By Rose Ana Berbeo

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out!” proclaimed trap and reggaeton artist Bad Bunny on February 1, while accepting the Grammy award for best urban music album.

The crowd inside the show, which took place in Los Angeles, overwhelmingly responded with cheers.

“We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens,” Bad Bunny added. “We are humans and we are Americans.”

Bad Bunny won a total of three Grammy awards, one of which was a history-making win for album of the year for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos).” It was the first time a Spanish-language album took the Recording Academy’s top prize.

The Grammy ceremony and Bad Bunny’s anti-ICE statement came in the context of the Trump administration’s brutal crackdown against immigrant workers, with hundreds of thousands of people arrested and deported in the last year, often violently. This anti-working-class assault has generated mass protests — particularly in Minnesota, which has become ground zero for the ICE dragnet. That’s where last month federal agents murdered volunteer observers Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, in cold blood.

Bad Bunny, one of the most well-known and awarded U.S. musicians today, repeated his pro-immigrant message a week later at the Super Bowl halftime show, without making an explicit political statement as he did in the Grammys.

This time the musician delivered his message with an artistic performance seen by millions as a celebration of an America encompassing everyone from Alaska to the U.S. mainland, the Caribbean, and the entire central and southern parts of the continent. The main feature of the show — with more than 128 million people tuned in — was an explicit expression of Puerto Rican pride.

Bad Bunny joins artistic resistance to anti-immigrant crackdown

With these actions, Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio), one of the world’s most streamed performers, joined a growing list of musicians, poets, and other artists who have become part of the resistance to the Trump administration’s attempt to divide the working class into native born and foreigners and hamper its ability to resist Trump’s catastrophic drive toward one-man rule.

The Super Bowl is widely known as the most-watched event on television in the United States, and performing in its halftime show is a coveted opportunity. The National Football League’s (NFL) choice of Bad Bunny was considered a good business choice, as the New York Times noted: “He has broken ticketing records around the world, produced 15 Top 10 hits and won album of the year at the Grammys last week.”

Right-wing forces, however, decried the NFL’s choice from the moment it was announced in September. These politicians and pundits were unhappy about giving such a prominent stage to a performer known for singing exclusively in Spanish and who has repeatedly criticized U.S. president Donald Trump in the past.

In fact, Trump and his supporters amplified the controversy with their reactions. Trump called it “a terrible choice.” Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem threatened that ICE agents would be “all over” the Super Bowl. “It’s so shameful that they’ve decided to pick somebody who just seems to hate America so much,” complained Department of Homeland Security (DHS) adviser Corey Lewandowski.

Bad Bunny has denounced many of the president’s policies since Trump’s first presidential term. He criticized the Trump administration’s response in 2017 to Hurricane Maria, which killed 3,000 people and devastated Puerto Rico’s infrastructure. The musician made headlines when he said in an interview he would not make any U.S. stops during his 2025 world tour — which included Puerto Rico — to avoid victimization of his fans by ICE.

The exhilarating ‘Benito Bowl’

The 13-minute halftime show — referred to by fans as the “Benito Bowl” — featured reggaeton, trap, salsa, bomba y plena, dembow, and pop music; a set built to evoke a typical Puerto Rican neighborhood; and a slew of celebrities, and hundreds of dancing extras. Virtually every word was in Spanish — a first in Super Bowl history — with the only exception being the song Lady Gaga sang in English.

The show was also full of politically and culturally charged symbols:

• Bad Bunny started his performance in recreated sugar cane fields — once Puerto Rico’s cash crop, an industry that depended on slave labor in colonial times and which was marked by wage-laborers’ struggles under U.S. occupation. He began with walking amid laborers in straw hats chopping at stalks. He strode past vendors of coco frío, tacos, and piraguas; a pair of boxers sparring; a table of older gentlemen playing dominoes; women at a nail salon. It was the singer’s way of accurately describing his native Puerto Rico as a place of both cultural joy and class exploitation.
• There were ample references to Puerto Rico’s colonial and neo-colonial past.^[1] These included Bad Bunny waving the light blue pro-independence Puerto Rican flag, climbing sputtering electrical poles to represent the controversy over widespread blackouts on the island (and the Trump administration’s canceling of $815 million to bolster the island’s electrical grid, along with other devastating cuts),^[2] and singing “Apagón” (Blackout).
• Pop star Ricky Martin sang Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (What Happened to Hawaii) with anti-colonial lyrics that allude to Hawaii (and Puerto Rico’s) loss of land, language, and culture. This took on significance beyond Puerto Rico, given the Trump administration’s pronouncement and celebration of its imperialist foreign policy, which it calls the “Donroe Doctrine.” This policy includes Washington’s January 3 military attack on Venezuela and the seizure of its president; calls to annex Canada; the U.S. hardening its blockade and threats against Cuba; and sharp threats against the Mexican and Colombian governments — just in the Western hemisphere.
• At the show’s closing, Bad Bunny’s exclaimed “God Bless America!” in English, followed by listing in Spanish all the countries in North and South America, with performers waving their flags — from Canada to the USA, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. A lighted billboard as a backdrop read in English, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Bad Bunny then held up a football to the cameras painted with the words in English “Together, We Are America,” saying out loud in Spanish, “And my homeland, Puerto Rico, we are still here.”

The performance was especially striking because football is the top sport in the United States,^[3] and as such, the Super Bowl halftime show is an important part of popular culture. As The Atlantic noted in 2017, following the start of the “take a knee” movement among athletes to protest police brutality and anti-Black racism, “Football has always been a battleground in the culture war.”

For these reasons, and especially given the Grammy precedent and right-wing attacks on the NFL’s choice for the halftime show, watching the “Benito Bowl” was a moving experience for me, even though I happen not to be a fan of the reggaeton or trap music genres.

Afterward, many U.S. mainstream media commentators praised Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance as “an all-American triumph” (Variety), and a “revolutionary” event (ABC), with CNN dedicating a special report called “Rhythms of Resistance,” and the New York Times saying it “gave voice” to Puerto Rico’s “Crisis Generation,” while others said it “steered clear of strong political statements” and focused on fun (People.com).

The language learning app Duolingo reported a 35% spike in Spanish learning activity during the halftime show — attributing it to many who didn’t understand what was being said looking to learn. It was another confirmation of the show’s positive impact among millions.

Political polarization

However, reflecting the real polarization across the United States on immigration, about six million viewers tuned out of Bad Bunny’s halftime show and instead tuned in to an “alternative” show set simultaneously on YouTube. Turning Point USA, the right-wing group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, organized this performance, which starred the right-leaning musician Kid Rock.

After the Super Bowl, a chorus of right-wing voices condemned Bad Bunny and his show, starting with Trump.

In a social media post, Trump called it “one of the worst, EVER!” and “an affront to the Greatness of America. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting.” 

A Fox News op-ed by Jorge Bonilla called the show “a slap at America” and said it featured the “toxic ideas” of Puerto Rican independence and “Latino identity as a nation within a nation.”

Cuban American congresswoman Maria Salazar (Republican, Florida) — known for her incessant and virulent attacks on the Cuban revolution — said, “To have a fully Spanish-language halftime show, without subtitles, is not inclusive. It’s exclusive.”

Others went further, demanding disciplinary actions or criminal charges.

Anthony Sabatini, a Florida Republican politician, called for deporting “Bad Bunny immediately,” and another, Randy Fine, described the show as “illegal” and demanded a Federal Communications Commission fine.

U.S. congressman Andy Ogles (Republican, Tennessee) asked the House Energy and Commerce Committee to investigate the NFL and NBC, which broadcast the show, for “a performance dominated by sexually explicit lyrical themes and suggestive choreography,” adding “American culture will not be mocked or corrupted without consequence.”

At the same time, a minority among right-wing voices defended the show, warning that the virulent attacks against Bad Bunny may alienate many Latinos.

As the New Republic reported, “Conservative influencer Emily Austin said, ‘Bad Bunny had the biggest stage in the world and could’ve made it political. He didn’t. He chose unity & love. You can celebrate different backgrounds and still love this country.’ And Vianca Rodriguez, who worked on the Trump campaign, said that Trump supporters who complained were ‘alienating [the] Puerto Rican conservative base.’”

This debate underlined the significance of Bad Bunny’s actions and the depth and extent of the pushback against Trump’s anti-immigrant policies among a growing majority of U.S. residents.

NOTES

[1] Puerto Rico has been a colony of the United States since the Spanish-American war in 1898, although its official status is “commonwealth.” Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens but cannot participate in U.S. presidential elections or have full voting representation in Congress. The pro-independence movement has been brutally repressed by the U.S. colonial power. Even though the majority of Puerto Ricans are not fluent in the language, English is the co-official language along with Spanish. As a result, Puerto Rico faces economic devastation, extreme social inequality, and environmental harm. The U.S. military has also used the island and the bases it has built there as a staging ground for interventions abroad and weapons testing.

[2] The total electrical grid fund was $1 billion. The Trump administration also canceled $300 million to promote solar and energy storage systems at hospitals and for vulnerable residents.

[3] According to a 2024 Gallup poll.

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