Willie Matos, Citizen of the World
by Andy Piascik
“When Willie Matos calls, I know it’s something important.” Thus spoke a Bridgeport union official in the Summer of 1979 about a phone call he received from Willie regarding a strike at the Handy and Harman precious metals factory just over the Bridgeport town line in Fairfield. Strikes were common in Bridgeport’s industrial heyday and Willie was likely only vaguely aware of the one at Handy and Harman until an employment agency contracted by the company came into his neighborhood in an attempt to replace the strikers with scabs. The company specifically targeted the State Street area where Puerto Rican youth in particular were grappling with high unemployment and the rapidly rising cost of living.
At the time, Willie was a leading member of the Spanish American Coalition (SAC), an activist organization he co-founded with Cesar Batalla and others some years earlier. When a young supporter of SAC who had been approached by the employment agency brought the literature he was given to the nearby SAC office on Colorado Avenue, Willie began to look more deeply into the strike.
Because Willie saw the world through a prism of interconnectedness and human solidarity, he did not hesitate to begin reaching out to union officials, workers and activists of all nationalities about Handy and Harman’s efforts to recruit scabs. He may not have known a single Handy and Harman worker, but he lived by the old labor movement credo that An Injury to One is An Injury to All. In this instance, Willie knew that a victorious strike might reverberate to the benefit of working-class families throughout the Bridgeport area and at minimum, would make life a little better for the Handy and Harman workers.
Strike Support Committee
In speeches he gave and conversations he had with many, Willie was all too aware of the aggressive shift in the 1970s by corporations in their negotiations with unions and the workers those unions represented, as well as in labor relations as a whole. Living on Organ Street between State Street and Railroad Avenue on Bridgeport’s West Side, he was surrounded by factories where the number of workers had been dramatically cut by corporations throughout the 1970s, including Bryant Electric, Casco, Hubbell, United Pattern, Dictaphone and Bead Chain. (1) Since all of Bridgeport was his turf, Willie knew that the same thing was happening elsewhere around town at Bridgeport Brass, General Electric, Jenkins Valves and other factories. He was also keenly aware that the layoffs were already beginning to ravage Bridgeport, with marked increases in poverty, crime and desperation.
What began as an effort to deter neighborhood youth from signing on as scabs quickly grew, under Willie’s leadership, to a full-blown strike support committee. The work of the committee and the officials of the United Steelworkers of America local at Handy and Harman culminated in a mass march and rally in Fairfield in November of 1979. Shortly thereafter, the company settled the strike on terms highly favorable to the workers. (2)
An Epidemic of Plant Closures
The work Willie did during the strike was just one example of his commitment to freedom and justice for people everywhere. Typically, the support he spearheaded for the Handy and Harman workers was not an ending at the strike’s conclusion. Rather, it was the beginning of something new, something much needed: a larger effort to address the devastation caused by factory closings by forcing the corporations closing those plants to provide funds for worker training and re-training, the cleaning up of any soil contamination, refunds to municipalities for tax breaks and other forms of financial compensation.
Not long after the conclusion of the Handy and Harman strike, Bridgeport’s workers suffered a major economic blow when Bridgeport Brass closed. Though many other factories in the city closed in the decade that followed, the closing of Bridgeport Brass was felt especially acutely for a number of reasons. For one, the factory was a Bridgeport mainstay that had been located right smack in the middle of the city for 115 years. In addition, with a peak total of 4,000 workers, it had been, for a number of years, the city’s second largest employer, behind only General Electric. In addition, its closing was the first major factory closure in town since that of the Singer Sewing Machine plant on Arctic Street a decade before. And last, Bridgeport Brass had been the sight of important labor actions and union battles going back to when the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers first organized the plant in 1937, history with which Willie was undoubtedly familiar.
As the closing of plants became an epidemic in Bridgeport, the workers who made the factory owners wealthy were abandoned. Working class neighborhoods were devastated as, in addition to the job loss from the closed factories, restaurants, stores, diners and bars – many of which were locally owned, family businesses — went under due to a dramatic decline in customers. Through his statewide contacts, Willie knew of a group that came together in response, the Connecticut Plant Closing Coalition. In addition to his already large number of contacts, Willie encouraged new acquaintances from the Handy and Harman strike support committee to join its efforts.
A Noble But Unsuccessful Campaign
While Bridgeport was in many ways ground zero for capital flight in Connecticut, working class communities elsewhere in the state were similarly
reeling under mass layoffs. Despite the work put in by Willie and activists from Bridgeport and the state as a whole, plus a number of union officers and elected officials, the efforts of the Connecticut Plant Closing Coalition were largely unsuccessful. Plant closings and layoffs continued en masse, with corporations incurring little to nothing in the way of consequences.
One effect of plant closings that hit Willie personally was the loss of the family’s Organ Street home through eminent domain. When the City of Bridgeport decided to level the empty buildings that previously housed the Bryant Electric factory – buildings that literally surrounded the Matos home – Willie and his family were forced to relocate. He lived the rest of his life on the East Side.
A Long-Term Commitment to Justice
The work Willie did with the Handy and Harman strike support committee and the Connecticut Plant Closing Coalition are just two examples of the work for justice he did across many decades. In an article about Willie by Amanda Rivera, who at the time was a graduate student in Yale University’s Department of American Studies, Willie related how he encountered racism as a youngster that likely fueled his adult activism. Rivera cited one incident when Willie was encircled and berated by his eighth-grade classmates after a teacher mentioned in class that four Puerto Rican nationalists had entered the U.S. Capitol and fired shots in an attempt to draw attention to Puerto Rico’s dominance by U.S. imperialism. (3)
Willie similarly encountered racism in workplaces and union halls after graduating from Central High School in 1958. In the 1960s, he became involved in Spanish People in Command (SPIC), an organization formed to work for the rights of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in Bridgeport. Upon learning that the chapters of the Young Lords in Chicago and New York were looking to expand to other cities, Willie and others met with its leadership and transformed SPIC into the Bridgeport chapter of the Lords. (4)
One option that Willie might have chosen – one that a number of activists involved in the many movement organizations of the time opted for – was to move to one of the country’s largest cities where radical groups generally had more projects, resources and members. That was certainly true of the Young Lords, especially in nearby New York City, where the majority of its members lived and where it had a number of established areas of work. Instead, Willie chose to remain in blue collar Bridgeport. The city had been his home for two decades, for one, plus he by that time had a family. In addition, he had a fairly large network of associates of a variety of races and nationalities. Plus, Willie recognized the importance of groups like the Lords to people in places like Bridgeport, people who were not about to move to New York, Chicago or Philadelphia. (5)
Slumlords, Police Violence, Workers Rights
Under Willie’s leadership, the Bridgeport Young Lords took on slumlords and police violence. Their influence on the East Side in particular led to confrontations in which they stood up to landlord goons and heavily-armed police by closing down a large section of East Main Street for an extended period. And because Willie, unlike many of the most prominent Young Lords in New York and elsewhere, had workplace and trade union experience, the Bridgeport chapter prioritized organizing factory workers and agricultural laborers from other parts of Connecticut. Soon after the formation of the Bridgeport chapter, he was elected to the YLP’s national leadership body.
Vieques Support Committee
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. Though it took many years, 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, Elected Office and ASPIRA
During all of his activist work, Willie was dedicated to his family as well as a respected staff member at the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights. He taught classes on the Puerto Rican Experience at Housatonic Community College and served one term on the Bridgeport City Council before shifting back to community work, saying that he was unable to accomplish what he hoped because of the constraints of political office. He then went on to play an important role in the establishment of the Latino youth group ASPIRA and helped secure space for it at a former library in his old West Side neighborhood.
Willie imparted lessons about Puerto Rican history and national pride, whether in discussions he led at ASPIRA or in the celebration of the lives of baseball great Roberto Clemente and others. He loved Latin music and led any number of demonstrations in song, whether it be the ballads of Ray Barretto or labor movement anthems like Which Side Are You On?. An internationalist, Willie practiced intersectionality before that term was coined, linking the freedom struggle of Puerto Ricans both in the United States and on the island, to social justice movements both in the U.S. and around the world.
In his later years, Willie was interviewed a number of times by younger activists and scholars who recognized the importance of the wisdom he had to share. In addition to the article she wrote about him, Amanda Rivera interviewed Willie for the Bridgeport Public Library History Center. (7) And an interview Eddie Tranzcendent did with Willie is available on YouTube: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ5JG7uF27k).
Though it shocked and saddened many, it was perhaps fitting that Willie’s end came while he 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. In the week celebrated and honored in a number of venues by those who knew and loved him. Never one to seek the spotlight, Willie would likely have redirected all praise accorded him to those who carry on the work he dedicated his life to.
NOTES
1. The very street where Willie lived was named for the Bridgeport Organ Company whose factory was one of the first in the neighborhood.
2. The Bridgeport Sunday Post, November 18, 1979, page 1.
3. Willie Matos: Capitan of the Bridgeport Young Lords by Amanda Rivera: https://connecticuthistory.org/willie-matos-capitan-of-the-bridgeport-young-lords/
Amanda finished her graduate studies and received her Ph.D from Yale in May of 2026.
4. Formed in 1969, the Lords were first the Young Lords Organization, then the Young Lords Party and ultimately the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization. The definitive account of the Lords is that by the late, great scholar and activist Johanna Fernandez, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2020).
5. The Young Lords leadership recognized the importance of this as well. In their newspaper Pa’lante, for example, they hailed the formation of the Bridgeport chapter as “very important because it was the first time the Party opened in a small, working class city.”
6. In addition to garnering a great deal of local media attention, the efforts to oppose plant closures received national attention via, for example, the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/11/nyregion/plantclosings-bill-revived.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/03/07/nyregion/aid-sought-for-workers-as-factories-shut.html NYT 3/7/1982
7. That interview is available digitally here: https://bportlibrary.org/hc/ve/vex5/3902E56B-8362-4F0B-B65D-449838506420.htm
