Dr. Jorell Melendez Badillo: “The Archives Are Not Neutral”
In a Lunch and Learn lecture, Dr. Jorell Melendez-Badillo, a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, engaged in a conversation about his book, The Lettered Barriada. The book delves into the world of the Puerto Rican barriada (a poor neighborhood at the outskirts of a major city) and the group of self-educated working class men who positioned themselves to write, speak, and ultimately bring forth social movements which went on to shape a national story of Puerto Rico. In his work, Melendez-Badillo explores how the creation of history by this group led to exclusions from within the margins of society. In his words, the “history of the working class is the history of the people at the top of the working class.” Despite being based in the experiences of an underrepresented minority of the Puerto Rican working class, popular narratives in Puerto Rico excluded the vast majority of a diverse set of working class experiences. Through the power of the archives in which their writings were recorded, self-educated workers themselves framed a narrative of history– defining who was important and what stories would be included in a national mythology. This led to the erasure of the diverse “street archive” in favor of a singular national story curated by a minority group of people.
In his talk, Melendez-Badillo said that “the archives are not neutral.” In considering justice, it is important to wrestle with the fact that collective histories must be created. Inherent in the creation of history is the choice of what to write about, document, and save for generations to come. In his essay, “On Jewish Revenge,” Shachar Pinsker implores “that memory is something that we choose… it requires construction and cultivation. It is not just a natural attribute or a reservoir waiting to be filled.” Our records of history, created by potentially biased individuals, shape collective memory. What is included in the archive– documents, authors, and frames of thinking– becomes legitimized in history. What is not included is often forgotten. The saying that “history is written by the victors” often rings true, in that our archives of history are written by those who have the education, access, wealth, or cultural impetus to keep record. This leads to the exclusion of stories of those less privy to control over the archives. Melendez-Badillo’s point is that within working-class Puerto-Rican communities, it was the self-educated, male individuals who took up the job of the archive, which left little room for the voices of the poorer, less educated, female, or lower working class communities.
Melendez-Badillo argues that modern historians do not do enough to account for the bias of archives. Rather than challenging the origins of information, the stance from which facts were recorded, he argues, many historians simply follow the word of the archives blindly, unintentionally leading them to reinscribe harmful and incomplete narratives of history. He proposes that historians should instead be focused on the creation of an “anti-archive”, searching for the untold stories of history to bring forth a more accurate, nuanced narrative. Melendez-Badillo was successful in his outlining of this goal, speaking to a room full of historians and their students, who would do well to remember his perspective in their own explorations of the historical archive.
In the context of our class, I made many connections between archival power and the theme of justice. History fuels many questions relating to justice. How in history have certain groups of people been treated unfairly? What context does history give as to why injustice happens? What history underlies the systemic injustice which plagues our society? This especially connects to our readings about the Nuremberg Trials, in which the idea of “victor’s justice” became a common critique of the way in which the trials played out. The allied powers who prevailed in World War II took up the mantle of holding Nazi leaders accountable to their crimes during the war, but did not confront the crimes they themselves committed. Thus, a common narrative of Nuremberg being the “greatest trial in history” was spread, despite deep flaws (Marrus 563). Melendez-Badillo’s argument reminded me that the common record of history might in many ways present only one side of a bigger story, which might lead to misrepresentation and injustice. In order to begin to rectify that injustice, it is important to take account of the history untold in the archives which fuel everyday norms, narratives, and mythologies.
Bibliography
Marrus, Michael R. “The Nuremberg Trial: Fifty Years After.” The American Scholar, vol. 66, no. 4, 1997, pp. 563–70.
Melendez-Badillo, Jorell. “Lunch and Learn with Jorell Melendez-Badillo.” 4 October 2024, Davidson College.
Pinsker, Shachar. “On Jewish Revenge.” Aeon, 17 May 2024, aeon.co/essays/what-role-for-revenge-in-jewish-life-literature-and-culture.
