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Libros / Books
El Sol Latino March 2022
Knowledge Produced in the Margins: An Interview with Jorell Meléndez-Badillo by MARISOL LEBRÓN This article was originally published in the The Abusable Past | January 5, 2022 Reprinted with permission from Marisol Lebrón In The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), Jorell MeléndezBadillo details how a cohort of self-educated workers challenged the cultural elite to reshape the Puerto Rican intellectual terrain in the wake of the U.S. occupation of the archipelago. The community that these organic intellectuals crafted, what Meléndez-Badillo coins as the lettered barriada, worked to speak to the conditions of coloniality and capitalist exploitation faced by the poor and working classes, as well as theorize new forms of emancipatory politics. In addition to tracing the emergence of the lettered barriada, Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers fundamentally changed print culture and created new archives of knowledge in early twentieth century Puerto Rico. While these “obreros ilustrados” or enlightened workers, challenged elite hegemony through their impact on print culture, politics, and national mythology, Meléndez-Badillo shows that these workers reproduced exclusions that further marginalized women and Black workers as outside of the intellectual life of the archipelago. In this way, while Meléndez-Badillo is dedicated to telling the story of the lettered barriada and its impact, he does not craft an uncritical or overly celebratory narrative. Instead, throughout the book he embraces the complicated, and sometimes contradictory, nature of these intellectuals and the political communities they built in order to paint a picture of a society in flux as new forms of colonial rule upended the existing power structure and created openings for insurgent intellectuals to transform their lives and the future of the archipelago. Marisol LeBrón: You start and end the book talking about a desire to find your family in the stories of the Puerto Rican labor movement and being surprised about their place within it. You say that this revelation about your family and how they fit into formal narratives of labor history profoundly shaped your approach to this book. Can you talk a little bit about that? Jorell Meléndez-Badillo: First and foremost, thank you so much for taking the time to do such a careful reading of the book. I truly appreciate your questions and engagement with the text’s main ideas. This book is the product of many years of thinking and writing about the Puerto Rican working classes. I first became interested in the topic because of my own working-class background and politics. I was raised by my grandparents and our family was very big. Every time there was an excuse to celebrate, I would hear them talk about their upbringings. I heard stories about how they practically raised their own siblings, milked cows in the morning, and about how seven or eight of them slept in the same room. I also listened to stories about their times in the cigar workshops or my great grandparent’s work sugarcane fields. As an adolescent, I was a part of the punk rock movement in Puerto Rico. By the age of fourteen or fifteen, I was already organizing events with local and international bands. It was an empowering experience sustained by a D.I.Y. ethos that could be read as an anarchist praxis or, at least, influenced by it. When I began studying and taking history seriously, I decided to explore the legacies of anarchism in Puerto Rico. To my surprise, there was not much written about it. I decided to write my M.A. thesis about the history of anarchism in the archipelago. During that time, I was also part of an anarchist collective that was trying to open a Social Study Center in Santurce, Puerto Rico. The thesis, which eventually became my first book, was an attempt to trace a radical genealogy to help us engage in transhistorical dialogues with those that had come before us. I saw it as a tribute to my working-class background.
I begin The Lettered Barriada with the moment when I first learned about my great grandfather’s scab days because it forced to rethink my understandings of Puerto Rico’s working-class history. Why were people like him absent in the historical narrative? As I began to think about this question, I quickly realized that it was not solely the scabs who were absent. The historical narratives written by Puerto Rico’s working class intellectuals silenced and erased women, Black folks, and non-skilled workers, among others. This realization forced me to reconceptualize my research question. Instead of seeking to explore who was absent, I began thinking about the ways that those erasures were historically produced. The Lettered Barriada is not a history of the Puerto Rican working classes. Instead, it is a history of those that dominated the means of working-class knowledge production at the turn of the twentieth century. This small group of ragtag intellectuals saw themselves as the self-appointed interlocutors of the masses. As I demonstrate in the book, these self-identified obreros ilustrados [enlightened workers] did not challenge the patriarchal and Eurocentric logics of the cultural elite, but often reproduced them in their writings, speeches, and spaces. In the process, they created historical narratives that centered an idealized worker that was male, skilled, and raceless (i.e., white or aspiring to be whitened). ML: One of the things I really loved about the book was the way you fight against seeing the Puerto Rican working class as incredibly isolated, and, well, insular, in relation to larger global movements and the transnational circulation of ideas. You have this great line in the book where you say that the literate obrero [workingman] could pick up a working-class newspaper and “imagine himself as a global subject, all without leaving the cafetín.” Can you tell us how the archive of labor periodicals you discuss in the book enabled working-class Puerto Ricans to participate in global phenomenon? JMB: As nineteenth-century intellectuals began crafting their idea of the nation, the regeneration of the workingclasses was seen as crucial and necessary. Workers, however, were usually excluded from these conversations. The workers whose steps I trace in the book developed complex ideas about society, the nation, and citizenship. Through newspapers, books, and theatrical plays, the obreros ilustrados not only sought to produce knowledges but also assert their identities as agents of political and social transformation. While scholars of Puerto Rican labor history have studied these newspapers and books for decades, print media was only understood as part of workers’ class struggle or as labor propaganda. Though that is definitely the case, in the book I am reading those sources differently. I am arguing that taken together, this vibrant intellectual production signals the emergence of other aesthetic and political sensibilities. I took seriously the identities workers carefully crafted because they took themselves seriously. Workers projected themselves as journalists, poets, and sociologists, among other things. But since they were excluded from the conversations that the lettered elite were having, they began looking elsewhere.
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