Hosts Alexander Scott and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli speak with Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau about their new book P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke University Press, 2026).

Díaz and Rivera-Rideau — creators of the "Bad Bunny Syllabus" — situate Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio within more than a century of Puerto Rican history and a much longer tradition of music as resistance. The conversation traces the political and economic conditions that shaped Bad Bunny's formative years: the end of Section 936, the debt crisis and the imposition of the fiscal oversight board Puerto Ricans call La Junta, the gentrification and displacement accelerated by Acts 20/22, and the devastation and abandonment of Hurricane María. Vanessa shares her family's own experience of the storm and its aftermath, and both authors discuss the summer 2019 uprising that forced Governor Ricardo Rosselló's resignation — with particular attention to the Black feminist organizing of Colectiva Feminista en Construcción and the deep genealogy connecting bomba and plena to reggaetón and perreo as forms of communal protest. They close with Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance, the politics of a Spanish-language anti-colonial statement on one of the most-watched stages in the world, and why, in Puerto Rico, the party is the protest.

Vanessa Díaz is associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University and author of Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020).

Petra R. Rivera-Rideau is associate professor of American Studies at Wellesley College and author of Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2015) and Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba (Duke University Press, 2024).

Get the book:
P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance is available now from Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/p-fkn-r (also available in Spanish)

Explore the Bad Bunny Syllabus: https://www.badbunnysyllabus.com/

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Alexander Scott speaks with rural sociologist Andrew Smolski about U.S. imperialism and the long history of empire in Cuban development. Drawing on Smolski's archival research and his work on Cuban agriculture, the conversation traces how imperialism has shaped Cuba's capacity to develop across five centuries — from Spanish colonialism, the Haitian Revolution, and the rise of the sugar-slavery complex, through U.S. occupation and the Platt Amendment era, to a blockade now in its seventh decade — and asks what it would mean for development research to treat imperialism as a condition of development rather than mere background.

Andrew Smolski is an assistant professor of rural sociology in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at The Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the Latin American Perspectives editorial collective.

Further reading from our guest:

"Interrogating Structural Conditions for Agricultural Production: A Comparative-Historical Study of Cuban Incorporation, Delinking, and Exile," Journal of World-Systems Research 28(2), 2022 (open access):
https://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/jwsr/article/view/1117

The Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question in Latin America, special issue of Latin American Perspectives (January 2024), co-edited with Daniela García Grandón and Joana Salém Vasconcelos:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0094582X241252111

Violence, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in Contemporary Latin America, special issue of Latin American Perspectives (January 2021), co-edited with Matthew Lorenzen:
https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975005

"Class Struggle and Violence in Latin American Cities," Latin American Perspectives 48(1):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0094582X19860470

For more information about Latin American Perspectives, our podcasts, and guests, please contact lap.outreach@gmail.com.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your preferred listening platform.

Bryce Henson joins the pod to discuss his book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip Hop in Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2023). Drawing on ethnographic research in Salvador da Bahia, Henson explores Brazilian hip hop as a diasporic cultural and political movement rooted in Black radical traditions, anti-racist struggle, and collective community formation. Throughout the conversation, the group discusses the historical significance of quilombos in Brazil, the relationship between Blackness and political struggle, the role of hip hop as a form of "quilombismo," and the intersections of race, class, gender, and diaspora in contemporary Brazil.

Bryce Henson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University, with affiliations in Africana Studies and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. He is also an affiliated researcher with the Pós-Afro Program at the Universidade Federal da Bahia and serves as Associate Editor for Transforming Anthropology.

Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip Hop in Brazil can be purchased here: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477327986/

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3KnR3IBULZ9aAesr8pY3Ov?si=wp_fX5SwSnigAXai5nWT6Q

A journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas.

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