Puerto Rico’s Radical History Is Being Rediscovered
Jorell Meléndez-Badillo worked with trap superstar Bad Bunny on his new album to inform fans about Puerto Rico’s history of popular struggle. His work as a historian is part of an important political moment that Puerto Ricans are now going through.
A man protests outside the headquarters of a power company after a blackout in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on April 8, 2022. (Ricardo Arduengo / AFP via Getty Images)
The past few months have been historic ones for Puerto Ricans, both within Puerto Rico and in the diaspora. In late October, the often forgotten US colony surfaced in the race for the White House when the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
This was his attempt at a joke during a Donald Trump rally in New York City, where Puerto Ricans make up a large part of the population. The comment undermined Trump’s efforts to widen his coalition by gaining the support of famous Puerto Ricans like reggaetoneros Anuel AA and Nicky Jam while allowing the Kamala Harris campaign to make empty promises on an issue that it didn’t really care about before the scandal.
A week later, the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) broke through the limits of the island’s two-party system, entrenched for half a century, when its charismatic candidate for governor, Juan Dalmau, placed second with over 30 percent of the vote. Then, on Three Kings Day 2025, Puerto Rican musician Bad Bunny released his politically charged album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, which quickly rose in the charts from Argentina to Austria.
Each of these events is related to how the colonial relationship with the United States has shaped the past and present of the Puerto Rican nation. This relationship is a guiding thread in Jorell Meléndez-Badillo’s Puerto Rico: A National History.
A Revolutionary History
Meléndez-Badillo recently received acclaim for collaborating with Bad Bunny on the historical context of his recent album, providing visual representations of significant events throughout Puerto Rican history for each song. His own work has proved to be just as revolutionary for Latin American history as Bad Bunny’s newest album was for reggaeton.
In what seems like an almost impossible feat, Puerto Rico: A National History provides an overview of Puerto Rican history from the Taíno civilization to the present in easy-to-understand language. It is a book that can reach the casual reader while still providing a work of historical research that meets the most rigorous academic standards.
Puerto Rico effectively tells the history of the country in a way that emphasizes the voices of the most marginalized sectors of society. However, what truly separates Meléndez-Badillo’s history from hegemonic narratives is its creative use of individual histories to demonstrate to the reader the broader trends in the historical period that is being covered. The personal stories allow for the formation of characters, and the reader sometimes feels as if one is reading a novel, not a piece of academic literature.
One of the characters that Meléndez-Badillo uses to illustrate the dilemmas of the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial empire, a period of history that often feels far removed from the present, is Miguel Enríquez. Enriquez was a Puerto Rican–born Spanish corsair who was first imprisoned for running contraband but then, through the development of a vast political network, won the blessing of the colonial authorities. He went on to build a business empire that would make him into Puerto Rico’s wealthiest man and one of the richest in Spain’s colonial empire.
However, as a black man and the son of a formerly enslaved mother, Enriquez was still subjected to racism, even at the height of his power. Eventually, when he fell out of favor with the Spanish authorities, Enriquez lost all of his wealth and died in poverty.
Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of Cold War–era Puerto Rico through a similarly unique character, Providencia “Pupa” Trabal. Like many Puerto Ricans of the 1940s and ’50s, Pupa was an ardent supporter of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín and his social democratic Popular Democratic Party until her disillusionment with Munõz Marin drove her to align with the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and the left-wing Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP). While organizing on the Puerto Rican left, she wrote for the leftist newspaper Claridad, became a target of state repression, and even met the likes of Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende.
However, despite her revolutionary credentials, her male colleagues often looked down upon her and discouraged her from accepting an invitation to Allende’s inauguration. Even though hegemonic historical narratives often overlook them, characters like Miguel Enríquez and Pupa are key to Meléndez-Badillo’s narrative and the complex history of Puerto Rico, allowing the reader to relate to history through similarities with themselves or characters in their own life.
Puerto Rico and Latin America
Another key part of Meléndez-Badillo’s narrative is that he shows how Puerto Rico, despite its colonial status, has always been an integral part of Latin America. From the very beginning, Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary army envisioned Puerto Rico as part of an independent Latin American nation. There were plans to liberate the island from Spanish colonial rule as part of the major revolutionary wave that overtook the continent in the nineteenth century.
As Meléndez-Badillo recounts, Puerto Ricans would later take up arms alongside the Cuban revolutionaries who planned to overthrow Spanish rule half a century later. In solidarity with those fighting in Cuba, a group of Puerto Rican exiles created a flag for the island, forever uniting the two people’s struggles against colonialism.
In the 1920s, Puerto Rican independence leader Pedro Albizu Campos embarked on an odyssey across Latin America, building networks of solidarity that he hoped would one day serve to elevate Puerto Rico into the company of independent nations. Puerto Ricans later traveled to Cuba after the 1959 revolution and met fellow revolutionaries from every corner of the globe, cherishing ambitions to craft a successful revolution of their own back home.
The book also dispels the myth of Puerto Rican acceptance of the colonial status quo, showing the history of resistance on the island from the day that Christopher Columbus’s ship first landed in 1493. While there have often been disagreements about the political status of Puerto Rico, there were always Puerto Ricans who resisted the colonial authorities of their time, whether they were from Spain or the United States.
Meléndez-Badillo highlights the forms of resistance that have been lost in the traditional narrative of Puerto Rican history, from early rebellions by indigenous and enslaved peoples to the forgotten resistance against the US occupation and the urban guerilla organizations of the 1960s and ’70s like the Comandos Armados de Liberación and the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional. Through his powerful narrative, Meléndez-Badillo reminds us that Puerto Rican history is a history of resistance.
Puerto Rico: A National History is a must-read for anyone who would like to learn more about the archipelago and will be a key text in the field of Latin American history for years to come. The book should also be helpful for the wider US left because it provides a glimpse into the long history of one of Washington’s five colonial possessions. It can provide us with insight into how to translate the histories and struggles of the plurinational US working class into concrete actions against oppression today.
Most importantly, the book provides the Puerto Rican diaspora with an accessible history of Puerto Rico, available to readers in both English and Spanish. It gives many of those who grew up in the diaspora, as I did, the opportunity to engage with our history, organize in our communities, and build our future as part of the Puerto Rican nation, even if, in the words of Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary Juan Antonio Corretjer, we were born on the moon.