Dr. Johanna Fernández, the Dominican American historian, prison abolitionist, and movement scholar, died on July 30, 2026, after a years-long struggle with non-small cell lung cancer. She was 55.
By KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO • NY AMSTERDAM NEWS
Dr. Johanna Fernández, Dominican American historian and prison abolitionist, passed away on July 30, 2026. (Photo credit: David Galarza, Amsterdam News)
Fernández’s life –– a mix of scholarship, activism, family, and friendship — was rooted, her brother Geovanny Fernández explained, in lessons learned from their parents, especially their father, Tirso Fernández.
Tirso Fernández was from the Dominican Republic, from a small place near the city of San Juan de la Maguana called Lavapiés. He and his wife, Minerva Fernández, who is from La Vega, were refugees of the 1965 Dominican Civil War. They raised Johanna and her brothers, Geovanny, Osvaldo, and Tirso Fernández Jr., in New York City, with a politics that Geovanny described as based on generosity. “I think the idea was to help people, particularly those who didn’t have a voice,” he said. Their father, he remembered, measured family visits back home partly by whether his children had helped others: “Did I give any money? How much money did I give?
“As for politics, my cousin said that the purpose of politics is to help others. Certainly, that was an ethos (helping others) of my sister, [that] she learned from her father, Tirso Fernandez.”
A professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Johanna Fernández was a leading scholar of the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican and Latinx radical organization whose New York chapter fought for health care, sanitation, breakfast programs, lead-poisoning testing, and community control. Her award-winning book, “The Young Lords: A Radical History,” was based on oral histories, archives, and recovered police surveillance files obtained through a Freedom of Information Law lawsuit she filed against the New York Police Department. H