"An estimated 135 million viewers in the United States watched Benito Antonio MartÃnez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, perform live at the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday. Many millions more all over the world later caught the show online. What they saw was a stunning redefinition of what it means to be an American. It took about five seconds to realize this was no ordinary halftime show."
"And another 30 for Bad Bunny to overrun the trench work of the US culture war, and the schisms of race, gender, class, and sexuality so easily manipulated both by MAGA nationalists and bad-faith centrists. He showed all kinds of people working and playing, creating a universal joy that excluded none. Bad Bunny jammed over a century of history into his 13-minute performance."
"He started where all good history should: with labor, walking through a sugar plantation set as workers cut the cane that, over the decades, has generated incalculable profits, mostly channeled to Europe and the United States from the Caribbean, including Bad Bunny's Puerto Rican homeland. And even as the show moved on to other themes-and the other performers, Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin-the sugar cane remained, surrounding scenes of urban streets, Puerto Rican casitas, Bronx bodegas, and those ubiquitous cheap plastic chairs."
An estimated 135 million Americans watched Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime performance, which blended pageantry, cultural storytelling, and labor imagery. The show began with a sugar plantation set and workers cutting cane, referencing historical extraction from the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. Scenes shifted through urban streets, Puerto Rican casitas, Bronx bodegas, and communal gatherings, keeping sugar cane as a recurring motif. Bad Bunny performed largely in reggaeton Spanish, foregrounding multilingual and diasporic identity. The performance highlighted labor, inclusivity across race, gender, class, and sexuality, and offered a worker-centered, internationalist vision positioned against nationalist exclusion.
Read at The Nation
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]