How many Chicagoans are from the countries Bad Bunny named in his Super Bowl halftime show?

There’s a lot to unpack in musician Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, which lovingly paid homage to his native Puerto Rico in rich detail.

But one part near the end of his 13-minute set, performed predominantly in Spanish, stood out because it was one of the few times he spoke in English.

Bad Bunny proclaimed “God Bless América,” in English, before listing off dozens of countries and territories in the Western Hemisphere, starting from Chile in South America all the way up to Canada in North America and ending with Puerto Rico. He then spiked a football painted with the English words “Together, we are America.”

Local academics say his message was clear: The Puerto Rican musician was reframing what it means to be an “American” beyond just the 50 states of the United States.

“Most Americans, when we talk about the U.S., we call it America as if the U.S. is the only nation that’s America, but for people in Latin America and the Caribbean, América refers to the entire hemisphere,” said Lilia Fernández, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fernández says Bad Bunny’s unifying message likely resonated with many in Chicago who themselves are from the countries or territories he named or are descendents of relatives who were born there.

A WBEZ analysis of census data from the most recent American Community Survey estimates finds roughly 1 in every 8 Chicagoans was born outside of the 50 U.S. states but in one of the countries or territories that make up the Western Hemisphere spanning from South to Central to North America.

Mexico is by far the most common place of origin for Chicagoans born outside of the 50 U.S. states, followed by Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Guatemala and Venezuela, in that order.

Of course, the number of Chicagoans who identify as the children or grandchildren of people born in those places is likely much larger.

Bad Bunny’s closing message builds on a centuries-old critique of the United States as the sole “America,” said Mérida M. Rúa, a Latino and Latina studies professor at Northwestern University.

Rúa says artists like Latin musician and politician Rubén Blades, in his 1984 album “Buscando América,” have explicitly called out the idea of America as a continent. Hundreds of years before Blades, the pan-American vision of Simón Bolívar, who led the charge against Spanish colonial rule in South America, was carried on by scholars like Cuban poet José Martí in his 1891 essay “Nuestra América.”

While Bad Bunny is the latest in a long lineage of people who have reframed the meaning of “America,” he’s the first to do it on a stage as large as the NFL Super Bowl halftime show.

It’s also a powerful statement to make in the current political environment, said Fernández. Just last month, U.S. military forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues its immigration enforcement campaigns across the country. On Sunday, President Donald Trump called the Super Bowl halftime show “absolutely terrible” and “an affront to the Greatness of America” in a post on Truth Social.

“It seemed to be a message of inclusion and an alternative vision to the politics we're seeing right now in the United States, particularly from coming out of the White House and supporters of the president and his enforcement policies,” Fernández said.