Alberto Ortiz Díaz

Alberto Ortiz Díaz is an interdisciplinary scholar and historian of the Caribbean. A former General Archive of Puerto Rico contract archivist, he earned his PhD in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a 2024-25 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he offers courses on carcerality, medicine, and health and healing in the Black Atlantic, among other topics. His first book, Raising the Living Dead: Rehabilitative Corrections in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, was published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2023. “Incarceration, Reentry, and Afro-Puerto Rican Worlds” is a multiformat project that centers the histories of incarcerated Puerto Ricans of color in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the 1940s and 1950s. Using multiple sources, including inmate files and especially parole records, the project documents the key features of the lives of black prisoners who navigated Puerto Rico’s criminal-legal and parole systems and those who ended up in different corners of the Puerto Rican diaspora. In so doing, it underscores the internal diversity of Afro-Puerto Rican experiences while informing the racial fluidity-rigidity debate that has long marked Puerto Rican Studies.