The Lettered Barriada

Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico

Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781478014782
  9781478013853
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478022091
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Words as Bricks and Pages as Mortar: Building the Lettered Barriada
• Chapter 2. The Workshop Is Our Homeland: Global Communities, Local Exclusions
• Chapter 3. In the Margins of the Margin: Workingwomen and Their Struggle for Remembrance
• Chapter 4. Becoming Politicians: The Socialist Party and the Politics of Legitimation
• Chapter 5. Strike against Labor: The 1933 Student Mobilizations
• Chapter 6. Minor Theft: Consolidating the Barriada’s Ideational Archive
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index