Before moving to the United States to pursue his PhD., Assistant Professor of History Jorell Meléndez-Badillo was a high school teacher in Puerto Rico, using a textbook written by UW-Madison Emeritus Professor Francisco Scarano to teach history. This August, Meléndez-Badillo joined the Department of History at UW-Madison, and has been sharing his knowledge of Puerto Rican studies.
He calls it a “dream come true.”
“This is the department of people that not only shaped Latin American and Caribbean studies, but my own field of Puerto Rican studies,” says Meléndez-Badillo, who taught history at Dartmouth College before joining the faculty at UW-Madison. “This is a department with a huge tradition of Puerto Rican studies, and so I’m just humbled and excited to have the privilege to continue that legacy.”
As a first-generation scholar, Meléndez-Badillo says he works to center voices that have been erased. As a “working class intellectual historian,” Meléndez-Badillo writes about the ways in which Puerto Rican history is produced from marginalized voices.
“I'm interested not only in the ways that workers, most of them self-educated, produced knowledge in the margins of the country's literary elite, but also how they created certain silences in those narratives,” he says.
In writing his first book, “The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico," Meléndez-Badillo was inspired by his own working-class grandparents who raised him. When he discovered that voices like theirs were absent from the historical narrative, he sought to understand why. Throughout the book, Meléndez-Badillo explores how self-educated working men established their own narratives and “shaped Puerto Rico’s national mythology.”
Since 1898, Puerto Rico has been a territory of the United States. While the archipelago has restricted self-governance and its own constitution — which was drafted in 1950 and approved by the President and Congress in 1952 — Puerto Rico does not have the benefits of being an official state or that of an independent country. In “The Lettered Barriada,” Meléndez-Badillo tells stories of working-class individuals who created the Socialist Party and navigated the “colonial polity” of Puerto Rico.
“Ultimately, it's a book about knowledge production and history production from the margins,” Meléndez-Badillo explains. “It is an exploration into the ways that a small group of working-class intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century crafted historical narratives that not only impacted the ways that we understand the past, but also their own contemporary political movement.”
To understand how working-class individuals established this narrative and produced discourse, Meléndez-Badillo turned to newspapers, exploring how they were utilized to facilitate what he calls the “global circulation of radical ideas.”
“Instead of looking at newspapers simply as a material thing, I'm also looking at newspapers as archives of multiple ideas,” he says. “I'm interested in the ways that these ideas circulated in the format of books, leaflets, newspapers. It so happens that most of the people who circulated them were radicals or anarchists, communists and socialists.”
Meléndez-Badillo recently finished another book, “Puerto Rico: A National History,” which seeks to understand the "modern political and economic situation of Puerto Rico from a broader historical perspective.” As a territory that has been characterized by colonization, the book explores the historical context of Puerto Rico and provides informed arguments about the impact of its history on possible futures. For these books, as well as the rest of his works, Meléndez-Badillo has two goals.
“My work is guided by two questions,” says Meléndez-Badillo, “How is knowledge produced in the margins? And how does the circulation of knowledge impact local subjectivities?”
As a working-class intellectual historian, Meléndez-Badillo makes it a goal to expand conversations surrounding history and have a transformative effect on the future with his work.
“I hope that these books are not only read for the sake of passing a class or because a professor assigned them,” he says. “I hope that they allow people to understand their positionality and their lived experiences in a broader historical context. I write history in order to impact the reality that I live in, and in order to imagine a better future.”
Meléndez-Badillo is intentional about this mission in the classroom as well. As an assistant professor, he seeks to break down the traditional hierarchy and create a space that is conducive to productive and meaningful learning through conversations with and between his students.
“I see my scholarship and my teaching intertwined,” he says. “Part of what I want to do is transform the spaces where I'm at, and in the classroom that entails thinking of the classroom as a space where we can collectively produce knowledge.”
As he continues to grow in his new position, Meléndez-Badillo hopes to build upon his mission and create a larger learning community at UW.
“I'm really invested in the expansion of Puerto Rican studies from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective,” he says. “I hope that being here allows me to continue expanding that intellectual tradition that has been so important in the field writ large and has stemmed from UW-Madison's History Department.”