Arguably the music world’s biggest Latino pop star, certainly the biggest Latino rapper, 31-year-old Bad Bunny will be headlining Sunday’s Super Bowl LX Halftime Show.
Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen (as are all Puerto Ricans). Born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, he performs almost exclusively in Spanish. It is a choice that has not harmed his career.
His sold-out residency in Puerto Rico last summer boosted the island’s economy by tens of millions of dollars. Last week, he garnered 16 GRAMMY nominations, including Album of the Year for DeBí TiRAR MáS FotoS (‘I should have taken more Pictures.’)
For reasons that range from irony to outrage, the fact that an unapologetically Spanish-language performer will be centerstage on the 50-yard line at this fraught moment in our nation’s history has been the focus of endless commentary and debate. ‘Football is America’s sport’. ‘Latinos play soccer.’ What kind of name is Bad Bunny?’ ‘He doesn’t even try to speak English.’
President Trump has vowed to purge the tens of millions of ‘illegal aliens’ who made their way into the country during the years of the Biden presidency. Some fear the thin-skinned president will now retaliate against the NFL by, say, imposing a luxury tax on the world’s richest sports league to punish the choice of Bad Bunny to headline its biggest show of the year.
Judging the risk too acute to his most fervent fans, Bad Bunny refuses to tour in the continental U.S.
Before the tragic deaths in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti stopped its momentum, ICE leadership had vowed to enforce immigration laws wherever they are being broken, even on game day, even including the parking lot of Levi Stadium in California, where the LA Rams and the Seattle Seahawks will have at it on Sunday.
In accepting one of his GRAMMYS, Bad Bunny declared, “ICE Out. We are humans, not aliens.”
Bad Bunny is acutely aware that these are fraught times.
The contempt some feel for Latinos is obvious. Remember the 2024 Republican National Convention when comedian Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico, “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean?” Bad Bunny responded that time neither in Spanish nor in English, but with a powerful video tribute to El Isla Del Encanto, praising the Enchanted Island and its proud residents.
It’s not Bunny’s first time on the world’s biggest stage.
In 2020, he joined Shakira and J.Lo in a supporting role for a Latino-themed halftime show that was seen by an audience of over 100 million. That was a couple of million more than watched the big game itself, but that was an almost quaint time, before the coming of COVID and the Second Coming of Trump.
Driven by Xenophobic leadership that has vowed to purge the United States of the undocumented, we have witnessed a social convulsion that has swept from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis.
Bad Bunny’s selection reminds us that it is not all bad news. Upon his selection, he declared in part, “What I’m feeling goes beyond myself. It’s for those who came before me and ran countless yards so I could come in and score a touchdown. This is for my people, my culture, and our history. Go and tell your grandma that we are going to be the halftime show at the Super Bowl!
