Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Biography

I am a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. My work focuses on the global circulation for radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities.

My most recent book, The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, Nov. 2021), tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workingmen were able to go from producing knowledge within their workshops and labor unions in the margins of Puerto Rico’s cultural and intellectual elite, to becoming highly respected politicians and statesmen. It is a story of how this group of workers produced, negotiated, and archived powerful discourses that ended up shaping Puerto Rico’s national mythology. However, by following a group of ragtag intellectuals, the book demonstrates how techniques of racial and gender silencing, ghosting, and erasure also took place in the margins. Ultimately, it is a book about the intersections of politics, knowledge, and power-relations in Puerto Rican working-class intellectual production at the turn of the twentieth century.

I am currently finishing a book titled Puerto Rico: A National History (under contract with Princeton University Press). The book offers a national history of Puerto Rico, a country without a nation state. It tells the story of how Puerto Rico has been colonized for more than five centuries while also documenting the ways that people have resisted colonial domination. Ultimately, the book will provide unfamiliar readers with an informed argument of how and why Puerto Rico arrived at its current juncture, as well as how Puerto Ricans are imagining possible futures in the face of austerity, failing infrastructures, and the rubble left behind by colonial neglect.

I am currently working in another monograph-length research project, tentatively titled Following the Revolution: Juan Francisco and Blanca Moncaleano’s Transnational Militancy, 1910-1916. It explores the materiality of working-class intellectual communities in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. borderlands by rethinking the role of anarchist newspaper production. Beyond their propagandistic ethos, newspapers served as nodes that facilitated the creation of transregional anarchist cartographies.

I am also the author of Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Secret Sailor Books, 2013; Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo-CNT, 2014; Editorial Akelarre/CEISO, 2015), co-editor of Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), and editor of Páginas libres: Breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). I have published book chapters, as well as journal and newspaper articles on the histories of anarchism, labor, and radical politics in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. My work has appeared in Hispanic American Historical Review, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Perspectives, NACLA, International Labor and Working Class History, Society and Space, and The Abusable Past, among others. I hold a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Connecticut.

Education

Ph.D., University of Connecticut
M.A., Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico
B.A., Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico

Books

Selected Publications

Peer-Review Articles

• “Luisa Capetillo and the Caribbean’s Counter Republic of Letters.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 69 (Nov. 2022): Forthcoming.
• “A Party of Ex-Convicts: Bolívar Ochart, Carceral Logics, and the Socialist Party in Puerto Rico, 1917-1928,” Hispanic American Historical Review vol. 101, no. 1 (February 2021): 73-99.
• “Mateo and Juana: Racial Silencing, Epistemic Violence, and Counterarchives in Puerto Rican Labor History,” International Labor and Working-Class History Journal vol. 96 (Fall 2019): 103-121.
• “Imagining Resistance: Organizing the Puerto Rican Southern Agricultural Strike of 1905,” Caribbean Studies Journal vol. 43, no. 2 (July-December 2015): 33-82.
• “Labor History’s Transnational Turn: Rethinking Latin American and Caribbean Migrant Workers,” Latin American Perspectives vol. 42, no. 4 (July 2015): 117-122.

Book Chapters

• “Radical Genealogies: The Beginnings of Anarchism in Nineteenth-Century Latin America” Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, edited by Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Graciela Montaldo. Forthcoming, 2023.
• “Luisa Capetillo en La Habana: Sus escritos en la prensa anarquista cubana, 1910-1914.” In Amor y anarquía: Los escritos de Luisa Capetillo, edited by Julio Ramos. Cabo Rojo: Ediciones Educación Emergente, 2021.
• “The Anarchist Imaginary: Max Nettlau and Latin America, 1890-1934.” In Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchist Print Culture and the United States, edited by Montse Feu-López and Chris J Castañeda. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
• “The Puerto Rican Experiment: Crisis, Colonialism, and Popular Response.” In The End of the World as We Know It? Crisis, Resistance, and the Age of Austerity, edited by Deric Shannon. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.
• “Interpreting, Deconstructing, and Deciphering Ideograms of Rebellion: An Approach to the History of Reading in Puerto Rico’s Anarchist Groups at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.” In Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies, edited by Meléndez Badillo, Jorell and Nathan Jun, 57-75. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

Other Academic Publications and Public Scholarship

• “A Brief Reflection on Thinking Against the Archive of Puertorriqueñidad,” Caliban’s Readings: The Caribbean Philosophical Associaton’s Blog (April 24, 2022).
• “Camacho-Quinn’s gold medal sparked a debate about Puerto Rican national identity,” The Washington Post’s Made by History, (August 6, 2021).
• “La Calle Fortaleza in Puerto Rico’s Primavera de Verano,” co-authored with Aurora Santiago Ortiz, Decolonial Geographies of Puerto Rico’s 2019 Summer Protests, online forum edited by Marisol LeBrón and Joaquín Villanueva, Society and Space Journal (February 25, 2020).
• “Commemorating May Day in Puerto Rico,” NACLA Report on the Americas vol. 51, no. 3 (September 2019): 301-305.
• “Puerto Rico’s Multiple Solidarities: Emergent Landscapes and the Geographies of Protest,” co-authored with Aurora Santiago-Ortiz, The Abusable Past by Radical History Review (July 22, 2019).
• “Los ecos del silencio: Dimensiones locales y aspiraciones globales del periódico Voz humana.” Revista La Brecha vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 23-27.
• “Voces libertarias: The Economic, Political, and Social Discourse of Puerto Rican Anarchism, 1900-1917.” Theory in Action: The Journal of the Transformative Studies Institute vol. 5, no. 4 (2012): 6-12.
• “Expresiones anarquistas dentro de la prensa y la cultura proletaria puertorriqueña de principios del siglo XX.” Kálathos: Revista Transdisciplinaria Metro-Inter vol. 6, no. 1, (2012).
• “El cabildo secular en Puerto Rico: Siglos XVI-XVIII.” Kálathos: Revista Transdisciplinaria Metro-Inter vol. 5 , no. 1 (2011).

History Courses

• History 201 – The Historians Craft: Afterlives of the War of 1898 in the Caribbean – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 260 – Introduction to Latin America – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
• History 347 – The Caribbean and Its Diasporas – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
• History 500 – Reading Seminar in History: Transnational Utopias: Anarchism Across the Americas – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)