Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, put on a Super Bowl — rather, a Benito Bowl, as many have termed it — halftime performance on Feb. 8 that represented the cultural outpouring of the entire Americas. Accompanied by roughly 300 backup performers, Bad Bunny rapped and sang his lyrics while gliding through scenes representing aspects of both Puerto Rican and larger Latin American culture.
He waltzed past a stand selling piragua, old men playing dominoes and climbed on set pieces resembling utility poles while he sang “El Apagón,” a song about the power outages faced by Puerto Ricans after the privatization of the island’s electrical system. During “NUEVAYoL,” Bad Bunny stopped to take a shot with Toñita, the founder of the Caribbean Social Club that has been central to the Caribbean community in Brooklyn for decades.
His songs were complemented by scores of musicians trumpeting the tones of not only his trademark reggaeton and dembow, but also salsa, traditional bomba and plena. Much of the show centered around a recreation of a classic Puerto Rican casita, while Bad Bunny sang his love for his homeland. This vast tapestry woven on the field (in a mere 13 minutes, no less) by Bad Bunny and company was no small feat in its message or artistry.
Bad Bunny’s show asserts that yes, there are Americans who have something called culture.
However, the performance also had equally massive waves of pushback. This outrage was primarily from the members of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. As a matter of fact, MAGA was angry about the performance before it even happened. The announcement that Bad Bunny, a Spanish-speaking Latino man, would be gracing the field was enough for them to call a foul.
MAGA fanatics have been more than comfortable voicing their anger at the sheer fact that a Puerto Rican man (and therefore, an American man, despite conservative hearsay) was performing at the Super Bowl. Positioning themselves as apparent expert authorities on popular music, conservatives deemed this performance spot certainly wasn’t due to Bad Bunny’s artistic gravitas. He wasn’t rightfully chosen because he’s one of the most popular musical artists worldwide, across any genre. The guy who, as a Spanish-language artist, went No. 1 in China? No, it can’t be that his popularity earned him the spot. You would think Bad Bunny’s success, funneled into an equally massive Super Bowl performance, would epitomize the fantasy of total meritocracy that conservatives usually salivate over. But of course it doesn’t, as Bad Bunny being a Latino and Spanish-speaking artist is enough to condemn him while on the stage he rightfully occupies.
This detrimental thing that MAGA-impressioned white Americans are fearful of, the thing that Bad Bunny represents, is the frightening and unfamiliar concept of culture itself. To white Americans whose only claims to cultural belonging come in the form of American consumerism or group nostalgia for a homogenous (and more openly racist) past, this concept is unsettling and unfathomable. Bad Bunny’s show asserts that yes, there are Americans who have something called culture. Many conservatives see culture as alien, confounding and something that they themselves lack. Therefore, in complement to the unabashed racism that characterizes their outrage, they view it as something that must be silenced.
Trump’s culturally bankrupt and aimlessly roaming white voter base does not seem to understand Bad Bunny’s performance, which proudly exhibits intimate features of Puerto Rican and Latin American cultures. Nor can they see the goal of unity behind his calling out a long list of countries in the Americas, many of which one could find plenty of MAGA fans unable to pronounce in their ignorance-branded patriotism.
When it comes to some conservatives, they do so through gesturing towards a nostalgia-made fantasy of an old America — that is, a U.S. that never truly existed, instead more resembling magazine advertisements from the 1950s than actual history.
To detractors of a Spanish-language halftime, English is positioned as a neutral default, only noticed when the sound of another language signals its absence. The Trump administration’s recent executive order declaring English the country’s official language exemplifies the insistence on seeing English in this light. In terms of the other things — food, dress, objects — that comprise a culture, some white Americans seem to receive them from the belly of depersonalized American consumerism rather than from a community. While this isn’t the case for all white people in America, of course, this is a common reality to the extent that something like the MAGA movement can be attractive to a plurality of them.
This dearth of culture could also be seen in the Super Bowl counter-performance put on by right-wing nonprofit organization Turning Point USA, an event solely built on negating the actual halftime show. Between the irony of a conservative white guitarist ripping off (and butchering) Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the National Anthem, a right-wing country singer rapping over a stock trap beat and another guitarist copying Chuck Berry’s famous duckwalk on stage, the nonexistence of the white-only “all-American” culture seemingly posited by the performance was glaring.
But the lack of cultural identity of many white Americans should come as no surprise. In fact, it was by design to make white Americans a neutral baseline and to racialize those who did possess cultural identity. Whiteness exists to exclude. It is a category fabricated with racism against those dubbed “other” as its sole purpose. So for those who exist inside of whiteness, there is no actual identity to be found. White Americans, untied to their ethnic roots, are left to scrounge up culture elsewhere. When it comes to some conservatives, they do so through gesturing towards a nostalgia-made fantasy of an old America — that is, a U.S. that never truly existed, instead more resembling magazine advertisements from the 1950s than actual history.
Furthermore, they so often do so through clinging to a concept of whiteness that runs on the cheap, corrosive fuel of racist hatred, ultimately empty of being anything in itself. In this, there is no such thing as “white culture” — many conservative whites find a sad excuse for culture in the MAGA movement. They shout in confused rage when they are challenged with actual culture, as they were uncompromised by Bad Bunny’s halftime performance.
Despite the racism and the vitriol in response to Bad Bunny’s performance, there was nonetheless an outpouring of love and joy as a result of his show. Bad Bunny not only showcased his own Puerto Rican culture in his performance, but also used his place as an icon in Latin America to represent the entire Americas. On the one hand, some tuned in on Sunday to become enraged upon hearing poetry in a language that will never be theirs, and see loving references to cultures they will never call their own. However, some of the roughly 41.8 million Americans who speak the language of Bad Bunny’s music understood every word: They heard, “Ama sin miedo.” And as he spiked a football emblazoned with the words “Together, we are America,” they heard, “Seguimos aquí.”
