Summary
NPR preview of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show, featuring an interview with academic Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, co-author of P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance. Frames Bad Bunny’s performance as simultaneously a party and a political protest — a deliberate strategy of joy-as-resistance.
Key Points
- Bad Bunny won Album of the Year at the 2026 Grammys for Debí Tirar Más Fotos — first Spanish-language album ever to win that award
- His Grammys speech: “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out. We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens — we’re humans and we are Americans.”
- Wellesley College professor Rivera-Rideau teaches a course: “Bad Bunny: Race, Gender, and Empire in Reggaetón” — uses his work as a gateway to Puerto Rican history
- Bad Bunny’s political history: criticized Trump’s Hurricane Maria response in 2018 on The Tonight Show; endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024; song “Nuevayol” mocks Trump’s immigration policies
- Rivera-Rideau’s thesis: Bad Bunny’s resistance is expressed through joy — “The Party is the Protest”
- Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens but have been caught in ICE operations due to “racialization of Spanish”
Newsletter Angles
- The political frame: Bad Bunny represents the thesis that cultural expression can be a more durable form of political resistance than conventional protest — joy-as-organizing
- The Puerto Rico angle: U.S. citizens who are “perpetually foreign” — a systemic form of exclusion that the immigration debate rarely grapples with honestly
- Academic lens on pop culture: the Bad Bunny Syllabus as a model for how a single artist can anchor a curriculum on history, politics, and empire
Entities Mentioned
- Bad Bunny — central subject; political history and Grammy wins detailed
- Roc Nation — selected Bad Bunny as Super Bowl performer
- Donald Trump — subject of Bad Bunny’s political critiques
Concepts Mentioned
- Cultural Politics of Sport — halftime show as political stage
- Joy as Resistance — the “party is the protest” framework
Quotes
“One of the things we talk about in our book is that Bad Bunny is part of resistance, he does engage in protests but it’s often through joy. We have a chapter in our book called ‘The Party is the Protest’ and I actually feel like that’s what I expect at the Superbowl, a party and a protest.” — Petra R. Rivera-Rideau
Notes
Strong analytical framing. The academic context (Rivera-Rideau, Wellesley) gives this more intellectual grounding than typical game-preview coverage. The “perpetually foreign” framing for Latino/Puerto Rican Americans is the most useful concept here for newsletter purposes.