Petra Rivera-Rideau Associate Professor of American Studies, Wellesley College
Broadly, her research examines the cultural politics of race in Latin American and Latinx communities. She is primarily interested in how ideas about Latinidad – or Latinx identities – are produced and circulate in US popular culture, especially popular music.
Her first book, Remixing Reggaeton: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, focused on how the rap-reggae musical hybrid reggaeton offers new ways of thinking about Puerto Rico's relationship to the broader African diaspora. She argues that reggaeton's black diasporic politics disrupt dominant narratives of Puerto Ricanness that stress the island's ties to Spain. She has also published articles about reggaeton in journals such as Popular Music & Society, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Her article “If I Were You: Tego Calderón’s Diasporic Interventions” (Small Axe) won the Blanca Silvestrini Prize for Best Article in Puerto Rican Studies from the Puerto Rico section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2019.
Her second book, Fitness Fiesta!: Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, was published by Duke University Press in 2024. This project asks why Zumba Fitness, and Latinx popular culture more generally, is so popular in the mainstream at the same time that anti-Latinx rhetoric and anti-immigration sentiment thrives in the U.S. She considers how the Zumba Fitness brand both reproduces stereotypes of Latinx cultures as fun, exotic, and sexy, while simultaneously and contradictorily dismissing structural inequality and racism.
Petra also co-edited Afro-Latin@s in Movement: Critical Approaches to Blackness and Transnationalism in the Americas with Jennifer A. Jones and Tianna S. Paschel. This interdisciplinary volume combines academic analysis, personal reflections, interviews, and photography to examine how different ideas about blackness travel across Latin America, the Spanish Caribbean, and the United States.
She is currently finishing my third book, tentatively titled P FKN R: Bad Bunny and the Sounds of Resistance in Puerto Rico (Duke University Press), co-written with her colleague Vanessa Díaz at Loyola Marymount University. Together, they created the Bad Bunny Syllabus, a website that provides resources that contextualize Bad Bunny’s success in relation to Puerto Rican politics, reggaetón histories, and Latin crossovers. She recently served as a consultant for the videos about the history of reggaetón that Bad Bunny incorporated into his historic Coachella headlining set. She also developed one of the first courses about Bad Bunny in the United States which she teaches regularly: AMST 323: Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón.
She frequently comments on reggaetón in the media, both in the US and internationally. Her work has been featured in news outlets such as NPR, Agence France-Presse, El País (Spain), CBS News, and Rolling Stone. She has written for the Washington Post and PBS’s American Experience. Most recently, she wrote an accompanying essay that is archived with Daddy Yankee’s recording of “Gasolina” in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.
Generally, her courses consider the histories, cultures, and representations of Latinx communities from a transnational perspective. At Wellesley, she teaches courses about Afro-Latinx history and culture, Latin music in the US, Latinx popular culture, and Puerto Rican history and culture.
When she's not at work, Petra enjoys spending time with her family, reading fiction, going to the beach, and cooking new foods.