Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show brought music, dance, and rich visual effects to the Super Bowl, drawing the largest audience any halftime show has ever had. It also included some history lessons.
Bad Bunny, originally Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, included Puerto Rican traditions, family moments — including an actual wedding and a family watching the Grammys, with Bad Bunny handing a trophy to the small son of the family. Familiar foods, businesses, entertainments, and architecture made a path through small vignettes into a celebration of Puerto Rico’s culture. But there were also bigger messages.
Colonialism
Sugar cane dancers with European-style violins bring up Puerto Rico’s colonization by Spain. Initially, indigenous Tainos were forced ot work in gold mines, bvut Spain imported enslaved people from Africa in the 1500s, when both Puerto Rico’s sugar plantations and the violin began. Sugar cane was more important to Spain economically than gold by the 1600s. Over the next two centuries, Spain’s trade restrictions and natural disasters crippled the sugar industry in Puerto Rico.
When Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898, U.S. companies stepped in, bringing automation and dominating the sugar trade. Family farms went under and most of the profits went to the states.
Puerto Rico conbtinues to have a colonial relationship with the United States.
Boxing
The boxers in the first song get about the same amount of time as the dominoes players, but the history of boxing in Puerto Rico is woven into the island’s social, cultural, and political life, developing from local pastime to a defining element of national identity. Although informal fighting took place on the island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—often around sugar mills, work camps, and town festivals—the sport began to take formal shape after the United States established governance in 1898. American soldiers, sailors, and workers brought organized boxing with them, and gyms began to appear in urban centers like San Juan and Ponce. By the 1920s and 1930s, Puerto Ricans were not only watching boxing but training seriously.
Sixto Escobar became Puerto Rico’s first world champion in 1934. Escobar’s rise was more than a personal achievement; it marked the moment when an island still struggling with poverty and economic instability found a hero on the global stage. His success helped establish boxing as a route to international recognition at a time when Puerto Rico had limited political voice but deep pride in cultural achievement. In 1948, Juan Evangelista Venegas Trinidad won Puerto Rico’s first Olympic medal. By now,Puerto Rican boxers have won six gold medals.
American unity
At the end of the set, Bad Bunny switched to English to say, “God Bless America!”, going on to list the nations in the Americas from South to North, plus the territory of Puerto Rico. The flags of all these American places streamed through the space, and Bad Bunny marked the moment by spiking a football which said, “Together we are America.” Speaking again of Puerto Rico, he said, “We are still here.”
“Lo único más poderoso que el odio es el amor,” was then displayed, followed by its English translation: “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Certainly, Bad Bunny was correcting the U.S. habit of calling the United States of America “America” as though the rest of South, Central and North America were not really included in that term. But he was also calling for unity, and for decolonization of Puerto Rico not with hate or violence, but with love.
The show brought attention to Puerto Rico, making this the perfect time to reach out to your legislators and let them know that it is time to admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state of the Union.
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