This roundtable brings together historians of Puerto Rico and its diaspora to closely engage with two newly published books: Puerto Rico: A National History (Princeton, 2024) by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo and Puerto Rico in Never Never Land: Race and Law in the Creation of Puerto Rico (UNC, 2024) by Mónica A. Jiménez. Puerto Rico: A National History offers a comprehensive history of the archipelago from before the arrival of the Spanish to the contemporary period. It seeks to highlight the various ways that Puerto Ricans have created unique ideas of nation and national identity in the face of continual colonialism. Puerto Rico in Never Never Land situates Puerto Rico’s legal relationship with the United States within a larger history of US legal exclusion that includes Native and African Americans. The book highlights how ideas of race that have deep roots in US settler colonialism have shaped and limited the archipelago’s political past and its potential futures. Speakers will consider these two works and their contributions together and discuss how these books complicate and expand our understandings of Puerto Rico’s place within Caribbean, Latin American, and US history.