Latina/Latino Studies Event Calendar

Please join the Department of Latina/Latino Studies for the Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Jr. Lecture Series with Dr. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his talk "History as a Terrain of Struggle: Against the Politics of Forgetting in Puerto Rico."

Abstract: Puerto Rican history has been a contested space ever since its early days. From Fray Íñigo Abad y la Sierra’s 1788 book to Paul G. Miller’s Historia de Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century, the production of history has served different political purposes. This lecture will explore the ways that history teaching and writing gave way to racialized tropes of Puerto Rican docility and laziness. More recently, however, the state has moved to silence or erase the past through Puerto Rico’s “politics of forgetting.” The talk ends with the ways that these ideas are being challenged by artists and cultural producers.