Artist: Humanities Forum — Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo: Puerto Rico, Historical Thinking, and the Politics of Forgetting in the Caribbean
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.