Biography

Reynaldo Ortíz-Minaya is a scholar of the Black Atlantic whose work rethinks Atlantic slavery, colonial governance, and punishment as interlocking infrastructures of racial capitalism. Working at the intersection of Black Studies, historical sociology, and political economy, he analyzes how regimes of coerced labor, law, and confinement organized imperial power across Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean—and how these formations persist in contemporary policing, incarceration, and state authority.

His book manuscript, From Plantation to Prison: Black Studies, Carcerality, and the Afterlives of Slavery in the Spanish Caribbean, 1820–1886, examines the coupled expansion of plantation slavery in Cuba and the development of penal regimes in Puerto Rico as mechanisms for integrating the Spanish Caribbean into the nineteenth-century world market. Drawing on archival, legal, and visual sources, the project advances a Black Atlantic framework for understanding how carceral power migrated across sites of extraction and confinement, how slave resistance was governed and rendered legible, and how colonial authority was reproduced through material, legal, and spatial design.

Alongside his historical scholarship, Ortíz-Minaya maintains an active portfolio of policy, governance, and public-facing work. He has served as a Fulbright Scholar and Fulbright Specialist and works as an international consultant on rule of law, criminal justice, and governance. He also serves on multiple international boards and advisory bodies focused on penal reform, rule of law, and global justice, positioning his scholarship in direct conversation with contemporary debates on mass incarceration and necropolitical governance.

Across scholarship and institutional practice, Ortíz-Minaya’s work insists that the Black Atlantic is not a peripheral case but a central analytic site for understanding capitalism, empire, and the modern carceral state.