CRES Lecture Series: Our Broken Memories

Our Broken Memories: On History-Making, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Forgetting in Puerto Rico

Featuring Dr.Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Description: 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 and it has created spaces to access ideas about the past and fostering collective imaginaries about other potential futures.

Biography: Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Puerto Rico: A National History (2024), The Lettered Barriada (2021), and Voces libertarias (2013), and coeditor of Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies (2026). He is currently completing A Counter-Republic of Letters and working on The Idea of Home, while co-founding and codirecting the Puerto Rican Studies Hub.