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WILLIE MATOS, FRIEND AND COMRADE  
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Andy Piascik
October 29, 2024
Counterpunch
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_ Willie Matos, who worked his entire adult life for Puerto Rican
liberation and freedom for working class people everywhere, passed
away on October 14. _

, Photograph Source: Carolyn Gonzalez – ctpost

 

He was 84. Willie Matos was participating in a panel discussion for
Hispanic Heritage Month at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven
marking the 60th 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 [email protected]_

* Willie Matos
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* Puerto Rico
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* liberation movements
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