Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Was A Reclamation & Reimagination Of America

When Bad Bunny leaped off the Levi’s Stadium field in Santa Clara, California, ending his 13-minute Super Bowl halftime show chanting the lyrics of “DtMF,” the stadium erupted in fireworks. More than 2,800 miles away in Orlando, Florida, I saw the sky outside my window light up, too, flashing in brief bursts of color. In a city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in the contiguous U.S., some shop-owners shut their doors early so they could catch the show together with their families, others kept the lights on well into the night to host sold-out Benito Bowl watch parties, and others took to neighborhood roads, dancing with friends under street lights or illuminating entire neighborhoods with light shows. From the rolling hills of northwest California to the low wetlands of the Southeast U.S., we, distant neighbors, celebrated like patriots commemorating our beginning — because, for the millions of us who trace our histories across the American continent, we were.

For the estimated 135.4 to 142 million viewers who tuned in globally — figures that would make Bad Bunny’s halftime show the most-watched in history — it was an invitation to reclaim what it means to be an American, an identity and inheritance that for too long has been hegemonized by the U.S., even though it belongs to an entire continent.

After an energetic performance of a medley of hits like “Tití Me Pregunto,” “Yo Perreo Sola,” “Safaera,” “Party,” “Voy a Llevarte Pa PR,” “EoO,” and “Monaco,” to name a few, Bad Bunny, born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, ended his performance invoking “God Bless America.” It was the first English words he uttered during a halftime show that was historic, in part, because it was the first in the NFL’s 60-year run to ever be performed predominantly in Spanish. With the flags of Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, and the U.S., among others, waving behind him, the Puerto Rican rapper then went on to name countries across the Caribbean and South, Central, and North Americas. When he ended with “my motherland, mi patria, Puerto Rico,” he cemented his performance, like a victorious touchdown, with a football stamped with the words, “Together, We Are America.” It was a message for all of us, those who have always traced their roots to the region, those who arrived centuries ago, violently and forcefully, on ships, and those who, generation after generation, have migrated to this corner of the world carrying a dream.

The words, the flags, and the faces of racially and ethnically diverse people encircling the Grammy award-winning artist sent a message to President Donald Trump and the ultra-conservative, who boycotted Bad Bunny’s halftime show because of the rapper’s cultural identity and pro-immigrant politics: America is a continent, and his rendering of “God bless America” is a prayer for the people of every nation that stretches across it, not just the white U.S. citizens who have long positioned themselves as the primary beneficiaries of the label and land.

Transitioning to his native tongue to complete the blessing, like any other Latine church kid who speaks in English but prays in Spanish, Martínez Ocasio intoned an even more important invocation for migrants and their descendants: “seguimos aquí” — “we are still here” — a popular Puerto Rican refrain that marks our survival, presence, and refusal amid generations of political and natural disasters. 

Some who boycotted the performance tuned into an alternative halftime entertainment event, the “All-American Halftime Show,” organized by the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA. It aired live online at the same time as the NFL’s official halftime show, explicitly positioned as a protest of Bad Bunny’s performance. Roughly five million viewers (a fraction of the audience that watched Benito Bowl) tuned in to watch little-known country and rock artists like Kid Rock, Brantley Gilbert, Lee Brice, and Gabby Barrett. To them, Martínez Ocasio’s identity as a Puerto Rican artist, his use of his native Spanish, and his belief that “the only thing more powerful than hate is love” were framed as a threat to white American notions of “faith, family, and freedom.” 

Ironically, it is the people of Puerto Rico, a U.S. colonial territory, who have been calling for freedom since the U.S. seized the archipelago in 1898. Their cries reverberated throughout Bad Bunny’s performance. 

Bad Bunny commenced his historic performance with a stage set evoking Puerto Rican history, beginning with the brutal legacy of Spanish imperialism on the island. A man wearing a pava hat — the traditional hat of Puerto Rican agricultural workers, lovingly called jíbaros — strums the opening notes of “Tití Me Preguntó” and declares, “Qué rico es ser Latino.” Behind him stand sugarcane fields, where enslaved Africans and Indigenous Taínos as well as poor criollos once labored, enriching the pockets of the island’s first colonizers and giving rise to a shared Puerto Rican identity rooted in communal power and resistance to colonial systems.

Seconds later, Bad Bunny’s baritone resonates across the fields. Dressed in a cream collared shirt and tie, a sport-inspired jersey bearing his family name, Ocasio, and the number 64 (representing the birth year of his mother, Lysaurie Ocasio), and his signature BadBo 1.0 Adidas sneakers, he is flanked by actors: some, wearing pava hats, embody those Puerto Rican farmworkers of the past, while others dress in modern farmwear, portraying the contemporary Latine laborers who continue to toil across the harsh agricultural landscapes of the U.S. All of them hold machetes, a tool once wielded by formerly enslaved people to revolt against colonizers across the Caribbean.

As he dances through the sugarcane fields, Bad Bunny brings us with him to modern-day Puerto Rico. Vendors sell coco frio, welitos play dominos, Black and brown women adorn themselves at a nail salon, and workers continue to rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane María. Benito then cools off from the blazing Caribbean sun with a piragua and tacos from the beloved L.A. taco shop, Villas Tacos, a nod to the street vendors across California and the U.S. who have been targeted and harassed amid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns. 

Some of the scenes he portrays are painful, but there’s joy in his resistance and power in our cultural art forms and entertainment. Watching Bad Bunny evade punches from Puerto Rican boxer Xander Zayas and Mexican boxer Emiliano Vargas evokes the pride our families feel in our living rooms, watching our people represent us in sport. Seeing Latine artists like Cardi B, Karol G, Pedro Pascal, Young Miko, and Jessica Alba dancing en la casita — a life-size replica of a traditional pink Puerto Rican house that Bad Bunny has used as a stage during his historic 31-day “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí residency” in Puerto Rico and on his Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour to symbolize a pari de marquesina, those Caribbean garage parties nostalgic to so many of us — summons us to move through the structural violence we continue to endure with dance, too, just as our ancestors did. 

But instead of bomba and plena, traditional Afro-Puerto Rican musical genres born from protest and community, women in khaki miniskorts shake their asses as Bad Bunny raps the lyrics to his reggaeton hit “Yo Perreo Sola,” a song about bodily autonomy, independence, and the right to dance without harassment. “Las mujeres en el mundo entero, perreando sin miedo,” he says, assuring women everywhere they have the space to move freely and safely in the show he’s created. Bad Bunny then transitions smoothly into “Safaera,” where we, global fans, sing the words to a sexually explicit, and empowered, song he can’t rap on the largest stage in the world: “Si tu novio no te mama,” he sings, as countless viewers yell back, “el culo, pa eso que no mame. Baja pa casa que yo te lambo toa. Mami, yo te lambo toa.”

Welcoming millions of watchers to “la fiesta más grande en el mundo entero,” Bad Bunny knows his halftime performance will break streaming records. He has shattered records throughout his career, becoming Spotify’s most-streamed artist worldwide in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2025 and surpassing Amazon Music’s live-streamed concerts during his “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí: Una Más” finale. That’s because, as the world now knows, no one parties quite like folks from the Caribbean. There is protest, resilience, and freedom in the dips, sways, and wines that Trump labeled “disgusting.” And through his performance of “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR,” the Grammy award-winning “EoO,” and a medley tribute to reggaeton pioneers like Tego Calderón, Don Omar, and Daddy Yankee, Bad Bunny invites the world to perrear como una puertorriqueña, to learn history and dance through Puerto Rican rhythms. 

Ahead of his halftime show, Bad Bunny emphasized that language wouldn’t be a barrier to enjoying his performance. Speaking with Apple Music Radio hosts Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden at the Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Press Conference, Martínez Ocasio urged those who’d be watching to dance from the heart, to relish a “heartbeat dance” — and heart was at the center of the entire show. 

There was the moment Bad Bunny stared into a camera, pointed at the viewers watching from television sets, laptop screens, and portable projectors, and encouraged them to always believe in themselves because they are worth more than they know. There was the couple, kissing after “I do” in a white wedding gown and tuxedo, who legally married during the halftime show. There was Lady Gaga, one of Bad Bunny’s favorite artists, and Los Sobrinos, a Puerto Rican band who played on his most recent album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, performing a salsa rendition of “Die With a Smile” as the newlyweds shared their wedding cake. And when Bad Bunny returned to the mic, there were moments of cross-generational care. First, while singing his hit “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” he gently woke a child sleeping on two seats, an experience every Latine who grew up going to family parties that stretch well into the night knows. Then, during “Nueva Yol,” he gifted a child his Album of the Year Grammy trophy, kneeling to the ground, and whispering to him, “Cree siempre en ti.” The boy symbolizes Bad Bunny’s own inner child, Latine youth across the diaspora, and, perhaps, even Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old Ecuadorian boy who was detained by ICE in Minnesota while coming home from school.

But Martínez Ocasio’s heart danced most passionately for his homeland — and for Puerto Ricans, whose population in the contiguous U.S. outnumbers that in the archipelago, home is often experienced differently, though no less authentically, throughout the diaspora. In “Nueva Yol,” Benito takes us to a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Big Apple, with Puerto Rican flags hanging from store windows, women braiding each other’s hair outside of a barber shop, Brooklyn’s own Toñita, the beloved owner of the community anchor Caribbean Social Club, handing him a shot of rum, and Boricuas of every shade dancing in the street to a genre their Nuyorican ancestors co-created. 

Ricky Martin then takes us back to Puerto Rico, now to the rural mountains, where he reinterprets Ocasio Martínez’s “Lo Que Pasó en Hawaii,” a protest song against U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico and a call to its people to fight to preserve land, heritage, and culture at a time when tourism-driven colonial pressures aim to reshape the island. When Bad Bunny returns to the mic, it’s to perform “El Apagón,” a sharply political song that uses the debilitating power outages in Puerto Rico to critique government corruption and displacement. Carrying a Puerto Rican flag and, at one point, scaling a sparking utility pole, Bad Bunny, through the song, urges Puerto Ricans to fight for the future and sovereignty of their land and people.

But as the music shifts from electro-reggaeton to plena, traditional Puerto Rican folk music, Bad Bunny extends his call. Walking off a set design of Puerto Rico that, in itself, should garner awards, and symbolically into the homes of those watching across the Americas, he names each country that makes up the Caribbean, South America, Central America, and North America — urging us all to reimagine American-ness, no longer restricted to the U.S.’s linguistic hegemony or make-believe colonial borders. Bound by shared histories, cultures, and resilience, he invites us to claim belonging and community that transcends nation-states and challenges centuries of imposed divisions.

This, of course, is the greatest threat to the ultra-right. It’s why Turning Point produced the All-American Halftime Show. It fears not just Bad Bunny but what his artistry is capable of: reimagination. 

Through history, education, joy, dance, pleasure, and love, Bad Bunny’s music allows us to envision another reality — one where we, as marginalized people, understand our power and our worth, and where we fight lovingly for our undocumented neighbor in the house next door and for those enduring state repression in neighboring countries. 

This is the cross-continental America we can create, the one where solidarity, justice, and dignity prevail for all of us, the one worth putting our hearts into and illuminating our skies for. After all, as Martínez Ocasio noted in a jumbotron during his final performance: “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”