1. Bregando el Super Bowl

In Puerto Rican parlance, Bad Bunny was bregando. As Puerto Rican author Arcadio Díaz Quiñones examines bregar, an everyday verb for working through both easy and difficult situations, it names a practice, a strategy, and a struggle, an active ethics and a situated mentality: “Brega refers to a language and practices that precede individuals and sustain the community” (384; my translation).Footnote ³ Díaz Quiñones further describes it as a strategy that brings “into relation what until then appeared distant or antagonistic” (381; my translation). Bad Bunny was bregando by bringing a uniquely Puerto Rican and Spanish-language performance into the heart of American culture, showing community relations and articulating what had otherwise seemed distant to mainland Americans: Puerto Rico.

Before the show, conservative media had already attacked Martínez Ocasio’s Puerto Rican identity and his decision to sing in Spanish. Afterward, President Donald Trump called the performance “absolutely terrible,” declaring that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying” (El-Bawab).Footnote ⁴ His “nobody” clearly imagines a national audience that does not include Spanish speakers. For younger viewers accustomed to having their Spanish disparaged, the performance offered reprieve from what Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa calls “linguistic terrorism.” In contrast, Trump’s response reflected a wider environment that associates Spanish with undocumented status, even “illegality,” in the United States.Footnote ⁵

Bad Bunny’s bregar of a national celebration is also inflected by the verb’s everyday uses, its relationship to play and work taking shape in dominoes and piragua sales seen on stage. As Díaz Quiñones writes, “Whoever practices bregar well handles something wisely, whether a world of things, a world of people, or language itself” (380; my translation).Footnote ⁶ The choreography brought that skill to national spectacle, inviting viewers into familiar pleasures while continuing in Spanish. The show articulated the quotidian realities of Puerto Rican identity and pride in it, refusing to let those identities remain distant or unseen, celebrating Afro-Latino and Latino peoples and their oft-hidden work to preserve Puerto Rican identities and places.

2. God Bless América

For many Latinos, the performance captured a fraught pride in our different identities because, in Latin America, invoking a shared identity sometimes means invoking racist ideas like “mejorar la raza,” or “bettering the race.” At the end of the show, Bad Bunny said, “God bless América,” named all the Latin American countries across the hemisphere, and joined a procession of flags before throwing down the football (figure 2). A familiar phrase from U.S. patriotism became a Hispanicized blessing whose geography extends beyond the United States. But that extensive political geography is not racially innocent.Footnote ⁷

Figure 2.

Bad Bunny holds the football amid Latin American flags. Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, 2026. Screenshot by author.

That invocation of pan-Hispanicism has a longer, very problematic history. In “Nuestra América” (1891), the Cuban revolutionary José Martí imagined a hemispheric political identity capable of confronting the power of the United States. He pictured Latin American nations as trees resisting the United States: “the trees must fall into line, so that the seven-league giant cannot pass” (my translation).Footnote ⁸ That image offers a way to read the procession of flags at the end of Bad Bunny’s halftime show, their ordered movement resembling a line of trees. The vision of a collective Latin American identity is not without an ideological history and Martí’s supposedly non-racial framework.

In his canonical essay “Mi raza” (1893), Martí defended Black equality, but he also described: “differential rights”—rights distinguished by race—as the “enemies of peace” (my translation).Footnote ⁹ His defense of equality could make political claims grounded in racial difference appear divisive.

His argument sought to unite Black and white Cubans in the struggle for independence from Spain. Its promise of a common future depended on what differences that unity could accommodate. But his “post-racial vision” of democracy anticipated the selective logic of Trump’s vision of American-ness. Plainly said, both Martí and Trump situate their racial frameworks in language that leaves no room for what they label “differential rights” or “affirmative action.”Footnote ¹⁰ Neither framework leaves room for racial difference or Spanish, respectively, within national identity.

Read alongside Martí, Bad Bunny’s halftime show makes national identities more readily visible than the inequalities within them. What Martí invoked, Bad Bunny channeled, illustrating how a shared Latino identity does not necessarily include the history of the people whose labor produced countries like Cuba in the first place. While workers are present, the picturesque field leaves the violence of plantation labor largely unstated because the performance is a nationalist spectacle.Footnote ¹¹ That history also concerns land transformed for profit, where decisions about what to grow and build determine who—and what—can remain.

3. Concho’s Puerto Rico and the politics of conservation

In the halftime show, that struggle to remain on the island took the form of El Sapo Concho on the stadium’s scoreboard (figure 3). He represents the Puerto Rican crested toad, a species threatened by habitat loss and introduced species. He is the mascot of another kind of competition. His presence brings a struggle for environmentalism into the place where football’s victories and defeats are recorded.Footnote ¹²

Figure 3.

El Sapo Concho appears on the scoreboard at Levi’s Stadium. Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, 2026. Screenshot by author.

In Puerto Rico, environmentalism goes hand-in-hand with resisting gentrification, military and corporate encroachment, and the effects of global warming. Concho’s habitats are increasingly paved over by parking lots.Footnote ¹³ What appears to be empty ground is an active ecological site: both toads and sugarcane reveal the ecological intricacies of Puerto Rican history at the Super Bowl. Concho appears remotely. His home is Puerto Rico.

Bad Bunny then crashed into his childhood home—the same one seen in his Debí Tirar Más Fotos, where an elderly Puerto Rican man (played by the poet and actor Jacobo Morales) tells him about the island he remembers while sitting on the porch (figure 4).Footnote ¹⁴ From the house, Morales narrates a sense of loss and bewilderment about changes to the island, and the film and the crested toad shape that sense of loss. The house provides viewers a way of understanding that Bad Bunny is bregando so much personal and collective history, a celebration rooted in careful reflection. Díaz Quiñones places bregar precisely within this history of development: bregar has proved unable to prevent the destruction, carried out in the name of progress, of “the delicate ecology of the island’s scarce territory” (412; my translation).

Figure 4.

Jacobo Morales sits with Concho on a porch. Debí Tirar Más Fotos, dir. Bad Bunny, Reference Bunny2025. Screenshot by author.

That sense of loss belongs to a housing market where the conversion of homes into tourist accommodations makes a neighborhood more profitable by reducing the housing available to its residents.Footnote ¹⁵ In Making Livable Worlds, anthropologist Hilda Lloréns examines how AfroPuerto Rican women respond to gentrification, displacement, and environmental harm through practices of mutual aid, community ties, shared knowledge, litigation, and more.Footnote ¹⁶ She addresses, for example, attorney Ruth Santiago’s work in Jobos Bay over three decades, fighting against proposals to make it “a site in which to place heavy industries such as energy-generation, plants, pharmaceuticals, military bases, and manufacturing plants” (96). This is precisely what Ricky Martin sang about at the tail end of the halftime performance through the jíbaro refrain of lelolai, warning about the possibility of Puerto Rico becoming gentrified like Hawaiʻi, which recently experienced fires compounded by decades of resort development and water diversion.

In “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaiʻi,” Martin sings, “They want to take my river and beach” (my translation).Footnote ¹⁷ Its refrain asks listeners not to let go of the flag or forget the lelolai: “No, no suelte’ la bandera ni olvide’ el lelolai.” The Puerto Rican flag appears alongside lelolai, a refrain from Puerto Rico’s rural jíbaro musical tradition highlighting traditional practices. Here, Puerto Rico’s beauty is inseparable from the question of who can continue to live there.

4. Bregar beyond the Super Bowl

While Bad Bunny transformed the most American of spectacles into a celebration of Puerto Rico’s beauty, diaspora, and troubled colonial histories, there were clear limits to what he could say and how he could say it. With that in mind, he was able to bregar his way to the end zone and draw attention to political and social commitments in Puerto Rico. Those commitments remain rooted in Afro-Latino and Latino activism on the island and across its diaspora. They illustrate that Concho’s survival remains an active site of contention—one bound up with how the performance was anticipated and received in the United States. Still, at the end zone, Bad Bunny spiked the ball and, for a moment, won the game on his own terms.