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If, like tens of millions of music-lovers across the globe, you’ve surfed your way over to YouTube to check out the visualizers released alongside the 17 tracks that comprise Debí Tirar Más Fotos, Puerto Rican trap-rapping superstar Bad Bunny’s sixth studio album released on January 5, you likely noticed something interesting: Each one of the songs is accompanied by written texts that chronicle key events in Puerto Rican history, composed by none other than UW–Madison Assistant Professor of History Jorell Meléndez-Badillo.

Debi Tirar Mas Fotos Album art

Debí Tirar Más Fotos album cover.

Bad Bunny envisioned Debí Tirar Más Fotos as both a love letter to his beloved native country and a rare opportunity to showcase its rich political and social history. About a year ago, he reached out to Meléndez-Badillo, who had just published his second book, Puerto Rico: A National History, about the possibility of a creative collaboration. The fruits of that collaboration have racked up more than a combined 230 million views — and counting.

 ”[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,” Meléndez-Badillo told the Los Angeles Times.

Meléndez-Badillo’s contributions to the visualizations, which he initially wrote entirely by hand on a whopping 74 sheets of paper, are also written entirely in Spanish, and hit on key aspects of Puerto Rican history. The visualizer for the song “La Mudanza” talks about Puerto Rico’s troubling modern dependence on foreign funds for survival. The one that accompanies “Weltita,” a jazzy bolero, outlines the initial encounter between Indigenous Puerto Ricans and an expedition led by Christopher Columbus. Still another discusses the original creation of the Puerto Rican flag.

For both Bad Bunny and Meléndez-Badillo, this collaboration represents a powerful opportunity to elevate and celebrate a country whose history is often overlooked or overshadowed by the European and American histories that intertwine with it.

Before he moved to the United States to pursue his PhD, Meléndez-Badillo was a high school history teacher in Puerto Rico. He taught his courses, interestingly, using a textbook written by an emeritus professor of history at UW–Madison. As a scholar and author, Meléndez-Badillo has always been focused on the dispossessed and disadvantaged voices in his country’s history. His first book, The Lettered Barriada: Workers, Archival Power, and the Politics of Knowledge in Puerto Rico, was inspired by his working-class grandparents and highlighted the often-overlooked role of workers in shaping Puerto Rico’s national identity.

“I see my scholarship and my teaching intertwined,” Meléndez-Badillo told the College of Letters & Science in a 2024 interview. “Part of what I want to do is transform the spaces where I’m at, and in the classroom that entails thinking of the classroom as a space where we can collectively produce knowledge. I write history in order to impact the reality that I live in, and in order to imagine a better future.”