Guest Speaker Presentation with Dr. Jorell Melendez-Badillo "Our Broken Memories"

Critical race and Ethinc Studies welcomes you to join us on Thursday October 15th for Guest Lecturer, Dr. Jorell Melendez-Badillo who will be presenting on Our Broken Memories: On History-Making, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Forgetting in Puerto Rico.

This event is proudly co-sponsored by the UVM History Department and the Spanish Program. Event will be held on October 15th at 4:30pm in the Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338)

This talk will explore the ways that history has always been a contested space in Puerto Rico's political cultures, from the publication of foundational history texts to the present. More recently, however, the Puerto Rican government has encouraged a politics of forgetting that seeks to erase and silence the archipelago's past. However, history has also been at the center of popular culture, as Bad Bunny's latest album has demonstrated, creating spaces to access ideas about the past and fostering collective imaginaries about other potential futures.

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean History. His books include Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton UP, 2024) and The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke UP, 2021), and Voces libertarias: Orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Secret Sailor Books, 2013). He is also co-editor of Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies (Duke UP 2026), among other edited volumes.

Dr. Meléndez-Badillo is currently finishing a book manuscript (under contract with Duke UP), titled A Counter-Republic of Letters: Friendship, Revolution, and Anarchist History-Making. And he’s also working in a book tentatively titled The Idea of Home: Longing and the Caribbean’s Diasporic Imagination. He recently co-founded and co-directs the Puerto Rican Studies Hub, a research center dedicated to the study of Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricanness.