Chapter 1: How did Bad Bunny become a global voice for Puerto Rican independence?
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The National Football League welcomes you to the Apple Music Super Bowl 60 Halftime Show. Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, who you know as Bad Bunny.
He's a Spanish-speaking artist from a colony, and he's performing at the Super Bowl. at a time when the Spanish language is being criminalized.
The Trump administration can continue indiscriminate immigration stops targeting Latinos and Spanish speakers. We want to be with patriotic Americans, people who have great music, songs you've actually heard. I think it's super political. What he did was show the world what Latinos have and when he called out all of the countries. It was so special and I got super emotional.
Is it revolutionary?
I don't think so, but it's political. You know, the NFL also wants to reach a broader international audience, and Benito's the biggest artist in the world. The biggest artist in the world performed mostly in Spanish at Super Bowl 60 in Santa Clara, which, yes, cost some fanfare.
But the Puerto Rican singer and rapper, who's dominated global charts for the past eight years, isn't a stranger to politics. He refused to perform his most recent album in the continental U.S., saying he's worried that ICE will come after his fans. An idea he doubled down on after he won the Grammy for the Album of the Year and Best Musica Urbana Album.
Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say eyes out.
When he took the stage at the Super Bowl, he made a statement and a compromise. He didn't speak out directly against ICE, but he did use the global stage to do what his music has always done, make the world look at Puerto Rico, a U.S. Commonwealth whose people are U.S. citizens, but who live in what some critics call the world's oldest colony.
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Chapter 2: What political statements did Bad Bunny make during the Super Bowl?
Jíbaros actually play a mythic role in Puerto Rico in the same way that cowboys function in the western frontier of the United States. Real, but also larger than life. And Bad Bunny is a little bit of both. A star who many people see as representing the essence of Puerto Rico, and also just a guy from the countryside. His hometown is called Vegabaja.
Vega Baja is a small town that's still in driving distance of San Juan or like where you could maybe commute in if you had a job there. You know, he's not from Monte Monte, Monte Adentro, as we would say, like the kind of dramatic central mountains of Puerto Rico where, you know, it can be super off the grid. People still don't have water and lights.
Vega Baja is not like that, but it's distant enough that kind of Jibarito culture would be fundamentally like who he is. Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, a.k.a. Bad Bunny, was born on March 10, 1994. To a school teacher and a truck driver. He had what he's described as an extremely typical childhood, you know.
His parents kind of struggling to make ends meet, but always providing for them in a really responsible and loving way. He was part of his church choir as a kid. and would perform at talent shows, you know, ballads, salsas, stuff like that. And he doesn't come from a family of Puerto Rican revolutionaries or anything like that. His nuclear family was PNP, and that's the pro-statehood party.
In Puerto Rico, there are three main political parties. There's the New Progressive Party, or PNP, which wants to make Puerto Rico the 51st U.S. state. There's the Popular Democratic Party that wants to keep Puerto Rico as a commonwealth, basically status quo. And then there's the Independence Party that wants Puerto Rico to be its own sovereign nation.
Not a lot of Puerto Ricans are necessarily growing up in massively radical, you know, revolutionary-type households. This is Vanessa Diaz. She's professor of Chicano, Chicana, and Latino Studies at Loyola Marymount and author of the book PFKNR, How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance.
There's a lot more people who probably grew up in a Commonwealth Party household or a statehood party household or a mixed household, like a lot of mixed kind of political vibes in Puerto Rican families. And Bad Bunny kind of speaks to that. Because it wasn't his parents' political views that shaped him. It was just what he experienced growing up in Puerto Rico, the water he was swimming in.
Bad Bunny being born in 1994, I mean, it's a really important time.
We live in an age of possibility. A hundred years ago, we moved from farm to factory. Now we move to an age of technology, information, and global competition.
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Chapter 3: How did Puerto Rico's history influence Bad Bunny's music?
The entire roof was blown off, she says.
Everything got soaking wet.
The response is horrifying on the part of the U.S. federal government. Tarps never get there. FEMA is like nowhere to be found. They lied to Puerto Ricans saying that only a handful of people had died. And we're seeing our family members die. They said that they had done a good job because only a handful of people had died. The reality was different.
A study by the Universidad Carlos Albizu and Harvard University basically argued that the number was more around 4,645 people. And that was a conservative estimate. You call these events like Hurricane Maria natural disasters, but really they're just natural events and unnatural disasters, human-made disasters. This is where the benefits of being U.S. citizens should be showing up, and it's not.
Because of the failure of the federal and the local government, a lot of people started having conversations about Puerto Rico's colonial relationship. And I'm not talking about the circles that I come from, which are circles that have always been talking about this, but my family members, for the first time, were talking about imperialism, about colonialism. It's that opening synth live.
That sounds so much to me like a choir of like electronic angels, you know, kind of cutting in and out through an unstable internet connection. You know, it reminds me of dial-up internet, but it also reminds me of like trying to communicate with relatives after Maria hit. Bad Bunny was on tour at the time. When Hurricane Maria hits Bad Bunny is not in Puerto Rico.
He is out performing and he can't reach his family. He finally connected with family and was able to return to Puerto Rico. And then the following year. He has his first album come out in 2018. And in fact, the first single from his album is the song Estamos Bien. Estamos Bien is a trap ballad that has a self-consciously political register. It's such a complicated song, right?
Estamos bien means like, we're okay, we're good. And so it's kind of hopeful, but it's also, you know, acknowledging, like he has a lyric about the fact that we don't have light in the house, right? One of my favorite lines in the song is when he says, And if tomorrow I die, that's okay. I'm already accustomed to having my head in the clouds.
And to me, that combines in a really beautiful way some of the kind of nihilism or hopelessness I was talking about before with a kind of spiritual commitment to dreaming.
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