UAW-MF were an anarchist street gang operating in the lower East Side of NYC in the late 1960’s. An outgrowth of the militant Dadaist group Black Mask, the “Motherfuckers” (or the “Family”, as they referred to themselves) took over apartment buildings, storefronts, theaters and above-all the ‘public space’ of neighborhood streets and transformed them into a dense network of conflictual and vibrant experimental life. Equally hostile to organized political parties as well as “New Left” formations, the Family built-up a fiercely autonomous fabric of hippy-dropouts, Puerto-Rican street kids, homeless wino’s, disaffected intellectuals, radicalized students and others, who self-organized into a collective social force of struggle and experimentation. Operating in New York from roughly 1967-1969, theirs is a rich and complex example of territorially-immersed destituent life, whose lessons have yet to be fully drawn, in part due to the prevalence of competing narratives from this period in history, and in part due to the overall secrecy surrounding many aspects of their existence until now.

The main reading is the zine “Black Mask and UAW-MF”, but we encourage everyone to peruse the posters, leaflets, and writings of these comrades collected here.