Super Bowl LX was largely a dud of a game, with touchdowns only coming in the second half and special teams being the main story. However, the larger story came during Bad Bunny’s halftime performance. Bad Bunny, or Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, performed what I believe was one of the best halftime shows of all time.
While some people may still be catching up, Bad Bunny has spent the last few years dominating nearly every lane in popular music, trap, reggaetón, rap, and pop, and now a distinct hybrid sound that folds all of it together with salsa. His most recent album, “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,”
had over 8.2 billion streams on Spotify last year and was the first all-Spanish album to win Album of the Year at the Grammys. Additionally, he is responsible for four of the last six top albums on Spotify.
Not only was it clear that Bad Bunny was an obvious choice to perform during the biggest American sporting event of the year, but his choice of imagery, choreography and staging felt deliberate to the smallest detail. To talk about those visuals, some historical context is necessary.
Puerto Rico was obtained by the United States after the Spanish-American War. However, what followed wasn’t incorporation into American democracy so much as management from a distance. The Foraker Act of 1900 established a civil government under U.S. authority, and the Jones-Shafroth Act in 1917 granted statutory U.S. citizenship while keeping ultimate governing power in Congress, a political status that to this day leaves Puerto Ricans without voting representation in Congress and without a vote for president.
In 1948, Law 53 prohibited the display of the Puerto Rican flag in Puerto Rico. Signed into law by U.S.-appointed governor Jesús T. Piñero, this legislation criminalised any expression of Puerto Rican nationalism. In his “La Mudanza” music video, Bad Bunny exclaims, “Aquí mataron gente por sacar la bandera / Por eso es que ahora yo la llevo donde quiera.” In English, this translates to “Here they killed people for showing the flag / That’s why I bring it everywhere I want now.” The mere act of waving the Puerto Rican flag was never pageantry but an overt political act.
For Bad Bunny, politics isn’t just flag-waving but something he actively addresses through his music. His most recent album speaks directly about a more insidious issue of gentrification that he believes is threatening Puerto Rico.
In his short film entitled “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” posted to YouTube last January, Bad Bunny plays an older gentleman walking to a café in a town in Puerto Rico. On the way, English starts to dominate the soundscape and once he arrives, he’s told the café only has “vegan quesitos.” More than a moment of comedic relief, the joke touches upon how displacement has been presented as lifestyle and gentrification has been disguised as “upgrades.” Moments like these allow Bad Bunny to capture a very specific, sinking feeling of becoming a foreigner in your own neighborhood that people have felt all over the world, beyond just Puerto Rico.
It’s also important to note that beyond speaking about these problems in Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny has attempted to take them head-on. For his residency, Bad Bunny performed 31 shows in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the summer of 2025. For the first nine shows, he only permitted those with a Puerto Rican ID to purchase tickets. It’s also estimated that his performance brought between $400 and $700 million to Puerto Rico’s economy, according to the travel agency Discover Puerto Rico.
Thus, when Bad Bunny stepped foot onto the field during his halftime performance, it was clear that he was going to celebrate Puerto Rico in a way that would shine a light on its history.
Bad Bunny began the show walking through sugarcane fields, which the New York Times reports was “a source of rampant labor exploitation” as he strides past “other joys of Puerto Rican life.” The power-pole sequence during “El Apagón” turned the electrical grid itself into a prop, a blunt reference to the island’s long-running electricity crisis, sharpened by government negligence and privatization. When he performed “Nuevayol,” the point was a nod to the fact that Puerto Ricans have built one of their most important cultural capitals in New York and even features Toñita, the owner of a famous Puerto Rican social club in Brooklyn. Finally, the “Hawaii” reference during “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” serves as a warning not to let Puerto Rico become the next version of an island remade for outsiders, a place where tourism and capital crowd out locals and culture.
While I am certainly missing several subtle references intentionally sprinkled throughout the show, I think Bad Bunny’s art has provided a wonderful reminder of Puerto Rican heritage. I’m not going to pretend I can speak for Puerto Ricans about what the performance meant or how it landed emotionally. But I can say that I can’t remember another halftime show that made me feel this strong a desire to actually learn, not just to rewatch the spectacle, but to understand both the story underneath it and the way questions of identity, language, land, diaspora and pride show up in Bad Bunny’s music and visuals.
So, to readers: do your own digging. Read some Puerto Rican history and listen to Bad Bunny’s work. Rewatch the performance with curiosity and not just as a flashy pop-culture moment, but as a piece of storytelling about Puerto Rican history.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
