In 2023, Bad Bunny gave what he said was his “first English speech ever” when he presented his producer, Noah Assad of Rimas Entertainment, with the Billboard Executive of the Year Award.
“We are from the same place. We are from a small, very small island in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico,” said Bad Bunny in his speech. “We have a huge music culture. We have a beautiful music history and I’m very proud to spread to the world our music, our culture, together.”
The remarks were heartfelt and sincere. The iconic Puerto Rico singer and his close friend and producer had climbed to the top of the music industry together. Their meteoric rise continued with the NFL announcement that Bad Bunny will perform at the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, the most widely watched entertainment each year in the United States.
A nagging concern among people who profess skepticism over Puerto Rican statehood is the alleged potential loss of Puerto Rican culture. Although Puerto Rico is already fully a part of the U.S. family as a U.S. territory, there has been historic concern that elevating Puerto Rico’s status from a territory – sometimes called a colony – to that of a state with full democratic rights and secure U.S. citizenship would somehow lead to the erasure of Puerto Rican culture.
The Super Bowl is the biggest American cultural event. Nothing else comes close in size, grandeur, symbolism or global resonance. As recently pointed out by blogger Charlotte Clymer, as many Americans watched the Super Bowl last year as those who watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969, which was once indisputably the most-watched live event by Americans.
Excluding the moon landing, the top ten live American television broadcasts are all Super Bowls, and the top three are all from the past three years. Clymer writes:
“There is no American cultural event that comes within shouting distance—much less spitting distance—of the Super Bowl. When you walk around today, wherever you are—at work or a café or a park or your kid’s school—keep in mind that, on average, at least a third of the adults around you were all watching the Super Bowl at the same time this year.”
In the words of Clymer, the Super Bowl can be considered “a showcase of American exceptionalism” and “a distillation of all things America: sports and celebrity and military pageantry and unabashed patriotism and unapologetic commercialism all being slammed together.”
This year, a Puerto Rican performer will be the featured artist at the Super Bowl halftime show. He will proudly sing in Spanish, bringing his Latin music and reggaeton to a global audience. In doing so, he will put Puerto Rico on center stage, sharing his music and culture with the largest television viewership in the United States.
If there were ever doubts in the past, they no longer exist. It is time to exhale. Puerto Rican music and culture have proven strong enough to withstand any potential pressure to erase it. In fact, the opposite is true: Puerto Rican talent like Bad Bunny’s is welcome throughout the global marketplace and is not threatened by imaginary doom loops about the possible loss of Puerto Rican culture if the colony were to get finally the right to vote and protected U.S. citizenship.
If anything, Americans living stateside have generally embraced and elevated Bad Bunny’s artistry. At this pivotal moment, Super Bowl decisionmakers have decided to platform the Puerto Rican culture that produced Bad Bunny and continues to inspire his music. All Americans will have the chance to see this Puerto Rican talent in full display during the Super Bowl halftime show on February 8, 2026.
