Bad Bunny's hottest local Super Bowl pregame is at the Chicago Public Library

It’s a big week for Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known professionally as Bad Bunny.

After making Grammy history as the first Spanish-language album of the year winner, the world’s most-streamed male artist is now prepping for his Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday.

While many Chicagoans are getting ready to watch the halftime show from the bar or at home, the real local pregame is at the Chicago Public Library, which is hosting a cultural program that explores Puerto Rican history through music.

This week, it will host two sessions of a program that has evolved since last year called “Bad Bunny x Super Bowl: Beats and History.” Since last fall, the Chicago Public Library has hosted several educational events around Puerto Rican Chicago, according to Mariella Colón, who manages the civic, cultural and literary engagement unit of adult services at the library. [Editor’s note: Colón is no relation to this reporter.]

History and pop culture are at the center of the hour-long discussions in a casual, book club-style meeting meant to make Puerto Rican history accessible to Chicagoans of all generations and backgrounds.

The event is a part of the library’s ongoing “One Book, One Chicago” initiative.

More than 300 people have attended the virtual and in-person events at various Chicago Public Library branches, with folks tuning in from as far as New Jersey and Florida.

In the library program, Colón breaks down Puerto Rico’s long history of resistance to a soundtrack of songs from Bad Bunny’s “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” alongside musical movements that predate the singer.

The program incorporates the work of historian Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of “Puerto Rico: A National History.”

Meléndez-Badillo worked closely with Bad Bunny to create text-based music videos for each of the 17 tracks on “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.” The professor’s notes, written in Spanish only, detail the work and lives of several Puerto Rican individuals and important social justice movements in the archipelago’s history.

“Benito was really interested in using his platform to amplify Puerto Rican history,” Meléndez-Badillo said in an interview with the Sun-Times. “Puerto Rican history is unknown, even for us Puerto Ricans.”

Bad Bunny saw the videos as an accessible way to educate the masses about Puerto Rican history, Meléndez-Badillo said. “He wanted history to be accessible to people in the projects, en casa, in real working-class neighborhoods.”

The program aims to help attendees understand the relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S., Colón said. Her presentation begins in 1898, when the U.S. took control of Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War, effectively making Puerto Ricans second-class citizens.

Island residents are U.S. citizens, but they can’t vote for president nor is the territory represented by Congress. Federal funds for schools and Medicaid are limited, while import regulations have contributed to skyrocketing living costs. Many islanders have left as a result, with cities like Chicago becoming home to hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans.

“I was trying to figure out how to bring the story of Chicago's diaspora [to the] forefront and to make people really interested in it beyond just a lecture or a book, because there's a lot of scholarship on Puerto Ricans and Chicago,” said the library’s Colón. “I say to the people who are participating that if you take away one thing from this presentation, it is understanding the fact that Puerto Rico remains a colony in the 21st century.”

Bad Bunny has used his platform to criticize anti-immigrant rhetoric and the Trump Administration. When Bad Bunny accepted the first of three Grammy Music Awards on Sunday night, he called out U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: “We're not savage. We're not animals. We're not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.”

“DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS” is the first Spanish-language record in history to win the Grammy for Album of the Year, a win that observers say challenges what ideas comprise American culture.

The artist also notably skipped American cities in his recent tour, instead focusing on a residency in Puerto Rico that invigorated tourism and local businesses on the island. In an interview with i-D Magazine last September, he explained that the choice was made intentionally. He and his team were “very concerned” about the possibility of ICE agents turning up to his concerts.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance “is deeply political in this current moment,” Meléndez-Badillo said.

“Benito doesn't need the U.S. market. The U.S. market needs Benito,” he said. “The NFL is expanding internationally, and so they needed the biggest star in the world.”