On Sunday night, millions of people across the United States and throughout Latin America tuned in to watch the National Football League’s (NFL) Super Bowl LX. Many of them were less interested in the game itself than in the highly anticipated halftime show of Puerto Rican pop king Bad Bunny.
Bad Bunny is the stage name of Benito Martínez Ocasio, who won the Grammy for best album the previous week. He delivered a show that lived up to the hype, speaking exclusively in Spanish and went through the major hits of his 2025 album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (“I Should Have Taken More Photos”), with an aesthetic evoking Puerto Rico and the island’s working-class New York diaspora.
Through the lyrics of his song “Lo Qué Le Pasó a Hawaii,” he used the platform to openly criticize US colonialism in Puerto Rico and he offered an ode to Puerto Rican working-class migrants with “NUEVAYoL.” Bad Bunny, surrounded by flags from throughout the continent, ended by saying “God Bless America” and then shouted out the names of every country in the Americas in true Bolivarian fashion.
The most political act was the performance in itself, a gesture of defiance toward the xenophobia of Donald Trump’s base and a US government that dehumanizes Latin Americans every chance it gets. Martínez Ocasio used the quintessential US sporting event to openly criticize an administration that has further militarized the US colony of Puerto Rico in order to attack other Latin American nations while continuing to deny Puerto Ricans the right to decide their future.
It’s no wonder that the halftime show enraged Trump, who took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to say that it was “absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!” The US president, whose name appears in recent Department of Justice emails related to the notorious pedophile Jeffery Epstein, claimed that the dancing was “disgusting, especially for young children that are watching from throughout the…
Auteur: Cruz Bonlarron Martínez
