with AIDS varied depending on their race and ethnicity, sex and gender identity, access to health insurance and family support. Smaller working groups within ACT UP formed to address the issues of specific identity groups and create connections between these groups and the broader LGBTQ+ community and their allies. In 1990, a Latina/o Caucus was organized within ACT UP. Julian de Mayo is a researcher and memory activist who organized the ACT UP Latina/o Caucus archives. In this excerpt from a 2020 interview from the ACT UP oral history project, de Mayo described the group and its organization.

Interviewer: How exactly did the Latino Caucus of ACT-UP come to be?

Julian de Mayo: The first step towards the Latino Caucus is actually a Spanish-language committee. Their job was to translate the materials that ACT-UP was developing. But then, in 1990, some of these Latino activists are like, Okay, we actually need to do more advocacy, and more activism that is Latino specific, we're not just translators or your secretaries. Which was a critique, of course. There was a hierarchy that leaned towards gay white males whose purpose was really to get pharmaceutical companies to create drugs. That was their number one concern. But what about intravenous drug use? What about housing? What about immigration? What happens when medication becomes available? Who's going to have access to that? [Latino members] had a whole different set of issues that they did not feel were being represented in the general ACT-UP conversations. And that's why in 1990, they decided to create a caucus. This is quite interesting, because in ACT-UP you have several working groups, but the Latino Caucus had a different level of autonomy. Because a caucus meant that they had control over who could join. It was very politically astute, but also a politically sensitive issue, because one of the big things that they decided to do is run the meetings in Spanish. That, by default, excluded a lot of ACT-UP. Once this group is created, which is a small group at first, that's when you see people from Puerto Rican communities uptown who are part of churches, former inmates who had contracted HIV through intravenous drug use, they start coming to the Latino Caucus, not necessarily because it was ACT-UP, but because it was the Latino Caucus. So this space they created allowed for an incredibly diverse coalition to form. There were straight people. There were queer people, gay folks, parents. It was super diverse. And that was part of how they had to operate their organization. Their caucus was extremely intersectional and extremely respectful in their language and in the issues that they addressed.

Interviewer: You mention intersectionality and diversity within the Latino Caucus. What common ground brought the group together and who were these individuals?

de Mayo: I think what united them was an absence of people organizing, talking, and caring about how AIDS was impacting Latino communities in New York City. There was some common ground there. Intravenous drug use, for example, was a way of transmission among Latinos. Whereas gay white men [were affected] in a certain way, in Latino communities, the main vector was actually intravenous drug use. But that was not being talked about in Latino communities. And it wasn't being talked about in these gay white male circles. There was no real outreach to Latino leadership in the city. I think that that sort of absence brought people together. A lot of people were recent immigrants from places like Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Chile. That group was mostly gay men who had survived dictatorships, who had also been politically active in their home countries. But then you also have a significant amount of Puerto Rican folks that were both migrants to New York - people who had grown up in Puerto Rico who were also politically active, some of them in the sovereigntist movement in Puerto Rico. But then you also had Nuyoricans - people that were from these communities in the Bronx, Bushwick, [and] the Lower East Side, living through a very acute crisis with drugs and AIDS in their communities. You also had Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, from out west. They [all] join ACT-UP at different times.