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

by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

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

Genres: History

280 pages, Paperback

Published November 26, 2021

Reviews

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This book began as an attempt to find the voices of those people like my family - my great-grandparents, grandparents, and great-aunts and great-uncles - who were not unionized, did not aspire to become modern or 'civilized,' and might have even opposed unions. Since I was not able to find them in the historical record, I began to pay attention to a question that ended up guiding this book's narrative: why were they absent? Following Michel-Rolph Trouillot's argument that archives are neither neutral nor natural, and that silences are always actively produced, added another layer: how were they silenced?" (4)

Luisa Capetillo was the only workingwoman that we know of to edit a newspaper and publish books during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Besides the exceptional case of Capetillo, women were silenced in the historical archive created by obreros ilustrados (34)