The exhibit couldn’t be timelier.

Last month, Puerto Rico's governor announced that the island's roughly $73 billion in public debt is not payable. The economic crisis in Puerto Rico is complicated by the island’s unusual geopolitical status; it’s neither a state, nor an independent country. It is a U.S. territory, with an import-export law called the Jones Act that many Puerto Ricans have accused of handicapping their economic opportunities in favor of U.S. interests.

Puerto Rico’s status as a territory was foremost in the minds of the Young Lords in the late 1960s. The first point of their Thirteen Point Program and Platform read: “We want self-determination for Puerto Ricans — liberation on the island and inside the United States. For 500 years, first Spain and then the United States have colonized our country. Billions of dollars in profits leave our country for the United States every year. In every way we are slaves of the gringo.”

Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, who curated the exhibit at El Museo del Barrio, believes Puerto Rico's financial crisis is a manifestation of the problems the Young Lords protested decades ago. “I think that’s a perfect example of the legacy of colonialism, and the imperialism that the Young Lords and many people way before them were already fighting,” he said.

“¡Presente!” highlights social campaigns the Young Lords organized in East Harlem, including a garbage offensive in which they blocked traffic by building up piles of uncollected trash in the street, and a takeover of a tuberculosis testing truck, which they hijacked and drove to a different location to serve more people.

The exhibit spans three cultural centers in New York City — The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, and The Loisaida Center on the Lower East Side — all neighborhoods where the Young Lords were active. The Harlem exhibition features political posters from the museum's permanent collection, commissioned artworks, and photographs of the Young Lords from Hiram Maristany, a Young Lord himself who served as their official photographer.

“As an artist, as a photographer, I had to remove myself from the activity. I had to document it,” Maristany told Al Jazeera. “They would scream at me, ‘Why are you taking pictures when we’re getting beaten up?’ I said, ‘One day you will understand this.’”

More than 40 years later, his commitment is getting its due.

“It’s still speaking to generations of young people," Maristany said. “And it’s showing that the poorest people, people of color, people who have been disenfranchised, people that people look past, do not respect, can do some extraordinary things given the opportunity.”