Puerto Rico

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo's sweeping history of Puerto Rico offers readers a panoramic and personal account of the archipelago from pre-Columbian Taíno culture to the post–Hurricane Maria era of Bad Bunny. Mixing political and cultural lenses, Puerto Rico: A National History asks readers to ponder how Puerto Ricans have developed and sustained their own idea of the nation over the longue durée of their history. The answer, which will not surprise those familiar with the author's work on anarchism and radical politics in Puerto Rico, is that Puerto Ricans have conjured the nation through negotiation with and resistance to colonialism in its many forms and guises. The understanding of Puerto Rican nationalism that has formed, Meléndez-Badillo argues, has not been limited to the geographic borders of the island but rather has been fluid, dynamic, and diasporic in nature. Indeed, he writes, “there have been and continue to be multiple Puerto Ricos that coexist in the archipelago” (p. xiv).Divided into 15 shortish chapters, the fast-moving narrative provides a bottom-up account based on a wide array of secondary sources. While not a synthesis of the existing literature, the book's pace sometimes requires Meléndez-Badillo to tell the story from a bird's-eye view. Thanks to his skill as a historian, however, his national history of struggle and resistance remains grounded in his deep readings of the sources and does not veer into unbalanced polemic. Although it covers more than 500 years of Puerto Rican history, about one-third of the book takes the reader from the pre-Columbian era to the end of the nineteenth century (chapters 1–4); the remaining two-thirds are allocated to the twentieth century (chapters 5–10) and the twenty-first (chapters 11–15).An assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Meléndez-Badillo writes that he migrated from Puerto Rico to the continental United States in 2013, nearly 60 years after his grandfather left during the 1950s, when airlines such as Pan Am and Eastern inaugurated nonstop service between San Juan and New York. As he makes clear in the prologue and conclusion, the history of the Puerto Rican nation is personal, not just for himself but for millions of others who make up the diaspora in the continental United States—whose population now outnumbers those living in the archipelago.And it is to this diaspora that the book is written. Simultaneously published in Spanish by Planeta, the book is perfectly suitable for undergraduate classrooms but will, perhaps, find a wider set of general humanities audiences among Puerto Rican readers outside academia. If anything, the book could have used more of Meléndez-Badillo's family story. Though his grandparents emerge as characters in the beginning of the book and in selected sections throughout, there were missed opportunities to include their voices or those of other families, with some sections relying on fictional characters where oral histories might have strengthened the narrative. That is more of an observation than a critique, however, as Meléndez-Badillo's command of Puerto Rican literary and musical culture works to the book's benefit.While there are other narrative histories of Puerto Rico written in English, including César Ayala and Rafael Bernabe's Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 (2007), the book under review stays more closely focused on its argument of agency and resistance and, as previously stated, situates its story in a larger expanse of time. In doing so, the goals and methods of Puerto Rico: A National History could be compared to Ada Ferrer's Cuba: An American History (2021). To be fair, however, Meléndez-Badillo's aims are on a somewhat narrower scale than Ferrer's Pulitzer Prize–winning book.The strengths of Puerto Rico: A National History are most evident in the discussions of organized labor and the nationalist movement of the twentieth century and the focus on the island's more recent struggles during the twenty-first century. Meléndez-Badillo gives deserving attention to the destructive hurricane season of 2017, when Maria and Irma exposed the tangled legacies of colonialism, political corruption, debt, anti-Blackness, and climate change that have engendered new popular uprisings and solidarity across the island and diaspora—highlighted by his discussion of “El apagón,” the Bad Bunny and Gabriela Berlingeri “anthem” of recent protests, which concludes the narrative (pp. 216–17).Readers of the Hispanic American Historical Review interested in Puerto Rico, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Latinx history, and anticolonial studies will find much to offer in this clearly written and beautifully packaged book. Students and public audiences will likewise appreciate Meléndez-Badillo's engagement with the present day and, in his celebration of the Puerto Rican culture, his resistance to disaster narratives that occlude the historical agency expressed by Puerto Rican understandings of the nation

Geography · Political science · Cuban History and Society · History · Race, History, and American Society

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