Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

Associate Professor of History

melendezbadi@wisc.edu

Office: 5221 Levy Hall
Office Hours: TBA
Curriculum Vitae (pdf) | Website

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

I am a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America and the author, most recently, of the critically acclaimed book, Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024), translated to Spanish by Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte as Puerto Rico: historia de una nación (Grupo Planeta, 2024). I am also the author of The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021) and Voces libertarias: Orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico (Secret Sailor Books, 2013).

I am the 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 am also the co-editor of Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2026. I am currently finishing a monograph titled A Counter-Republic of Letters: Friendship, Revolution, and Anarchist History-Making, under contract with Duke University Press. My next research project explores the impact of U.S. higher education during the war of 1898 in the Caribbean. I have published extensively in the form of book chapters, public-facing articles, and scholarly publications in leading peer-reviewed journals including the Hispanic American Historical Review, Small Axe, International Journal of Working-Class History, and Caribbean Studies, among others.

More recently, I collaborated with global superstar Bad Bunny in the creation of historical narratives that accompanied each song’s YouTube visualizer in DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. I also wrote 40 historical and cultural short texts that are used in the screens of Bad Bunny’s historic residency in Puerto Rico. My work has been featured in the LA Times, Vogue, New York Magazine, Good Morning America, Univisión, Telemundo, AFP, La Nación, La Jornada, and El Nuevo Día, among many national and international outlets.

Before UW–Madison, I was a Mellon Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College. I am from the capital of the Caribbean: Aguadilla, Puerto Rico.

Education

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

Books

Puerto Rico: A National History

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. Puerto Rico: A National History. Princeton University Press, 2024.

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago’s people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today. In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus, and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico’s turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511—led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II—to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States. Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly. Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta

The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico. Duke University Press, 2021.

In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds. Disregarded by most of Puerto Rico’s intellectual elite, these workers engaged in dialogue with international peers and imagined themselves as part of a global community. They also entered the world of politics through the creation of the Socialist Party, which became an electoral force in the first half of the twentieth century. Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico’s national mythology. By following these ragtag intellectuals as they became politicians and statesmen, Meléndez-Badillo also demonstrates how they engaged in racial and gender silencing, epistemic violence, and historical erasures in the fringes of society. Ultimately, The Lettered Barriada is about the politics of knowledge production and the tensions between working-class intellectuals and the state. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Páginas libres: breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo (Editor). Páginas Libres: Breve antología Del Pensamiento Anarquista En Puerto Rico. Editora Educación Emergente, 2021.

Páginas libres. Breve antología del pensamiento anarquista en Puerto Rico (1900-1919), compilado y editado con sensible cuidado por Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, suma hilos a una recuperación histórica imprescindible en nuestro país. Con el junte de textos de Venancio Cruz, Luisa Capetillo, Juan Vilar, Juan José López y Ángel María Dieppa esta nueva entrega de la serie Otra Universidad pone en circulación ideas, conexiones, aciertos y silencios de y sobre nuestrxs anarquistas. Así abona la genealogía de esta ignorada propuesta política en nuestro archipiélago y sus filiaciones tanto locales como internacionales. En cada una de estas Páginas libres… se respira la ilustración radical del anarquismo puertorriqueño, su apuesta por el libre pensamiento, su sospecha por las instituciones al uso y su aspiración insobornable por una mejor existencia para todxs. Para Juan Vilar, “La humanidad vive, porque sueña” y ese soñar se concreta en acciones por la vida. Abre este libro, camina a su lado, ponlo en circulación libre y déjate inspirar por sus luminosos sueños. Son posibles.

Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo. Voces Libertarias: Los orígenes Del Anarquismo En Puerto Rico. Secret Sailor Books, 2013; Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, 2014; Editorial Akelarre, 2015, 2013.

Durante las dos primeras décadas del siglo XX, Puerto Rico será el escenario de una gama de cambios y transformaciones que afectarán a toda su fibra social, económica e ideológica. Es en este contexto de harta complejidad que comienzan a circular las ideas anarquistas dentro de las primeras organizaciones obreras en Puerto Rico. Su (re)producción y auge es producto de la participación de los obreros locales en varias redes trasnacionales de información y propaganda que los conectaban con nodos radicales alrededor del globo. Voces libertarias: Orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico aspira a documentar expresiones anarquistas dentro del ascendente movimiento obrero puertorriqueño durante sus años formativos. Producto de una rígida investigación histórica el texto explora la producción periodística, cultural y organizativa de grupos de obreros radicales a principios del siglo XX. A través de sus páginas, el libro pretende crear una conversación transhistórica con aquellos individuos que intentaron (re)configurar las relaciones sociales y económicas que conformaban su realidad e imaginario social pero fueron tragados por el silencio histórico en el letargo de los tiempos.

Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo (Editor). Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies. Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2013.

This volume of collected essays brings together conversations, papers, and debates from the Third Annual North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nathan Jun and Jorell A. Meléndez aspire to go beyond a simple collection of papers and instead aim to maintain a dialogue among different academic fields with the sole task of comprehending and re-thinking anarchist studies. With over twenty-one chapters written by a diverse range of activists, organizers, musicians, artists, poets, and academics, this book transgresses the apparent simplicity of the study of anarchism with a dynamic and interdisciplinary approach that crystallizes and emulates the heterogeneous nature of the anarchist ideal. From theory and philosophy to historical analyses, methodologies, and perspectives, from different manifestations in the arts, media, and culture to religion, ethics, and spirituality, from the intersectionality of animal liberation and queer struggles to contemporary praxis and organizing, the authors explore different topics from a critical perspective that is often lacking in their respective academic fields. This book is a must-buy for critical teachers, students, and activists interested in studying anarchism and the different ways in which we can transform our reality.

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

Advisor To

  • Sofia Rivera

History Courses