In this op-ed, writer Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera explores the Boricua history Bad Bunny brought to his Super Bowl 2026 performance: a party as a protest.
The flare explosions shoot into the air, over the white-clad jíbaros swirling around Bad Bunny, who is sporting a white jersey with his mother’s maiden name on the back and 64 on the front. The chorus of “DtMF” fills Santa Clara’s Levi’s stadium, and just before the end of the show, puffs of colorful smoke flares tint the twilight air. For a second, right at the end of the performance, I connect the spots of color against the dusk sky in my mind and think the red, white, and blue smoke maybe, just might be the Puerto Rican flag, dispersing far over the stage of the Super Bowl LX halftime show. What I know for sure is that the vibrant flags of the Americas—including both the lighter and darker blue Puerto Rican flags—surrounding Bad Bunny are a meaningful message to Boricuas and Latin Americans watching from all over the globe.
In his Apple Music halftime show interview, Bad Bunny promised us a big party, where it would be more helpful to know how to dance than speak Spanish, and he delivered: there was a party in the casita from his Residecia, spilling celebrities like Karol G, Jessica Alba, Cardi B, Pedro Pascal, and more onto its pink and yellow porch. There were jíbaro dancers in white parading through the reeds of caña, on the telephone poles, where the power “went out” for his performance of “El Apagón.” Los Pleneros de la Cresta continued the party through the end of the show, even continuing their performance into the street afterwards, all while behind them, a billboard flashes a line from Bad Bunny’s Best Música Urbana Album Grammy acceptance speech, “THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE.”
As Reggaetón and culture scholars Vanessa Díaz and Petra R. Rivera-Rideau (creators of the Bad Bunny Syllabus) told NPR recently, within the party, and that unfettered joy and lineage of talent, lies the real protest. And this protest is about Boricuas taking back narrative control, and shifting that narrative to one of love.
Bad Bunny made several choices throughout his Super Bowl performance that fought against colonial narratives. He had Ricky Martin join him for “LO QUE LE PASO A HAWAii”; Martin is not only an iconic Puerto Rican pop star, but also queer representation, singing a song that warns about the displacement of Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico. He staged an actual power outage during his performance of “El Apagón” to highlight the energy crisis in Puerto Rico. He spotlighted Puerto Rican contributions to music and culture that came before him, sampling Don Omar and Tego Calderon.
His emphasis on this anti-colonial historicity and inclusion extends beyond music, which shows in the sampling of Tito Trinidad in “NUEVAYoL” (1:26), a Boricua boxer who held champion titles in three weight classes, and the platforming the first Puerto Rican Sign language interpreter at the Super Bowl 2026, Celimar Rivera Cosme. It extends to platforming younger up and coming artists like his musical director Julito Gastón, platforming and heightening the profile of queer artists like Young Miko (who also appeared in the casita at the Super Bowl), and having his set designed by Mónica Monserrate and her all-Boricua, all-women team. It extends beyond Puerto Rico to Latin American at large—Karol G is Columbian and Pedro Pascal is Chilean-American. His inclusion even extends beyond human beings, as evidenced by the featuring of Puerto Rican endangered sapo concho from the DeBI TiRAR MáS FoTOS album on the Super Bowl scoreboard — even Puerto Rico’s animals are part of the story.
The halftime show honed in on this message of broadening solidarity first through the value Latin Americans bring through their work—in a nail salon, a piragua stand, a taco stand, a coco frío vendor—and through their culture, with the men seated at the domino table, the violinists in the caña fields, and Toñita (Maria Antonia Cay) serving drinks just as she would at her Caribbean Social Club in Brooklyn. The same solidarity he fosters amongst Boricuas, he expanded to Latin America, through the depiction of a boxing match between Mexico and Puerto Rico, and then to all of the Americas, when his dancers brought out the flags of every country in both South and North America—he then named them, in order from southern-most to northern-most. Not only did the brightness of Puerto Rican talent through Martin’s performance, but we saw Lady Gaga honor salsa by singing “Die With a Smile” in its style (not just a white American, but one who has proudly championed queer rights, moments after seeing two men perreando). His message is clear: there is room for it all. The work that Latinos do, the talent that Latinos have to offer, appreciation for Latinos, and the community that forms around it all.
To really hammer the message home, there was a literal wedding. The wedding, it turns out, was real. The couple invited Bad Bunny to their wedding set for that date, and he let them know that while he couldn’t make it due to the Super Bowl, they could have it there. And while the romance was riveting, our focus stayed on the community that was built around it, from the jeweler who got them the ring to the child asleep on the chair when the celebration ran long (as Latinos can attest, they all do). This is a familiar refrain for the diaspora; in one way or another, we will always come home for the family function.
My family is like the rest of the Boricua diaspora—our migration to and from the archipelago over the years has drawn loops of love and loss through time. But in all the various places we now call home, the strategy remains the same as always: a convening, an acknowledgement of what has been lost, a celebration of what we’ll have forever.
At midnight on Saturday, my father sent me a photo of my little cousin, smiling with all his teeth under his ringlet curls, stretching his Benito Bowl t-shirt towards the camera. Just before the game, my Tío Felix informed me that everyone in the family has the same shirt, confirmed that Papi had arrived at the function the night before and immediately began misbehaving, and that the parrillada was well underway. According to his friends, the energy in the restaurants back in PR was electric, it felt like it used to when Tito Trinidad won yet another title. “We all know,” he told me seriously. “When [Bad Bunny] said, at the Grammys, this is for you, the ones who had to leave—he means us. I left because I had to. He means me.”
The image of the swirls of dancers in white coming together onstage under all of the Americas’ flags ricochets off the moment when Bad Bunny gave his Grammy to a young boy stand-in for his younger self, and both scenes connect to form a larger image of a community that will beget more community, even in a country determined to be rid of Latinos like them. Their—our—presence and joy in the face of it all is the party and the protest.
Below is writer Yamilette Vizcaíno Rivera’s original essay, published in October 2025, which explores the Boricua history Bad Bunny might bring to his Super Bowl 2026 performance.
The electronic rain sounds of “ALAMBRE PúA” flood El Choliseo with a pining melody, and the stage in front of me comes alive — the mountains of Puerto Rico, green and wild, rise just beyond where you’d expect, complete with a Flamboyant tree in the top right corner. Down below the flora is a pink and yellow casita perfectly positioned to view it all, its roof conspicuously flat and clear, like a dance floor. I notice this and blurt, “Bad Bunny’s gonna stand on that house.” When he does — performing a close to 20 minute set with Rauw Alejandro — I’m suddenly much closer to Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio than my seat number led me to believe I would be.
Mainland reporting on Bad Bunny’s Residencia en El Choli, “No Me Quiero Ir De Aquí,” has focused on his rise to popularity, the significant economic impact he’s made, and the records he broke with his livestreamed extra performance. Some have acknowledged the inherently political choice to stage a residency in Puerto Rico in the first place. Slightly less covered is the wealth of Boricua history that makes his art as powerful as it is, including over 100 years of fraught Puerto Rico-U.S. relations that led to his arrival. This history is crucial for understanding the significance of where Bad Bunny stands now, and where he is going next.
When the NFL announced him as the headliner for the 2026 Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, the array of angry and confused reactions ranged from overt racism and xenophobic deportation threats to ignorance of Bad Bunny’s impact on both reggaeton and the definition of a pop artist. Whether the audience can understand the Puerto Rican Spanish or what it’s referencing, Benito’s art is inextricable from his (and his people’s) politics; it will be inextricable from his Super Bowl performance too. Just a survey of Boricua history will show: Bad Bunny is perhaps the only pop star fully equipped to take on the juxtaposition of the current American sociopolitical ecosystem and the fact that a show, definitionally, must entertain.
Art and politics are inseparable components of the same constellation: what you care about, and how it’s connected. Where works of art are bright focal points of care, politics is the organizing principle that connects them and gives them meaning. Puerto Ricans have been under U.S. control since the 1898 invasion, and have only had citizenship since the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917. The themes in Bad Bunny’s performances draw strongly from the power dynamics and tense political reality rooted in this history, bringing the art/politics constellation sharply into focus. Heartbreak refracts as it passes though the loss of the land where that love existed. Joy takes on additional layers, functioning as armor against those who would forbid you from self-expression, reflecting light and hope in every direction.
Because Puerto Rico’s population is about half the size of its diaspora, lives on the archipelago overlap and intertwine endlessly; it takes my tía 3 hours to enumerate all of our family’s connections to the Residencia production. Before Julito Gastón was Benito’s musical director, leading dances in the Loíza-born Afro-Puerto Rican tradition of Bomba on stage, he was a young child going viral for his drumming videos, which my cousins still used as tutorials three years ago. Before iLe, of Calle 13, sang “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii” for the 18th show, she was present at a birthday party my cousin still returns to PR to attend. Before the woman working security for the door to the casita on stage signed her contract, she went to school with my tía.
Scratch the surface of any of these simple interpersonal connections and underneath will be politics. The Bomba dances Gastón led onstage are a Black Puerto Rican tradition that have been part of Boricua protest since slavery. The outfit iLe wore to sing the haunted lullaby was explicitly inspired by the one Lolita Lebrón wore in her 1954 mugshot, taken after she led an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol for Puerto Rican independence. The flag Bad Bunny flies onstage is specifically the azul celeste (lighter blue shade) one that predates the U.S. invasion. To Boricuas who grew up in the caserío housing projects in the 90s, sitting in the plastic chairs featured on the DtMF album cover, these symbols and references are all political.
The next night, the stars wink at me from between the clouds on my way to a protest art exhibit. A collaboration between AgitArte and Mijente, “De AQuí NADie NoS SAcA” is a barbershop, braiding salon, and gallery named after a dual-purpose Bad Bunny lyric: an activist rallying cry and concert-goer earworm. Merch is sold to benefit organizations like Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico, which fed Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Posters advertise plays by the theatre collective Papel Machete, a group created in response to the 2006 government shut down triggered by US austerity measures for Puerto Rico. In the center of the room stands a 13-foot-tall papier mâché woman with a sign that repeats the message on the riotously colorful mural outside “DE AQUÍ NADIE ME SACA,” which I immediately recognize. My tío Juan Pablo Vizcaíno confirms that she is featured in Bad Bunny’s music video for “LA MuDANZA,” (3:18), and that he helped both in her creation and in her operation during filming.
The exhibit begins and ends in the street because it’s meant to connect to work beyond its walls. I immediately connect it to El Antiguo Ancón de Loíza, a nearby museum celebrating Afro-Puerto Rican contributions to history and founded by my family, which has been living on that land for 105 years. Outside the exhibition, Tío tells me his own Loíza-born traditional art will soon be on display on the mainland. His Vejigante masks have been selected for an October show alongside other underrepresented examples of American portraiture in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. I imagine the show as another pinprick of light in the sky above us — connecting him to something bigger than either of us would have dared to hope for.
The feeling lasts about a week. A few days after the last day of the pop-up, the Smithsonian is listed with the national parks, museums, and “nonessential services” that could go dark due to the mainland government shut down.
To purposely further adhere his politics and his art, Bad Bunny involved University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of history Jorrell Meléndez-Badillo in the DtMF album rollout. The distilled history lessons from Meléndez-Badillo’s acclaimed book Puerto Rico: A National History were used as visualizers and displayed onscreen during the Residencia. His anti-colonial storytelling clarifies moments like the SCOTUS Insular cases, which afforded Puerto Rican U.S. citizens only some constitutional rights. He also emphasizes that these decisions were made in the early 1900s, when both journalistic coverage of Puerto Ricans and public intellectual discourse of them (including the President), was almost unilaterally disparaging and racist. This proliferated the idea that Puerto Ricans could never be American because of their “ignorance, laziness, and inferior ability to self-rule” (Melendez-Badillo, ch. 6).
The depiction of Boricuas as an inferior people served as rationale for what many call clear colonial status, down to the taxation without representation. Still, there is hope when we see academic papers repeatedly proposing the overruling of the Insular Cases, some even providing data dispelling the tax-related economic fears that are commonly used to justify the racist policies. But my telescope swings back around to the racist public discourse that made such rulings possible to begin with. It’s eerily similar to government officials and political pundits threatening Super Bowl attendees with ICE because a Puerto Rican musician will be on a global stage for 15 minutes. They’ve picked up on something true: even if it’s just a dance party, that would be political too.
Puerto Rican history rings with this familiar haunting, ricocheting off of other marginalized groups today who face attack first from the U.S. media, and soon afterwards from lawmakers. It can feel like we are living in a symphony of denials that certain people are allowed to exist, even as we do, every day. But this is only part of the context in which Benito is taking the stage — the other one is a lineage of Boricuas before him who were fed the same message, from the criminalization of their native languages to their displacement for others’ economic gain, that their lives and culture were not of value. The response to this message throughout Puerto Rico’s history has been rigorous care, fierce pride, and militant joy.
The legibility of these three strategies depends entirely upon who the onlooker is. The top line, the most visible element, will be the joy. Bad Bunny’s prerogative has always been a good time. He has been on SNL five times (once in a Shrek costume for no apparent reason), he bookended his live-streamed concert with his Calvin Klein underwear campaign, and the sign language interpreters at his concerts are regularly memed for their interpretations, which essentially require miming sex-acts for minutes at a time. He even preceded the announcement of his halftime performance with a snarky tweet.
It is fair to ask why he would perform on the mainland after initially excluding the U.S. from his world tour due to ICE raids but the answer is likely many fold, and largely already clear. With his every move politicized anyway, and the safety of his fans jeopardized regardless of where in the country they are, he may as well be a Boricua star on an international stage controlling the global narrative about Puerto Rico, and have some fun while he’s at it. Bad Bunny’s references are deeply Puerto Rican and political, but they’re also secondary to the end game — a good time. The show will be raucous, cheeky, and full of the billboard-chart-topping songs. He will both surprise us and be exactly who he has been the whole time. Or, put differently: Bad Bunny’s gonna stand on that house.
