Professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo recently collaborated with artist Bad Bunny on his latest project. Accompanying the songs on Bad Bunny’s sixth album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos”, 17 visualizers were released on January 5. The visualizers feature historical notes, written by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, highlighting different eras and figures in Puerto Rico’s political and social justice past. After only one week, some of the visualizers have already reached 20 million views.
Professor Meléndez-Badillo is a historian of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. His most recent book, Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton University Press, April 2024), also available in Spanish as Puerto Rico: Historia de una nación (Translated by Aurora Lauzardo Ugarte, Grupo Planeta, 2024), offers an accessible introduction to Puerto Rico, its history, and the contemporary political moment. Similarly, the project with Bad Bunny tells an expansive history of Puerto Rico, spanning from the 1500s to present day and highlighting major turning points along the way. As Meléndez-Badillo shares with the LA Times, ”[Bad Bunny] was really interested in having that sort of historical component, so people were not only listening to the songs in YouTube, but learning their history while they do so.”
While Bad Bunny is immensely popular across the globe, the folk album is especially created for a Puerto Rican audience. Professor Meléndez-Badillo’s text in the visualizers is written in Spanish only and they showcase Bad Bunny’s vision to bring “Puerto Rican history into the conversation with music”. Read more from his interview with the LA Times.