Celebrating Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos' Vermont connection

NBC5 In Depth: Celebrating Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos' Vermont connection

Historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo reflects on the legacy of Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos and the importance of preserving Puerto Rican history, from Vermont to global platforms like Bad Bunny's music.

NBC5 In Depth: Celebrating Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos' Vermont connection

Historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo reflects on the legacy of Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos and the importance of preserving Puerto Rican history, from Vermont to global platforms like Bad Bunny's music.

As Hispanic Heritage Month comes to a close, the legacy of Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos and efforts to preserve Puerto Rican history are being celebrated.

Pedro Albizu Campos, known as "El Maestro," devoted his life to activism and advocating for Puerto Rico's independence. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, described Albizu Campos as "the apostle of independence in Puerto Rico."

"However, he is well respected by people from different political ideologies," Meléndez-Badillo said. "He was born actually in the southern part of Puerto Rico, in Ponce, in 1893. And then in 1912, he receives a scholarship after graduating from high school to travel to Vermont and study at UVM."

University records confirm that Albizu Campos studied chemical engineering at the University of Vermont from 1912 to 1913 before transferring to Harvard University to pursue a law degree.

"During World War I, he participated in the war effort. He was in the U.S. Infantry. He was discharged honorably in 1919, and then went on to Harvard again to complete his law degree," Meléndez-Badillo said.

"He was the first Puerto Rican man to graduate from Harvard University. He was a polyglot. He spoke about six different languages. So he was a brilliant intellectual, brilliant orator. And so when he arrived back to Puerto Rico, he joined the Nationalist Party, which had been created in 1922 to advocate for Puerto Rico's independence. He gets sent to Latin America; he tours all around Latin America, and in 1930 he becomes the president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, which is a turning point in Puerto Rican political history," Meléndez-Badillo said.

After joining the Nationalist Party, Albizu Campos ran in the 1932 election but suffered a decisive defeat. In the years that followed, the party abandoned electoral politics and embraced armed resistance.

Meléndez-Badillo has spent his career studying Puerto Rican history and the working classes. He recently collaborated with global music star Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, to amplify Puerto Rican history through the artist's album visualizers on YouTube.

"Working with Bad Bunny, I really wanted to amplify our histories, also to present a complex idea of Puerto Rican-ness," Meléndez-Badillo said. "Because I think that in the United States, oftentimes when we think about the Latinx community, we think of it as a homogeneous block. When we think about the Latino vote, now that we have an election cycle around the corner, there's always this conversation around the Latino vote. But I really would like to problematize that through my scholarship and look at the complexities and nuances of our people."

Meléndez-Badillo explained that Bad Bunny's work became a "Trojan horse" for introducing Puerto Rican history to a broader audience.

"It's about the ways that while we face an unprecedented economic and fiscal crisis in Puerto Rico, there's also a crisis within it that people don't talk much about, which is the crisis of the humanities and of history," he said. "And so one of the things that I will argue in the talk is that we cannot detach our historical imagination from the current moment."

Meléndez-Badillo also highlighted what he calls "the politics of forgetting," a phenomenon where certain historical events and figures are intentionally left out of collective memory.

"If they don't know about certain characters or histories, it's not because they're unaware. It's part of a broader, I think, structural problem in the ways that the humanities and history is presented in the curriculum at the grade level, all the way to the university," he said.

While celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, Meléndez-Badillo urged people to continue questioning whose stories are missing from history and why.

"Ultimately, [what] I would urge people is to continue the momentum of Hispanic Heritage Month, to keep educating ourselves and to understand that those 'lagunas', or erasures or silences in our historical memory, are made, they're manufactured," he said.

From Albizu Campos' time in Vermont to Bad Bunny's global platform, Meléndez-Badillo emphasized that history lives on as long as it continues to be told.