Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Moment and Puerto Rican Identity (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: People ask whether Benito is going to use the Super Bowl to make a political statement. I think that regardless of what he does or doesn't do, his presence there is deeply political.

[00:00:10] Speaker 2: Bad Bunny, as the pick for the Super Bowl halftime show, has thrust the Puerto Rican artist into the middle of a national conversation on politics, language, and immigration.

[00:00:20] Speaker 1: I never heard of him. I don't know who he is. I don't know why they're doing it.

[00:00:24] Speaker 2: But his politics long precede the Super Bowl.

[00:00:26] Speaker 1: My name is Yorel Melendez-Badillo, and I'm an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[00:00:35] Speaker 2: Yorel Melendez-Badillo isn't just any history professor.

[00:00:38] Speaker 1: I like to joke that Bad Bunny slid into my DMs.

[00:00:41] Speaker 2: He became Bad Bunny's historian and wrote vignettes of Puerto Rican history to be coupled with the digital release of songs.

[00:00:48] Speaker 1: Benito has been taking political stances throughout his career. However, this record feels more intimate.

[00:00:56] Speaker 2: Bad Bunny's Debítirá Más Fotos, recently awarded Album of the Year at the Grammys, the first Spanish-language album to win that honor, made a splash for the way it mixed history, politics, and the culture of the island.

[00:01:11] Speaker 1: The first song of the record, Nueva Yorl, there's the Statue of Liberty with the Puerto Rican flag, the light blue flag on top of it. That is actually an homage to two different actions that were done by pro-independence activists in which they put a Puerto Rican flag in the Statue of Liberty.

[00:01:29] Speaker 2: That light blue flag, Melendez-Badillo says, represents Puerto Rican independence and an identity separate from the United States.

[00:01:37] Speaker 1: In La Mulanza, particularly, there's a moment in which Benito is running with the light blue flag, which also in itself contains a political debate about which one is the official flag of Puerto Rico. And so Benito is taking a stand by using the light blue flag and running from people that are persecuting him.

[00:01:59] Speaker 2: And then there's this toad known as El Sapo Concho.

[00:02:02] Speaker 1: It's an analogy to the resistance of Puerto Rican peoples against displacement and gentrification.

[00:02:10] Speaker 2: El Sapo Concho has been seen on anti-ICE posters across San Francisco in the lead-up to the Super Bowl, reinforcing Bad Bunny's skepticism of federal agents. In September, he said part of the reason he wasn't doing shows in mainland United States was for fear that some of his fans would be detained. Now, Bad Bunny will perform on one of the biggest stages in America.

[00:02:31] Speaker 1: One of the most exciting things about this record in particular, it's how it's not only using history to understand the present, but it's also paying homage to Puerto Rican culture, particularly musical styles. And so now we're going to see it in the Super Bowl on the biggest stage. It will force people to grapple with the question, what is Puerto Rico, the place that he represents?