Puerto Rico, Historical Thinking, and the Politics of Forgetting in the Caribbean

Part of our Fall 2026 Humanities Forum

Puerto Rico, Historical Thinking, and the Politics of Forgetting in the Caribbean

Puerto Rican history has been a contested space ever since its early days. From Fray Íñigo Abad y la Sierra’s 1788 book to Paul G. Miller’s Historia de Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century, the production of history has served different political purposes. This lecture will explore the ways that history teaching and writing gave way to racialized tropes of Puerto Rican docility and laziness. More recently, however, the state has moved to silence or erase the past through Puerto Rico’s “politics of forgetting.” The talk ends with the ways that these ideas are being challenged by artists and cultural producers.

Co-sponsored by the Latin American Studies Minor.

Biography: Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo’s works focuses on the global circulation of radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His is the author of Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024), The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke UP, 2021) and Páginas libres: Breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). His work on the histories of anarchism, labor, and radical politics has also been published in book chapters, as well as journal and newspaper articles in Puerto Rico and Latin America. His work has appeared in Caribbean Studies Journal, Latin American Perspectives, and Theory in Action, among others. Meléndez-Badillo holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Connecticut, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow and a Humanities Institute Fellow. Before the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was Assistant Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow at Dartmouth College. He is the co-founder and co-chair of the Puerto Rican Studies Hub at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the incoming president of the Puerto Rican Studies Association.

This public forum is open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University's nondiscrimination policy.