Global superstar musician and intermittent professional wrestler, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny, graced the stage of the NFL’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show to deliver an unforgettable performance. Accompanied by special musical and non-musical guests such as Karol G, Ricky Martin, Lady Gaga, Pedro Pascal and others, Bad Bunny brought on an enthralling 13-minute performance highlighting the power of Latin American culture in a political climate that seemingly aims to repress it.
Some responses to Bad Bunny’s performance are vehemently critical, like that of President Donald Trump, who commented that the halftime show was “an affront to the Greatness of America” and continued with “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Others argued against this, claiming that in a show advocating for a unified expression of Latino pride, the president would rather demonize Latin Americans for being “un-American.” It is safe to say the show has become a hot-button topic.
The show generated endless conversations dissecting all its references to Latin culture, what they mean and why it all matters in the United States of today.
Utilizing the U.S.’s biggest stage of over 120 million audience members to make a political statement is not new by any stretch of the imagination — Kendrick Lamar did it last year. The sheer scale and weight of Bad Bunny’s performance, however, was unprecedented. The show generated endless conversations dissecting all its references to Latin culture, what they mean and why it all matters in the United States of today.
To actively explore all of these ideas, one can start by analyzing how the performance was sequenced.
The show began in the sugar cane fields of Puerto Rico. This imagery is relevant because when Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, U.S. sugar companies invested heavily in Puerto Rico’s sugar economy and the exploitation of workers ran rampant. These sugar workers — the ones seen armed with the machete and straw hat behind Bad Bunny — are known as Jíbaros, countryside Puerto Ricans and self-subsistent farmers who are often seen as a proud symbol of the island’s history.
From here, the camera panned out and we saw a coco frío cart — the fresh, icy Puerto Rican coconut water delicacy. After that, the camera continued to pan over, showing some older men playing dominoes. Then, a piragua cart moved into frame. Piragua, sometimes referred to as shaved ice, is also a refreshing summer treat in both Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. As the grandson of a Dominican woman, when I was growing up in Washington Heights on 189th Street, I would always see Piragueros and shaved ice vendors on the block during summertime, and I would always beg my grandma to buy me one every time we passed a new cart. Seeing one on the Super Bowl stage was certainly a welcome addition.
It is also notable to mention that on the yellow wooden piragua cart used in the performance, each of the syrup bottles meant to flavor the piragua had flags plastered on them. From left to right, the bottles bore the flags of Colombia, Spain, Puerto Rico and Mexico. This is one of the first subtle references Bad Bunny included to show how there are many different “flavors” of being Hispanic, with many having shared cultures and cuisines.
Right after this, the performance delved into even richer cultural references, celebrity cameos, dance breaks and even an actual wedding.
Moving through Bad Bunny’s discography, we arrived at the acclaimed track “NUEVAYol” while the set moved from the sugar cane fields and the Jíbaros of Puerto Rico to the more urban-styled streets of New York City. While New York City may be different from Bad Bunny’s mother country of Puerto Rico, new communities and entire neighborhoods were founded by those who immigrated from their respective countries to create something new and exciting, something special.
We are special because of the traditions we bring with us and the shared culture and new traditions we can create.
We see this in the set design: The yellow bodega awning of La Marqueta in the background and the quaint, yet charming Lalo’s Barbershop painted a picture of the streets in East Harlem or Washington Heights. We are not special just because of where we started from in our mother countries; we are special because of the traditions we bring with us and the shared culture and new traditions we can create.
From there, we moved to present-day Bad Bunny giving a Grammy to a much younger self, watching his Grammys acceptance speech onstage — a truly full-circle moment.
After that, we headed back to Puerto Rico, where Ricky Martin belted out a beautiful rendition of “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” abruptly interrupted by an exploding transformer on an electrical pole, resulting in a power outage.
The song “El Apagón” then played as workers climbed up the electrical poles and Bad Bunny sang amid the flying sparks and strobing lights of the arena. The word “apagón” translates to “blackout,” and the song protests the unreliable state of Puerto Rico’s electrical infrastructure and the island’s continuing gentrification. As in “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” he laments a future in which Puerto Rico becomes what Hawaii is to the rest of the United States: a hot vacation destination with an incredible overtourism problem and glaring socioeconomic issues that largely remain unresolved.
It would be remiss to not also mention that the symbolism of the electricity poles was especially relevant, as the existing energy crisis was directly exacerbated by Hurricane Maria in 2017, which tore through the power lines and caused an island-wide blackout. The U.S. Federal Emergency Response Agency was also heavily criticised for completely mismanaging the hurricane’s prevention and response in Puerto Rico, which is why the island’s infrastructure still suffers today.
This is also likely the reason why when Bad Bunny emerged, he brandished a Puerto Rican flag with a sky blue triangle. This flag is most commonly associated with Puerto Rican pro-independence movements and sovereignism from the United States, which is a rejection of the possibility of Puerto Rican statehood.
Towards the end of the performance, the symbolism was evident as Bad Bunny held the Puerto Rican flag, uniting with others who carried different flags of their home countries. It is here where Bad Bunny said arguably the most important sentence of the show:
“God Bless América.”
There’s no one version or single story for how Latinos look, act or sound.
The acute accent over the “e,” called a tilde in Spanish, is small, yet intentionally powerful.
While the sentence is not at all uncommon at the country’s biggest football game of the year, Bad Bunny is not referring to the United States of America, or at least not only the United States.
The tilde over the “e” alludes not to America but to the Américas. He notes this in his list of the countries that comprise the collective América, including Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Dominican Republic, the United States, etc.
He doubles down at long last, making a silent yet deafeningly loud statement with the words etched on the football he throws at the endzone: “TOGETHER, WE ARE AMERICA.”
Not only a poignant phrase on its own, one is reminded of Cuban nationalist José Martí’s 1891 writing, “Our América.” Martí wrote “Our América” seven years before the conclusion of the Cuban War of Independence (1868–98), during which he played a prominent role as a writer advocating for Cuban liberation through his essays, poetry and his pro-independence newspaper, “Patria.” Martí was one of the first Latin American figures to visualize a future of national and international unified Latin American pride, speaking of Cuban independence as part of a multi-class, multi-racial cause at a time when inclusivity of those perceived as lesser races in society was vehemently vilified.
Create is the password of this generation. Make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine! Jose Martí, Cuban nationalist writer and polemicist
Martí called out this hypocrisy in “Our América,” stating, “These men born in América, ashamed of the mother who raised them because she wears an Indian tunic!” While it’s not clear if Bad Bunny was directly citing Martí in his performance, there seemed to be a clear emphasis on including a variety of dancers with different skin tones to drive home this point. There’s no one version or single story for how Latinos look, act or sound. This representation is an effort to improve how Latinos are traditionally represented in popular media, which traditionally excludes Afro-Latinos and other groups entirely.
Martí saw firsthand how Eurocentric ideals encroached on a colonized Latin America and made Latin Americans reject the very things that made them who they are, like Indigenous or African heritage. Martí said this not to demonize those who hate where they come from but to inspire them to reject the Eurocentric ideals implanted by the colonizer and embrace what makes Latin America, Latin America.
As Martí points out, “Create is the password of this generation. Make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” He urges those in Latin America to retain a sense of nationalism and tradition and not to accept so easily what is imposed upon them. What did Bad Bunny do in his halftime show? He conceptualized an entire story showing just how much Latinos have created and how much rich culture and history are present in our stories, in spite of all the adversity overcome, and how that itself is something to be immensely proud of.
He’s very proud of being Latino. … I was very moved by it. Yuko Miki, Associate Director of Latin American and Latinx Studies
Martí’s call for a greater national identity is exactly what Bad Bunny calls on us to do 135 years after “Our América” was written. Upon reading “Our América” again after the Super Bowl performance, I found myself becoming increasingly unsettled by how eerily similar the themes and political messages were regarding how Latin Americans are “un-American,” whether it be through President Trump’s tweets condemning the Super Bowl performance or otherwise.
How depressing was it that the climate around this discourse has still been largely the same for the past 135 years?
To help process and poke at this question, I consulted Professor Yuko Miki, associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies at Fordham University and an associate professor of history. Miki first introduced Martí to me when I took her Understanding Historical Change: Latin America course last semester, so I was highly anticipating her answer.
“I think it’s an interesting moment where I feel like there’s competing notions,” Miki said. “Latinos are talked about as aliens or criminals … and I feel like Benito is symbolizing a very different and much more powerful narrative, right? … He’s not speaking in English. He’s very proud of being Latino. … I was very moved by it.”
Bad Bunny did this to highlight the beauty in our shared culture — even though my grandmother is from Santiago in La República Dominicana and your father is from Guayaquil, Ecuador, we can both go to a friend’s quinceañera and feel connected to our culture as Latinos.
To this point, there is a very clear and distinct choice in his performance, not just to highlight Puerto Rican culture as an individual, but Latino culture as a whole. During the wedding section of the performance, the image of the child sleeping on the three chairs while the party rages on is not just a Puerto Rican phenomenon; it is a culturally Latino experience. You could be Mexican, Uruguayan or Peruvian and still see that same phenomenon occur.
Bad Bunny did this to highlight the beauty in our shared culture — even though my grandmother is from Santiago in La República Dominicana and your father is from Guayaquil, Ecuador, we can both go to a friend’s quinceañera and feel connected to our culture as Latinos.
We are more similar than our differences may make us seem.
In a political and social climate that seeks to remind us only of the latter, it is important to reiterate Bad Bunny’s words etched on the billboard at the end of the performance: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”