Campus Directory

Pronouns she, her, her, hers, herself

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Humanities Building 1
n/a

Mail Stop Feminist Studies

Biography, Education and Training

Marisol LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on race, social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. Prior to arriving at UCSC, she held appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, Dickinson College, and Duke University. She received her PhD in American Studies from New York University and her bachelor's degree in Comparative American Studies and Latin American Studies from Oberlin College.

She is the author of Policed: A Latinx History of State Violence (University of California Press, 2027), Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021), and Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019). Along with Yarimar Bonilla, she is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). She has published her research in a variety of venues including Centro Journal, Signs, Society and Space, Modern American History, Radical History Review, Journal of Urban History, Souls, Women & Performance, and NACLA Report on the Americas.

An active contributor to popular conversations about policing as well as Puerto Rico and its diaspora, she has published op-eds in The Washington Post, The Guardian and Truthout in addition to being interviewed by a number of news outlets. She is one of the co-creators and project leaders for the Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRsyllabus), a digital resource for understanding the Puerto Rican debt crisis. She is also one of the editors for The Abusable Past, a digital project that features unique and original content related to the praxis of radical history in this social and political moment.

Selected Publications

Books

Policed: A Latinx History of State Violence (University of California Press, 2027).

Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua/ Contra Muerto Rico: Lecciones del Verano Boricua, Bilingual book translated by Beatriz Llenín Figueroa (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021).

Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019).

• Translation: La vida y la muerte ante el poder policiaco: raza, violencia y resistencia en Puerto Rico, Translated by Beatriz Llenín Figueroa,  Cabo Rojo, PR: Editora Educación Emergente, 2021.

Edited Volumes

Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, co-edited with Yarimar Bonilla (Haymarket Books, 2019).

•  Translation: Las replicas del desastre, co-edited with Yarimar Bonilla (Ediciones Callejón, 2021) and (Haymarket Books, 2021)

Edited Special Issues and Forums

Feminists Confront State Violence, co-edited with Anne Gray Fischer and Sara Mathhiesen, Radical History Review 148.

The Decolonial Geographies of Puerto Rico’s 2019 Summer Protests: A Forum, co-edited with Joaquín Villanueva, Society and Space, published online February 25, 2020.

Eye of the Storm: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Climate Change in the Caribbean, co-edited with Laura Weiss and Michelle Chase, NACLA Report on the Americas (2018) 50.2.

Journal Articles

“Instruments of Colonialism: Historicizing Corruption and Abuse in the Puerto Rico Police,” co-written with Mónica A. Jiménez, in Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (2022) 34.2: 51-74.

“Abolish,” 2020 Keywords Symposium, in Theory & Event (2022) 25.1: 128-134.

“Policing Coraje in the Colony: Towards a Decolonial Feminist Politics of Rage in Puerto Rico,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (2021) 46.4: 801-826.

“They Don’t Care if We Die: The Violence of Urban Policing in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Urban History (2020) 46.5: 1066-1084.

“Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and the U.S. Carceral State,” Modern American History (2019) 2.2: 169-173.

“Carpeteo Redux: Surveillance and Subversion Against the Puerto Rican Student Movement” Radical History Review (2017) 128: 147-172.

“Policing Solidarity: State Violence, Blackness, and the University of Puerto Rico Strikes” in Souls: A Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society (2015) 17.1-2: 113-134.

“‘Con un Flow Natural’: Sonic Affinities and Reggaeton Nationalism” in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2011) 21.2: 219-233.

Book Chapters

“How We Come to Know the Most Important Place in the World: Centering Puerto Rico in American Studies,” in Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies: A Reader, eds. Aurora Santiago Ortiz and Jorell Melendez-Badillo (Duke University Press, 2026): 34-44.

“Policing Solidarity: Race, Violence, and the University of Puerto Rico,” in Colonial Racial Capitalism, eds. Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson (Duke University Press, 2022): 206-231.

“Mano Dura Contra El Crimen and Premature Death in Puerto Rico” in Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, eds. Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton (Verso, 2016): 95-108.