Bad Bunny’s Halftime Show Arrives at the Right Time

While speaking Spanish is criminalized on the streets, this weekend it will be celebrated on America's biggest stage.

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Pop culture has a way of showing up in the damndest moments. When the most marginalized are rendered invisible by mainstream narratives, art arrives uninvited, unfiltered, and impossible to ignore.

After winning Album of the Year at the Grammys, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, is preparing to take the Super Bowl halftime stage this Sunday—against the backdrop of U.S. federal agents conducting coordinated raids across Latino communities nationwide. ICE routinely stops people of color on the street, asking where they’re from and scrutinizing accents that don’t sound “American.” Speaking Spanish on the subway, at work, or in schools—even in cities where it has been spoken for generations—is treated as evidence of foreignness.

Bad Bunny does not sidestep that reality. He starts his acceptance speech at the Grammys as the first Spanish-language artist to win Album of the Year with “ICE out.”

He dedicates the moment to immigrants facing detention and deportation. “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens,” he tells the audience. “We are humans and we are Americans.” It is not a vague appeal to unity—it is a direct refusal to allow immigrant communities to be dehumanized on one of the most visible stages in American culture.

The Super Bowl LX halftime stage—the most-watched television event in the United States— will see its first primarily Spanish-speaking solo performer to do so. What looks like mainstream embrace is also a political punctuation mark—a Latinx artist claiming space on a stage long dominated by Anglo pop, amid renewed panic over language, immigration, and belonging.

In 1988, when N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton, the FBI sent the group a warning letter. What was dismissed as “gangsta rap” was, in hindsight, reportage—an unfiltered account of police violence years before “police brutality” entered mainstream discourse. In 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” moved from headphones into the streets, becoming a chant during Black Lives Matter protests.

Bad Bunny belongs to this lineage of music. His latest album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, doesn’t just entertain—it insists on the legitimacy of voices long treated as disposable, on highlighting the effects of gentrification and colonization on Puerto Rico.

That insistence has drawn predictable backlash. Right-wing politicians have renewed calls to make English the official language of the United States—a symbolic move less about unity than about policing belonging.

English may be dominant, but it has never been alone. Nearly one in five Americans speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish leading by a wide margin. The U.S. is, in fact, the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world after Mexico—yet speaking Spanish is still treated as evidence of foreignness. Spanish predates English in much of what is now the United States—spreading across Florida, the Southwest, and California long before Jamestown. English rose not because it arrived first, but because it arrived with power. Empire, war, and policy did the work.

Puerto Ricans sit at the center of this contradiction. Granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, they never crossed an international border to migrate. Yet their movement to the mainland—especially to New York—has long been framed as a problem rather than a consequence of colonial rule.

“I think the fact that he sings in Spanish also has to do with the larger context of Puerto Rican history. Some of the songs in his latest album dwell on the history of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony, and he’s doing us a service because that history has been rendered invisible in the United States,” says Harvard scholar Alejandro L. Madrid, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music in an interview. “There are still lots of people in this country that don’t know that Puerto Rico is part of the United States and that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens even though they speak Spanish.”

Bad Bunny’s latest album is his most Puerto Rican yet—rooted in the island’s rhythms, political memory, and unresolved relationship to the United States. It grapples with colonial extraction, debt, disaster, and the quiet forces that push people to leave home. As Yale professor Albert Sergio Laguna has noted, this album doubles down on Puerto Rican musical traditions rather than sanding them down.

American culture has always known how to turn suffering into spectacle—to cheer diversity on screen while criminalizing it on the street. Bad Bunny’s presence does not resolve that tension—it exposes it.