The sugar cane fields came first. Before Bad Bunny sang a single word on February 8, the stage at the most-watched halftime show in Super Bowl history was dressed in the visual vocabulary of Puerto Rican colonialism: cane fields, utility poles, the particular darkness of a neighborhood that lost its lights after Hurricane María and waited years for them to come back. If you knew, you knew. If you did not, you watched a very good concert.
That gap is the whole argument.
The Set Was a History Lesson Nobody Assigned
The sky-blue Puerto Rican flag that appeared during the performance is not decoration. That specific shade of blue was outlawed after the United States took Puerto Rico as a territory, banned until 1957, worn in defiance long before it was worn in celebration. Bad Bunny did not explain this. He did not stop the show to offer context. He trusted that the people who needed to feel it would feel it, and he was right. Searches for Puerto Rico surged over 1,500 percent in the three weeks after the performance. Westridge students were dissecting the symbolism in class by early March. That is not the footprint of a branding exercise. That is the footprint of a lesson.
The critics who call this performance mere spectacle are making a fair observation about scale: yes, the Super Bowl is the most corporate stage on earth, and yes, Bad Bunny has a Spotify presence that most artists would trade their publishing for. I understand the skepticism. But confusing the platform with the message is like dismissing Marvin Gaye because Motown had a profit motive.
What separates craft from decoration is specificity, and this performance was specific down to the utility poles. The song "El Apagón" is not a vague protest anthem. It is about the gentrification of Vega Baja, about who gets to stay in a neighborhood after the disaster capital moves in. Ricky Martin singing an anti-statehood ballad on that stage, with Governor Jenniffer González's pro-statehood position hanging in the background, was not a coincidence. Bad Bunny built the set list the way a good cook builds a menu: every element doing work, nothing there just for texture.
What the Boycotters and the Cynics Both Got Wrong
Benny Johnson circulated an AI-generated image of Bad Bunny burning a U.S. flag. It was debunked within days: wrong number of flag stripes, missing tattoos, a Google AI watermark. The people who spread it were not fact-checking. They were confirming a feeling. And the feeling was correct in one narrow sense: Bad Bunny did say something real. He said "God bless America" and then named twenty-five nations across the Americas and the Caribbean, redefining who the sentence includes. Trump complained that "nobody understands a word this guy is saying." That was not a criticism. That was an admission.
The U.S. media coverage problem is concrete: only about eight percent of American journalists are Hispanic or Latine, per 2022 Pew Research data. Most outlets covering the February 8 performance reported the spectacle and missed the text. That is not Bad Bunny's failure. That is a newsroom composition problem, and editors should feel that number like a splinter.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio has been wearing skirts and speaking against ICE and flying the sky-blue flag since before any of this was a profile opportunity. The Grammy acceptance speech against ICE on February 1, one week before the Super Bowl, was not a warm-up act. It was the same argument, smaller room.
The sugar cane was real. The outage poles were real. You had to already know something to read them. That is not a weakness in the performance. That is the whole point.
