Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

His current book manuscript, The Lettered Barriada: Workers and the Politics of Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico, tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico’s world of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. These workers navigated the polity that emerged from the 1898 U.S. occupation by asserting themselves as citizens, as producers of their own historical narratives, and, ultimately, as learned minds. His book shifts the historiographical focus from class-based analyses towards the study of workers’ intellectual yearnings, aesthetic sensibilities, and radical desires.

Dr. Meléndez-Badillo holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of Connecticut, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow and a Humanities Institute Fellow. He is 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), and the co-editor of Without Borders or Limits: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Anarchist Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). His work on the histories of anarchism, labor, and radical politics has also been published in book chapters, as well as journal and newspaper articles in Puerto Rico and Latin America. His work has appeared in Caribbean Studies Journal, Latin American Perspectives, and Theory in Action, among others. He is the founder and co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Puerto Rico Section.