Jorell Meléndez-Badillo loves Puerto Rico, an island with a complicated relationship to the United States. Not just a beautiful, tropical locale that does not require passports for American visitors, the island has a nuanced political history of conquest and struggles for freedom from imperial rule. Puerto Rico: A National History covers this history with clarity, honesty, and compassion.
Puerto Rico begins with Meléndez-Badillo's personal relationship with the island before taking a chronological journey from its colonization by Spain to its annexation by the U.S. in 1898 during the Spanish-American War to the aftermath of Hurricane María in 2017. Meléndez-Badillo (The Lettered Barriada) condenses more than 500 years of history into 15 tidy chapters, each dedicated to a specific era or ideology. Along the way, he details the major events and personalities that shaped the Puerto Rican government throughout its past without being verbose. Puerto Rico is very well-suited to lovers of political histories.
Despite his love for the island, Meléndez-Badillo isn't afraid to call out its corruption, such as the fact that Governor Pedro Pierluisi's son "owns 88% of all short-term rental properties" in San Juan, the island's most populated city. Meléndez-Badillo also shows how U.S. policies toward Puerto Rico have affected the territory's people and resources, whether via trade and economics or intense munitions testing on the island of Vieques. A great choice for readers of books like How to Hide an Empire, or anyone looking to learn more about modern-day imperialism, Puerto Rico will make readers feel for the island and its people, both those still living there as well as the vast Puerto Rican diaspora. --Alyssa Parssinen, freelance reviewer and former bookseller