Joel Cintrón Arbasetti is a Puerto Rican journalist and author based in Philadelphia. He has been working with the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI) for 10 years.
His journalistic investigations have focused on Puerto Rico’s debt, economic and fiscal crisis, politics and urban development. His current beat is the Puerto Rican diaspora in the U.S., with a focus on urban geography.
In 2016, he published his first book “El Local,” a narrative cultural journalism investigation, with the Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. In 2020, he founded the independent publisher Antípoda, and published his second book, “Sobre un Animal Muerto,” a non-fiction road trip narrative. He has participated in various fellowships and workshops at the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano Gabriel García Márquez, including a workshop with author Leila Guerriero. He has received awards for his work at the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo from the Puerto Rico Journalists Association and the Overseas Press Club. In 2019, he was a Princeton University fellow at the Program in Latin American Studies.
Cintrón studied Journalism at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce and holds a master’s degree in Research and Theory of Communication from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. His thesis was about cultural hybridity, new technologies and the Puerto Rican underground music scene. He is currently working on a book about technology transfer and the history of electronic music in Puerto Rico.