Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies: Locating Puerto Rico Within Different Fields of Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable explores the fluid nature of Puerto Rican Studies in different fields, foregrounding the intersections of literature, cultural production, legal scholarship, and history. While doing so, these scholars will highlight the ways that Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Ricanness often get depicted or erased in the fields of Latinx Studies, American Studies, Latin American Studies, and beyond. By challenging traditional cartographies of knowledge, the panelists will highlight the often-uneasy location of Puerto Rico within different fields.

Participants will draw from their interventions in the forthcoming edited volume Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rico. They will critically examine how Puerto Rican diaspora literature has both reflected and shaped the trajectory of Latinx Studies, emphasizing the shared genealogies of social justice movements across diasporic Puerto Rican and Latinx communities. Further, the roundtable interrogates the complex positioning of Puerto Rico within American Studies. They will also question the boundaries of Puerto Rican Studies as an academic field, exploring its intersections with Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Finally, the roundtable will address the marginalization of Puerto Rico within U.S. legal studies.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Yarimar Bonilla, Princeton

Panelists

• Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Marisol Lebron, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Marisel Moreno, University of Notre Dame

• Mónica A. Jiménez, The University of Texas at Austin

Biographical Information

LeBrón, Marisol is Associate Professor in Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021) and Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019). Along with Yarimar Bonilla she is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). She is also one of the co-creators of the Puerto Rico Syllabus, a digital humanities project about the Puerto Rican debt crisis.

Meléndez-Badillo, Jorell is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work pays attention to the transnational circulation of radical ideas from the standpoint of working-class intellectual communities in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His most recent book is Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, 2024). He is also the author of The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico (Duke UP, 2021) and Voces libertarias: Orígenes del anarquismo en Puerto Rico. He is currently co-editing a volume with Aurora Santiago Ortiz titled Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies (under contract with Duke University Press).

Moreno, Marisel is the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches US Latina/o/x Literature. She’s the author of Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland (University of Virginia Press, 2012) and Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art, forthcoming with the University of Texas Press in June 2022. She is the recipient of the Indiana Governor’s Award for Service-Learning (2011), the Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award (2016), and the Rev. William A. Toohey, C.S.C. Award for Social Justice (2019). Moreno’s teaching and research interests focus on AfroLatinx and Latinx Caribbean literarture and cultural production. Her articles have been published in Hispanic Review, Latino Studies, Studies in American Fiction, Afro-Hispanic Review, CENTRO, The Latino(a) Research Review, and MELUS, among others. She has co-created and co-organized, with Thomas F. Anderson, the digital humanities project Listening to Puerto Rico. She also co-curated, with Anderson, the exhibit Art at the Service of the People: Posters and Books from Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education (DIVEDCO), for the Snite Museum at Notre Dame (2012). The exhibit traveled to California Lutheran University (2017), the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture (8/2018-1/2020), and was on digital display at the Galería de Arte at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico (2020), for which a website was created.

Jiménez, Mónica A. is a poet and historian. She is currently Assistant Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently at work on her first book, Making Never-Never Land: Race and Law in the Formation of Puerto Rico, which offers a legal history of race and exception in the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. Dr. Jiménez has received fellowships in support of her work from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) and the Ford Foundation, among others. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Letras Boricuas Fellow by the Flamboyan Foundation. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin and a JD from the University of Texas School of Law. Her poetry and scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in WSQ: Women Studies Quarterly, Latino Studies, CENTRO: Journal, and sx salon, among others.