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

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

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. “No one has treated the foundational texts of the Puerto Rican labor movement as comprehensively and organically as Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo. Uniquely compelling, The Lettered Barriada makes a significant addition to labor studies, Latin American history, and Puerto Rican and Caribbean studies.”― Francisco A. Scarano, author of , Puerto Rico: Cinco Siglos De Historia “Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo's focus on the ‘politics of knowledge production’ explodes our understanding of the internecine struggles within the early Puerto Rican Left and the politics of race and gender in the construction of radical social movements in Puerto Rico. Meléndez-Badillo exposes to historians of Puerto Rico how the historical narratives to which we all have contributed have been shaped irrevocably by the aspirations and interests of the flawed male radical visionaries of the turn of the century. His book is simultaneously empirically fresh, epistemologically challenging, and inspirational in its revisiting of Puerto Rican history and those who made it.”― Eileen J. Findlay, author of , We Are Left without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico "This book fills a gap in epistemological debates on working-class memory in Latin America and beyond, including its embodiment, activist perspective, and occlusion of counter-hegemonic voices. Recommended. Graduate students and faculty."― G. de Laforcade , Choice "[A]n important intellectual and social history. . . . This would be a fine book for graduate classes or advanced undergraduates to read and think about how historical narratives are created and reproduced, as well as the role of class, race, and gender in this process. It poses questions about how we do historical research and what questions we ask. At the same time, it will also force us to think about the types of sources we use or chose not to use."  ― Joshua Savala , A Contracorriente "This book is key for anyone seeking to understand not only Puerto Rican history but also the role of leftist and labor leaders in the Americas in writing (and not writing) their own movements’ histories."― Kirwin R. Shaffer , New West Indian Guide "An important landmark in the historiography of Puerto Rico, a refreshing critique of labor history in which the world of labor is central in that it not only intersects with but also subsumes other sections of social life. For this reason we should expect The Lettered Barriada to become an important point of reference for future historical works and to gain increasing traction with time."― César Ayala , Hispanic American Historical Review Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College, author of Voces libertarias: Los orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico , and coeditor of Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies .