Our Broken Memories

Critical race and Ethnic Studies welcomes you to join us on Thursday October 15th for Guest Lecturer, Dr. Jorell Melendez-Badillo who will be presenting on Our Broken Memories: On History-Making, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Forgetting in Puerto Rico. This event is proudly co-sponsored by the UVM History Department and the Spanish Program. Event will be held on October 15th at 4:30pm in the Waterman Memorial Lounge (Room 338). This talk will explore the ways that history has always been a contested space in Puerto Rico's political cultures, from the publication of foundational history texts to the present. More recently, however, the Puerto Rican government has encouraged a politics of forgetting that seeks to erase and silence the archipelago's past. However, history has also been at the center of popular culture, as Bad Bunny's latest album has demonstrated, creating spaces to access ideas about the past and fostering collective imaginaries about other potential futures.