Melissa M. Valle, Ph.D.

Hard laugher. Loving spitfire. Weepy empath. 90s hop emcee wannabe. Boundless wanderlust. The daughter of an island-born Boricua-turned-Jersey girl and an African-American Harlemite, both scholar-activists who were the firsts in their families to attend college, I’ve never known a life where racial justice and the vehement struggle against oppression in the United States and abroad wasn’t at the forefront of how I understood the world. So, what’s a sista to do but dive headfirst into the ring like a WWF fighter, right? I’ve been on a constant quest to find where best to employ my passion, curiosity, thirst for knowledge, and profound love for Black people. Youth development, community development, public policy, and special needs education all circuitously led me to the discipline of sociology. I am the Mellon Assistant Professor in Global Racial Justice in both the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark. I am also a core faculty member of the Global Urban Studies/Urban Systems Ph.D. program and affiliated faculty with the American Studies program. I am on fellowship leave from January 2023-January 2024 as a Princeton-Mellon/Princeton School of Public and International Affairs Fellow through the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities.

I do a lot of work around how people make meaning of race, racism, and racialized hierarchies. My current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, is an ethnography exploring how people determine who is worthy of occupying contested space in a gentrifying neighborhood in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. I demonstrate how race, ethnicity, gender, and class are encoded in the value of urban spaces through analyses of micro-level meaning-making practices and structures. I received a Fulbright award to Colombia to conduct my ethnographic fieldwork. I have also completed research on Afro-descendants living in Santiago, Chile, exploring the mechanisms that lead to reduced life chances for marginalized groups and how such groups negotiate stigma perspectives that suggest their identities have been devalued.

I loooove me some school, as is evident by my dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and Afro-American Studies from Howard University, Master of Public Administration in public and nonprofit management and policy from New York University, Master of Science for Teachers in childhood education from Pace University, and Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy, and Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.

My evolving scholarly and political interests are drawing me towards visual culture, architecture, the sociology of love, and comedy (not all together, or mayyyybe…nahh). We’ll see where the funding, the ancestors, my community, and my whimsical heart lure me. For now, I’ll do as I’ve always done, continue to hope that one day it will all make sense.

So what’s good with this “Machetes y Miel” name?

A dear friend once told me that my stories (especially when I travel) always reflect this ill combination of the struggle for justice and romance/love. Sí. And if you couple this with your run-of-the-mill tomfoolery, I think you’ll have a sense of what I am about, and therefore what my travel and lifestyle blog on this site covers. Machetes y Miel (aka machetes and honey) provides an outlet to share musings on self, love, and social justice. My alter ego, Carmen Jones Sandiego, is "Machetes y Miel in motion" (as another friend put it). Through Carmen’s eyes and voice, I provide access to information and experiences about my global travels with the hopes of giving folks a piece of the world, somehow making it seem a bit more manageable, yet recognizing how awe-inspiring it is. 

"Machetes y Miel” reflects my Gemini duality, my contradictions, joy, and pain, all that shit. My goal with the personal blog has been to speak from the heart, thoughtfully, without the pedantic overkill with which academic writing is typically rife. I’ve been keeping a journal with some decent regularity since 1989 and I see this as another way to dissect my experiences, but this time sharing them with those who may benefit in some way. If this is read by 5 or 50,000, my goal is to, as the great Steven Biko said, write what I like.