"During the halftime show at Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Bad Bunny paid homage to his home of Puerto Rico. He weaved his way through a set that featured barber shops and bodegas, family gatherings and elders playing dominos. But he also expanded his lens to make an argument about the place of Puerto Rico within a larger American context. Over a 13-minute set that included more than a dozen of his songs, almost all in Spanish, the artist born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio made the perpetual in-betweenness of his home sing."
"Puerto Rico has long struggled to find its place in the Americas. Too Latin for some in the United States, as reinforced by much of the controversy leading up to Sunday night's performance and too closely associated with the United States to be fully accepted by some in Latin America. As Bad Bunny often does, he turned not fitting in into a super power, leveraging Puerto Rico's caught-between-two-worlds cultural identity to create an inclusive, All-American image."
"Bad Bunny's opening words are always worth paying attention to. "Que rico es ser Latino," he said to start the show at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. Though there isn't really a proper English translation, the phrase means something close to, "How wonderful it is to be Latino," though the understanding of the Spanish phrase is more indulgent. Bad Bunny's opening line on each of the 31 nights of his residency last summer in San Juan was "Pue"
Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance at Levi's Stadium centered Puerto Rican cultural scenes like barber shops, bodegas, family gatherings and elders playing dominos. He performed a 13-minute set of more than a dozen songs, almost all in Spanish, and used Puerto Rico's cultural in-betweenness to assert a broader American belonging. Puerto Rico faces tensions of being viewed as too Latin in the United States and too U.S.-associated in parts of Latin America. Bad Bunny turned that liminality into a source of power, crafting an inclusive, All-American image. 2025 also brought health insurance reforms in over two dozen states limiting prior authorization delays.
Read at Kqed
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]