On March 9, Historian and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo spoke to a full room in Mazur Hall’s first-floor conference space about Puerto Rico’s history of resistance and his life-changing collaboration with the world’s biggest pop star. The event was presented by the Latinx Initiative, in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and the Klein College of Media and Communication. 

An author of multiple books on the history of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, Meléndez-Badillo saw his platform grow significantly when he was contacted by Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, to contribute to the rollout of his latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.

“Never in my life did I think I would have the biggest platform in the world to amplify Puerto Rican history,” he said. 

Amplifying Puerto Rican history and culture has been central to Bad Bunny’s recent work, from his much-discussed Super Bowl halftime performance to the very contents of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, which was named Best Album at the 2026 Grammy Awards. To Meléndez-Badillo, a native Puerto Rican himself, these efforts are inherently political because they “insist that anyone and everyone should have access to our history, to our sounds and to our culture.” 

“History has always been contested political space,” argued Meléndez-Badillo. “There is no such thing as an objective history.”

Illustrating this, Meléndez-Badillo traced the ways that, throughout its history as a colony, Puerto Rico has repeatedly seen its history rewritten through textbooks, creating enduring myths about indigenous people as “savages” and the Puerto Rican people as “docile,” and omitting the violence and enslavement of indigenous people that came with colonial rule.  “It was history in the service of colonial power,” Meléndez-Badillo said.

He believes Bad Bunny’s effort to provide greater access to and awareness of Puerto Rican history pushes back against what he refers to as “the politics of forgetting,” the selective erasure of history to paint a state-sanctioned picture of a land and its people. 

“And Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—directamente del espacio—is the biggest artist in the world, whether people like it or not,” he noted with a smirk, referencing a lyric from the song “Yo Le Llego.”

Meléndez-Badillo was tapped by Bad Bunny’s team to create visualizers, or alternative music videos, that would accompany each song from DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS on YouTube. 

“This album is a bet on the amplification of our history,” said Meléndez-Badillo. “It is an album that also seeks to democratize the knowledge produced in academic spaces.”

The team carried that same objective into developing the visualizers. In 2024, Meléndez-Badillo released the critically acclaimed Puerto Rico: A National History, which chronicled the history of the island in a digestible narrative style intended for the casual reader. “History has been made inaccessible to our people,” lamented the author. That book’s content and research were the foundation for the visualizers.

“[Benito] was also very adamant that he wanted these to be readable and available for everyone,” said Meléndez-Badillo, “He actually told me, ‘I don't want you to write these as you would write them for the students at the University of Puerto Rico.’ He wanted his history to be read by people in the working-class neighborhoods and the projects.”

Subjects covered by the visualizers include the labor movement, women’s rights, indigenous resistance and, per Bad Bunny’s own suggestion, political repression in Puerto Rico. 

“The visualizers have been viewed more than six hundred and fifty million times,” remarked Meléndez-Badillo, “and while not everyone that has engaged with them have read the visualizers, it’s six hundred and fifty million opportunities for people to learn about our history.”