Dr. Mendoza Speaks at MELUS 2025

Dr. Robert Mendoza spoke about his work on Nuyorican poet and playwright Pedro Pietri's first poetry collection, Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), at the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US conference at Cal State LA. In his talk, "“The Outsides, the Lumpen, and the Expelled: Waged and Wageless Life in Puerto Rican Obituary," Dr. Mendoza showed how Pietri’s poetry emerged during a period when many writers and activists of the late 1960s and early 1970s theorized the antagonism (and potential solidarity) between waged workers and populations making a living through the informal economy (often categorized as the lumpenproletariat). Dr. Mendoza placed Puerto Rican Obituary in conversation with several writers of the late 1960s who theorize the relationship between the lumpenproletariat and the waged working class, including James Boggs, the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and members of the New York City Young Lords Party.

This presentation is part of Dr. Mendoza's larger project to examine the portrayal of various forms of labor (industrial, service, and informal) in 1960s and 1970s US movement literature. Such writings recentered a new understanding of the proletariat as a category of dispossession rather than of exploitation/alienation through the wage relation.