Ramtin Arablui

Instead... The 1952 constitution argues that Puerto Rico needs to repay its debt before paying for public services.

Meaning that until Puerto Rico paid off its debt, it couldn't really function as a local government.

Pensions were cut, hospital hours were cut, schools were shuttered, with no end in sight.

So that was a recipe for disaster that exploded.

And then in 2016, the year Soy Peor became a hit.

The U.S., under the Obama administration, comes in with a solution, a bill called PROMESA.

And so what the PROMESA law did is that it created a fiscal oversight board of eight unelected members

that have more power than the executive branch, meaning the governor of Puerto Rico, the highest elected office, and the legislative branch in Puerto Rico, meaning the Puerto Rican Congress.

The board's job is to restructure and reduce the debt, and they can make cuts to get it done.

Puerto Ricans call it la junta.

Which evokes sort of those 1970s, 1980s sort of military juntas in Latin America.

La junta is...

Very, very, very unpopular in Puerto Rico.

So Benito's coming of age in a moment in which the crisis begins.

He was under 25 when PROMESA was passed and lowered the minimum wage for people under 25 to below $5 an hour.

The school he went to when his elementary school no longer exists, it was one of the schools that was shut down through the austerity.

Even though the song Soy Peor makes absolutely no gestures towards being read as a political song, I always strongly associate the mood of that song with the passage of Promesa.

Now I'm worse because of you.

It's, you know, a generation that feels that there's nothing for them, that any future that they might have had was stolen.

I've always thought of Bad Bunny's music as kind of giving room for the hopelessness and ugly feeling and disappointment of our generation.