Puerto Rico

A National History

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780691231297
  9780691231273
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691231280
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

A panoramic history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today

Puerto Rico is a Spanish-speaking territory of the United States with a history shaped by conquest and resistance. For centuries, Puerto Ricans have crafted and negotiated complex ideas about nationhood. Jorell Meléndez-Badillo provides a new history of Puerto Rico that gives voice to the archipelago’s people while offering a lens through which to understand the political, economic, and social challenges confronting them today.

In this masterful work of scholarship, Meléndez-Badillo sheds light on the vibrant cultures of the archipelago in the centuries before the arrival of Columbus and captures the full sweep of Puerto Rico’s turbulent history in the centuries that followed, from the first indigenous insurrection against colonial rule in 1511—led by the powerful chieftain Agüeybaná II—to the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1952. He deftly portrays the contemporary period and the intertwined though unequal histories of the archipelago and the continental United States.

Puerto Rico is an engaging, sometimes personal, and consistently surprising history of colonialism, revolt, and the creation of a national identity, offering new perspectives not only on Puerto Rico and the Caribbean but on the United States and the Atlantic world more broadly.

Available in Spanish from our partners at Grupo Planeta

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: “I Am Never Coming Back Here”
• 1. Borikén’s First Peoples: From Migration to Insurrection
• 2. Consolidating the Colonial Project
• 3. Revolutionary Winds: From Reform to Revolution
• 4. Imagining the Great Puerto Rican Family
• 5. Chronicle of a War Foretold
• 6. Foundations of U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico
• 7. A Turbulent Decade
• 8. The Populist Moment
• 9. The Great Migration
• 10. The Cold War and the New Push for Independence
• 11. The Road to Collapse
• 12. Broken Promises and Ongoing Resistance
• 13. The Night Everything Went Silent
• 14. The Storm after María
• 15. Broken Memories and Future-Oriented Histories
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Thematic Bibliography
• Index