As NY1's Hispanic Heritage Week continues, the station profiles a group of East Harlem social activists who strived 40 years ago to make local government more responsive to Latino needs. NY1's Rebecca Spitz filed the following report.

Felipe Luciano is miles away from who he was 40 years ago. In 1969, he was a former gang member who was frustrated with the city's negligence of "El Barrio," the Puerto Rican community in East Harlem.

Luciano co-founded the Young Lords Party, a grassroots organization designed to make local government more responsive to Latino needs.

"We kept hearing on the streets 'No one is representing our interests,'" says Luciano.

The Young Lords started with five members. Their methods were bold - they challenged authority and confronted those in charge to get what they wanted.

"I think the strength of the Young Lords was their ability to pinpoint what the issue was and to come up with creative, often very low-cost solutions to the problem," says Professor Frances Negron-Muntaner of Columbia University.

One of the first issues they tackled was lack of sanitation services. Luciano says the city wasn't regularly collecting trash in East Harlem, so the Young Lords started picking it up themselves.

When the Department of Sanitation continued to ignore them, the Young Lords literally took matters into their own hands.

"We put it in the middle of the streets, it stopped traffic. You stop traffic, you stop commerce," says Luciano. "They picked it up. That was our first victory."

While their brief existence only lasted six years, their impact was long-lasting.

Juan Gonzalez, now a columnist for the New York Daily News, fought for more vital issues.

"At one point we seized, or 'liberated,' a tuberculosis truck that the city was taking around to do X-rays for people with tuberculosis but was never putting it in the poorest communities," says Gonzalez. "So we took it from an upscale area of Manhattan, drove it to East Harlem and did X-rays right outside our offices."

Along the same lines, they fought to serve free breakfast to school-aged kids. They eventually took over a church that had denied them space and used it.

Their brash methods had consequences, including frequent clashes with police.

By 1974, the group was starting to unravel.

"We began to get jealous and insecure and envious of one another and as we grew we began to think we knew more than the people did," says Luciano.

Now off the socio-political radar for nearly 35 years, the Young Lords look back on the organization's legacy.

"That 19- and 20-year-old young people from the Barrio can effect such significant changes in the way that government operates to me - that's a lesson for all young people," says Gonzalez.