About
Jean M.C. Marzán, is an Afro-Boricua scholar naturally from el barrio Río Lajas, Dorado, Puerto Rico. As an anthropologist and cultural historian, his research interests focus mainly on U.S. imperialism, modern settler colonial logic, and community socio-cultural transformations.
As an undergraduate, he was a Mellon-Mays Fellow and developed a research project entitled "Native Doradeñxs' Realities: Afro-descendant Narratives Towards the Settler Colonial Project in Dorado, Puerto Rico". This paper is currently being revised and will soon be submitted for publication and presented at the 2025 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference in San Francisco, California.
Since 2021, Jean has also been part of the Afro-Diasporic and Race Studies Program at the University of Puerto Rico, helping to establish and expand this project into what is now the Afro-Diasporic and Racial Studies Research Center; the first official black-focused research center in the Puerto Rican archipelago. Through these efforts, Marzán was also involved in the logistical organization of the International Afrodescendance Summit, better known as Cumbre Afro, an international conference that serves as a worthy and deserved platform for our Afro-centered thinkers and knowledge generators in the Caribbean, Latin America, and our Diasporas.
As a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, Jean uses urban history and theories of settler colonialism to explore how native/afro-descendant Puerto Ricans understand and have faced gentrification and displacement as a collateral effect of U.S. imperialism and the archipelago's governmental economic legislation.
Finally, outside of academia, Marzán has worked in the streets as a community organizer and collaborator with organizations dedicated to monitoring political processes and public contracting. In this way, he positions all of his work, both professional and academic, from a community, liberatory, and intersectional perspective.
Fields of Study: Puerto Rican & Caribbean Studies, Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, Gentrification & Displacement, Urban History, African Diaspora, Race, Memory, Ethnography, Transculturation, and Latinx Studies.
