Bad Bunny Fans Are Upset — & Not Just About the Kendall Jenner Dating Rumours

A tide of Bad Bunny-related memes are sweeping social media relating to the Puerto Rican rapper’s suspected relationship with Kendall Jenner. From the online jokes and TikTok video responses, one thing is clear: Latinas are not having it. 

From hysterical calls to start referring to Bad Bunny as “Ben” rather than his birth name, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, to expressions of disappointment, these waves of critique reflect a collective sense of betrayal. Many are asking: What happened to the artist who critiqued the co-opting of Caribbean Latine culture amid reggaeton’s recent crossover appeal and who declared that cultural appropriators could never play the part because “les falta sazón, batería y reggaeton” in the song “El Apagón?”

Since Bad Bunny first made the transition from grocery store bagger to rapero, Latinas have been among his biggest supporters. Whether through his music or his performances, Benito has often used his art to uplift social, cultural, and political issues happening in Puerto Rico, including the plights of women and LGBTQ communities. In a genre that has historically perpetuated machismo, el conejo malo stood out for uplifting decolonial gender equality.

According to Yessica Garcia Hernandez, a scholar of gender and ethnic studies who is currently writing a book on the Latina fandom of legendary Mexican-American performer Jenni Rivera, these artistic decisions yielded a vast and loyal following of Latinas. “For Latina fans, it is about the erotics of the collective sense of belonging. In other words, it’s about how the star, in this case Bad Bunny, creates a space for fans to envision and create different futures for themselves and each other,” Garcia Hernandez tells Refinery29 Somos, pointing to Latina fandom around the slain Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla as another example.

For many Latina fans venting their grievances online, Bad Bunny’s recent dates with Jenner force them to think about the possibilities and limits of popular culture and what happens when the icons we love don’t love us back. According to Masaya Gurdian, a Gainesville, Florida-based fan of Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Nicaraguan descent, if the rumours are true about Bad Bunny’s romantic life, it feels like a slap in the face because “he is associating himself with a woman who has shown that she does not respect the Latine community.” She refers to a 2021 ad for Jenner’s 808 vodka brand where she rides in a pickup truck with her hair in two braids à la tevenovela hacienda babe and watches over brown-skinned Latino workers harvesting agave. “She cosplayed a Mexican girl from the countryside … and is out of touch with reality,” Gurdian continues.

Latina beauty content creator Lipstick Kitty agrees. In a TikTok video responding to the Bad Bunny-Jenner dating rumours, she connects her critique of the relationship to Jenner’s appropriations of Chicana culture, referencing an ad for the Kendall + Kylie clothing line in which Kendall wore a flannel button-up shirt and baggy Dickies with hoop earrings in chola style. 

According to Vanessa Diaz, a media scholar who wrote a book on celebrity culture and is teaching a course on Bad Bunny at Loyola Marymount University, Latina fans are having such a hard time making sense of the relationship because Bad Bunny and Jenner have “cultivated very different kinds of fan bases.” For instance, the former has fashioned himself as an overtly political figure, participating in the 2019 protests in San Juan that ousted then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, releasing a documentary about gentrification and U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, and calling out issues of cultural appropriation; meanwhile, the latter has been guilty of perpetuating cultural appropriation and trivialising social justice movements. “His work feels consequential, and her work feels frivolous and kind of over the top in this very particularly classed way, and in an appropriative way that they [the Kardashian–Jenner family] get critiqued for a lot,” Diaz says. 

For Diaz, the suspected relationship with Jenner raises questions around how the politics of Bad Bunny’s media representation will shift in this period of transition as he now lives in Los Angeles where he is pursuing projects in film and streaming, distancing him physically from Puerto Rico and its people. “In Puerto Rico, this is felt like a deeply personal concern, and I think rightfully so because of the consequential nature of his action on the island, and the way that people take him seriously there,” she says. “Everyone in Puerto Rico has been going through a lot of struggle for a really long time, and has been in direct engagement with a deeply colonised experience. And so what it means to produce art from that place, even if that’s within you forever, is different in terms of what it looks like on the ground for him.” 

What we are seeing in the new wave of media attention around Bad Bunny are the messy intersections of sex, race, desirability, and value in the cultural sphere. Soon after rumours spread around Bad Bunny and Jenner, it was announced that his Puerto Rican ex-girlfriend Carliz De La Cruz Hernandez was suing him for $40 million for the unauthorised use of her voice in his songs. It appears that the Puerto Rican women that he claims as all his in “Tití Me Preguntó” are challenging his access to them given what appears to be his new allegiances to Hollywood and non-Latine white women. 

And it’s an allegiance that he strongly defends in the song “Coco Chanel” with Eladio Carrion, where he references Jenner’s zodiac sign, Scorpio, and appears to take a jab at her ex-boyfriend, Phoenix Suns player Devin Booker. This move led a clearly annoyed Ivy Queen to take to TikTok to chastise Bad Bunny for engaging this way with Jenner’s ex and warn that Latinas will have a problem with the politics around his latest romantic flame. 

Jade Power Sotomayor, a scholar of Puerto Rican performance who was one of the plena dancers at Bad Bunny’s performance at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony, remembers how impactful that performance was for its inclusion of a diverse group of Latinas in terms of skin colour, nationality, age, and body type, and how frustrated she is that the moment was overshadowed by non-Latine white women, mainly Taylor Swift enjoying the display of “sazón, bateria y reggaeton” and, soon after, the Bad Bunny-Jenner dating rumours. “His ‘going’ white with Jenner is a betrayal to Latinas and especially seems to signify an allegiance to his own whiteness,” she says. “It’s an abrupt turn from the disinvestment in whiteness and coloniality that he has previously performed.” 

More recently, the singer-rapper fronted TIME magazine for its first Spanish-language cover. During the interview, he deflected questions around race and regarded himself as just a “chamaquito” trying to live his life — a move that also spurred a new wave of criticism. Many fans are wondering why the rapper, who previously recorded a song slamming anti-Blackness and uplifting the Black Lives Matter movement, is suddenly quiet about how racism shows up in the Latin music industry and how white Latine rappers like him benefit from it.

As Garcia Hernandez notes, early Chicana feminists like Cherrie Moraga argued that our romantic and sexual lives should be analyzed and recognised in feminist debates. She pushed for an analysis of what and, in this case, who “we’re rolling around in bed." "The reactions by fans demonstrate that on some level they, too, agree that romantic and sexual politics are not just private matters; they shape the way we understand racial desire, power, and pleasure," Garcia Hernandez says.

 

She continues: “There is no denying that Latina fans have branded Benito as a contemporary symbol of Latina feminisms, and now there seems to be a cultural expectation from fans that want Benito to remain committed to his social justice stardom.”

Across social media, it’s clear that many fans are interested in giving Bad Bunny grace as he navigates what is a very complex negotiation of being a massively successful, politically radical Puerto Rican icon in the cultural sphere. And the people interviewed in this story agree that race or ethnicity shouldn’t dictate who someone could be in a relationship with. Yet, Like Garcia Hernandez points out, we are also aware that the colonial politics of desirability that privilege non-Latine white women (and, in many cases, white Latinas, too) tend to leave darker-skinned Latinas, and other women of colour, shortchanged, and it makes sense that we may be in a process of reconsidering how much of our time, love, and energy to give to him now. 

“I have friends who cancelled him. I won’t. I’m too far in the relationship and too curious about what happens next. But it does feel sad, and, well, not the same, like staying together after being cheated on,” Sotomayor says.