Juan Cartagena, Esq.

Hear Juan Cartagena discuss his experience during the 1968 Riot in Jersey City and how it influenced his thinking:

“The Riots of Jersey City occurred in 1968… and they were two, three blocks from my house. The whole movement… of revolutionary action [and] thought… [its] more progressive thinking about community based activities and [its] connection to world activities… were part of what influenced a lot of what I did by the time I went to high school… I started high school in 1970. Those images of what we saw on TV, when I was seeing it in real life, particularly the Riots, [those] stayed with me.

Interviewer: What was an image? Could you describe it?

Sure. The images of the riots were, you know, the violence… Actually, it wasn’t so much [the violence]—it was violent, but what the images were saying was resistance… Resistance against a government that was oppressing us; because no resources of the government were coming to help the communities that I lived in; resistance because people just couldn’t take it anymore; and resistance because race was becoming a serious issue that nobody was able to solve at the national or local level. By the time I got to high school though, smatterings of hope were there… I worked from a very early age of my life. I worked at car washes, I worked at factories, I stocked shelves at Shop–Rite on the night shift. I worked… summer youth programs, which are hardly around today. And I learned a lot about the movement for Civil Rights because of [what] I saw firsthand in Jersey City, through the black community in Jersey City. Those images about resistance were mostly black born, I mean black led, I should say. The signals of hope were things like summer jobs, where we were able to talk with a lot of people from different backgrounds.”

Text edited for clarity. For a full verbatim transcript of the quote, please see p. 14-15 of the complete interview transcript.

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