Bad Bunny Bowl
The anonymous NFL player who told The Athletic, “I don’t even know who Bad Bunny is,” may be living under a rock. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the globally recognized and award-winning artist better known as Bad Bunny, made history at this year’s Grammy Awards after he was honored with Album of the Year for “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” his sixth studio album. It was the first time an artist won the coveted award for a Spanish-language release. (Bad Bunny also won Grammys for Best Música Urbana Album and Best Global Music Performance, bringing his career total up to six.)
He is following that up with a highly anticipated appearance at the Super Bowl LX halftime show on Sunday. Last year’s Super Bowl drew close to 128 million viewers, making it one of the most-watched television events in U.S. history. A counterprogramming halftime performance assembled by Turning Point USA does not have nearly the star power of Bad Bunny, so the expectation is that one of the largest audiences in history will tune in to see the Grammy winner.
“People had this huge expectation about what would happen, given the album’s importance both to Puerto Rico and to the world,” said Julio López Varona, co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. “It was a big moment for the island, and more with the Super Bowl [halftime performance] happening.”
And Bad Bunny is making the most of that moment by speaking out about the abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration patrols. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE OUT,” he said when accepting his Album of the Year award. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens; we are humans and we are Americans.”
Bad Bunny’s rise is a giant leap forward for Puerto Rico and the visibility of Latino culture in the American mainstream. That leap reads as an affirmation for Latinos, immigrants, and communities of color being pushed to the margins of a society whose culture they have long shaped, and by using his platform for a political message, the multi-platinum artist is calling attention to Puerto Rico’s unique status and its intergenerational hardships.
PUERTO RICANS ARE U.S. CITIZENS, which means they are not subject to immigration enforcement. Yet Puerto Ricans, across the diaspora and in Puerto Rico, have seldom been seen as full-fledged U.S. citizens. The invisible asterisk attached to their citizenship status is the consequence of decades of othering, and as Latino communities find themselves in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, Puerto Ricans are no exception.
According to the nonprofit civil rights organization LatinoJustice, immigration agents “have reportedly detained and questioned individuals of Puerto Rican descent across multiple states and even on the island of Puerto Rico.” Early last year, federal immigration authorities detained individuals of Puerto Rican descent in New Jersey and Wisconsin. They also raided a Puerto Rican establishment in Pennsylvania and conducted an immigration enforcement operation in San Juan’s Barrio Obrero neighborhood.
In February 2025, LatinoJustice filed an open records request with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE seeking copies of internal policies, training materials, and incident reports regarding the racial profiling and unlawful detention of American citizens of Puerto Rican descent. “We’ve had to go to the courts,” said Stephanie Cordero, senior counsel for immigrant rights at LatinoJustice, referring to appeals submitted over lack of responsiveness. “It’s always been an issue to get transparency from the government, but it certainly has been more difficult during this administration.”
DHS and ICE recently located records they say may be responsive to LatinoJustice’s request, and have sent those records to “other agencies for consultation,” the agencies’ latest status report reveals. “There were other documents that I would have expected for the searches to turn up that weren’t included in the disclosures,” said Cordero, who has seen what DHS and ICE delivered. “We’re talking about incident reports about operations that took place and that were publicized in the media, and [are] things that we expect for there to be records of.” FOIA offices have been the subject of mass reductions-in-force, leaving Cordero with concerns about the adequacy of the search.
Cordero hopes that the federal government takes accountability for what it has been doing, “which is targeting Black and brown people, regardless of their immigration status.” Immigration agents have killed at least eight people and wounded 13 more nationwide during their extended terror campaign, while causing at least 35 others to die in detention camps.
Some Puerto Ricans in the diaspora now carry their passports at all times out of concern they could be questioned by federal immigration authorities. It’s only the latest humiliation for Puerto Ricans, who have endured displacement, devastating hurricanes, pervasive corruption, and debt-fueled austerity.
Puerto Rico’s debt crisis stems from decades of predatory lending by Wall Street, which pounced on the opportunity to snap up triple tax-exempt Puerto Rican municipal bonds. As banks and underwriters relentlessly expanded Puerto Rico’s municipal bond market, the debt piled up. But the writing was on the wall when ratings agencies belatedly began downgrading the bonds in the early 2010s. Puerto Rico could not meet its debt payments, government agencies were underwater, and the island’s pension system was severely underfunded. By 2015, then-Puerto Rican Governor Alejandro García Padilla declared that the island’s debt, an estimated $70 billion and more than $55 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, was unpayable.
Under federal law, U.S. states do not have the authority to declare bankruptcy. Enter the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). Congress passed PROMESA in June 2016, granting Puerto Rico the authority to effectively declare bankruptcy.
PROMESA provided a legal framework to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt through the creation of the seven-member Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). Colloquially known as “La Junta,” FOMB entered negotiations with the island’s creditors to reduce the debt. When Puerto Rico went bust, those creditors fought vigorously to cash in, whatever the cost to the island’s social safety net. Despite this, Puerto Rico’s overall debt burden was reduced by about 50 percent to $37 billion in 2022.
This was all compounded by the hurricanes that devastated the island in 2017, destroying energy infrastructure and slipping the country further into desperation.
THE CLIMATE OF FEAR being fomented by the Trump administration has prompted the member organizations with the Center for Popular Democracy, spanning 48 community groups with two in Minnesota and one in Puerto Rico, to take action.
“Our organizations are literally providing food for people so that they don’t have to go out of their houses,” López Varona told the Prospect. “Our main focus right now is … doing everything in our power to both protect the communities that are being attacked right now by the Trump administration, and equip them with the tools they need to fight back.”
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters on Monday he does not expect Bad Bunny or other artists performing during the Super Bowl LX halftime show to make any political statements. What he may not understand is that Bad Bunny is inherently political.
“He is a young person who lived through hurricanes, lived through the pandemic, lived through the debt crisis, and his music … is a reflection of that,” López Varona said.
That includes his latest album. The 17-track LP draws on the entire spectrum of Puerto Rico’s musical tapestry, weaving together traditional Puerto Rican música jíbara, brass-heavy salsa rhythms, and the intensity of Afro-Caribbean bomba with contemporary música urbana like reggaeton, Latin pop, and dembow. Critics have described it as “both a celebration of the island he grew up in and a cautionary tale.”
“I think actually very few people understand just how direct and how explicit some of the more political messaging is, and how directly pro-sovereignty and pro-independence it is,” said Alberto Medina, president of Boricuas Unidos en la Diáspora (BUDPR). “There’s a lot of things in the album that are kind of deep cuts you just might not get the references [to] unless you happen to be really familiar with Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico’s history.”
For instance, the track “LA MuDANZA” is a reflection on persecution of the Puerto Rican independence movement. Specifically, the track references Puerto Rican revolutionary Eugenio María de Hostos, who died in exile in the Dominican Republic and was buried there. “He did not want his body returned to Puerto Rico until Puerto Rico is free,” Medina told the Prospect.
The second verse of “LA MuDANZA,” translated into English, goes like this: “If I die tomorrow, I hope they never forget my face / And that they play one of my songs the day they bring Hostos / With the light-blue flag on my coffin.” Similarly to its more defiant black-and-white counterpart, the light-blue Puerto Rican flag—el azul celeste—symbolizes hope for a free Puerto Rico. A gag law passed in 1948 during the suppression of Puerto Rico’s nationalist movement made it a felony, punishable by ten years in prison, to be in possession of the light-blue flag. (That law was repealed in 1958.)
Then there’s “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” which Medina likened to a “a soulful anti-statehood anthem.” The track spotlights Hawaii and Puerto Rico’s shared history of colonization, displacement, and annexation by the U.S., reminding listeners that self-determination is a collective struggle. Listen to the chorus: “They want to take my river and my beach too / They want my neighborhood and your kids to leave / No, don’t let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai.”
In the years of his ascent to global stardom, Bad Bunny has also become more active in the debate around Puerto Rico’s status, using his platform to encourage voter participation and criticize the island’s establishment parties: the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP) and Popular Democratic Party (PPD).
During the 2024 Puerto Rican gubernatorial election, Bad Bunny endorsed La Alianza de País candidate Juan Dalmau Ramírez, performing and speaking at a rally in the closing push before election day. La Alianza, or “the Alliance” in English, is an anti-establishment coalition led by the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and the Citizens Victory Movement (MVC), a progressive political party founded in the years following Hurricane Maria. PIP and MVC remain in the minority, but as Lόpez Varona points out, La Alianza “led to Puerto Rico having [Juan Dalmau Ramírez] be in second place.”
Puerto Rico’s politics are shifting, and Bad Bunny “is a personification of that,” Lόpez Varona said.
“Everyday Puerto Ricans, if you talk to them about what status they want, most of them will probably say they want statehood; some of them will want [status quo] and some of them will say that they want independence,” he told the Prospect. “But I think what they will all say is that what we have right now is not working, and I think that this anti-establishment moment is really brewing because the colony has been failing for too long.”
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