Why Bad Bunny’ Super Bowl halftime performance matters to Latinos
A few months back, a discussion broke out in the De Los chat about whether or not Bad Bunny would win album of the year at the 68th Grammy Awards for his LP “Debí Tirar Más Fotos.”
I was firmly in the “yes” camp from the day the nominations were announced and I was right!
But if I’m being honest, I had my doubts that it would happen until the second that presenter Harry Styles called out the Puerto Rican singer’s name Sunday night.
Those in the “no” camp — who were still rooting for him to win — had history in their favor. It’s so rare for any major awards show, but especially the Grammys, to recognize artists at the peak of their powers. It’s almost as if these voting bodies feel that some (usually Black) artists must go through a weird humiliation ritual before being deemed worthy.
In 2015, Beyoncé’s self-titled LP lost album of the year in favor of Beck’s “Morning Phase.” She was overlooked again when Adele won album of the year for “25” over her seminal album “Lemonade” at the 59th Grammy Awards. Her club classic “Renaissance” also missed out on the top prize in 2023, with Styles’ “Harry’s House” taking home the award.
Rapper Macklemore won the rap album Grammy over Kendrick Lamar’s “good kid, m.A.A.d. City” at the 56th iteration of the award ceremony. At the 2016 Grammys, Lamar’s deeply layered LP “To Pimp a Butterfly” lost album of the year to Taylor Swift’s “1989.” Mumford & Sons’ “Babel” won album of the year in 2013 over Frank Ocean’s “Channel Orange.”
The anti-Blackness in the Recording Academy — the voting body that chooses Grammy winners — cannot be understated.
But in a rare move the voters, which included the Latin Grammy Awards’ voting body for the first time this year, chose the album that actually reflected the cultural zeitgeist.
Really it was less so that I believed Bad Bunny would win as much as I felt that he needed to win.
The past year has been exceedingly trying for the Latinx community as Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have been conducted throughout the country. It has oftentimes felt as though being Latinx — looking a certain way, speaking Spanish, having certain names — is a crime. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen videos of or heard heartbreaking stories of Latinx people being separated from their families, harassed or even killed due to activities of federal agents.
So even if it was just a moment of recognition for Bad Bunny, I had a lot riding on one win for Latinx people. A win for an album that is unapologetically in Spanish, explored ideas of resistance toward colonization and dared to be joyful, would mean something to me.
When he won, I had the same reaction as him. I couldn’t believe it and I cried — genuine tears in my Latina eyes.
It felt like an acknowledgment that Latinx people exist and matter. I was also moved when he explicitly shouted out immigrant and Latinx communities. There was just something that felt radical, too, in him giving the majority of his acceptance speech in Spanish.
De Los writer Andrea Flores also had faith in Bad Bunny’s Grammys viability from the very beginning.
“I knew Bad Bunny was going to win big at the Grammy Awards the moment he released this album,” she told me. “Bad Bunny made music for Puerto Rico, and the world listened.”
“I cried when I saw that Bad Bunny won album of the year. For me, it felt like sweet vindication for Latinx artists — reggaetoneros, more specifically — who have long been ignored, and at times vilified, by mainstream media for so many years. But what made me even more emotional was seeing posts on X showing Bad Bunny in 2016 as a bag boy at a local Puerto Rican supermarket. He looks familiar in that picture, like a cousin, brother or childhood friend. That was only 10 years ago. It’s proof to me that so much can change if you believe in your art and in yourself.”
It’s weird that a Latinx artist from an American colony is the most powerful cultural figure in the country at the same time that Latinx people face the most tenuous situation in the U.S. that I’ve seen in my life.
When Bad Bunny takes the stage for the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, I wish he’d get up there and call out ICE again on an even-bigger stage or do some kind of spectacular act of protest against the vile political class that has always and continues to push through discriminatory policies against non-white communities.
It’d be awesome if that happens, but even if it doesn’t, there will still be something profoundly radical about him simply being there and performing exclusively in Spanish.
(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
The latest on Trump’s immigration enforcement
(Joel Angel Juarez / Getty Images)
After killing two U.S. citizens, forcibly extracting immigrants and using force against protestors, some 700 federal agents are being pulled out of Minnesota. About 2,000 officers will remain in the state, White House border czar Tom Homan said early this week.
On Tuesday, immigration officers in Minneapolis pulled their guns on and arrested protestors who were trailing their vehicles, the AP reported.
Meanwhile, my colleague Gavin J. Quinton reported that the Senate isn’t “anywhere close” to reaching an agreement on ICE funding, as Democrats demand “nonnegotiable” ICE reforms.
In some good news, Liam Conejo Ramos — the 5-year-old from Minnesota who was famously photographed wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack while detained by ICE agents — and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were released from a detention facility in Dilley, Texas and are back home in Minnesota.
The duo was released thanks to a ruling from the U.S. District Judge Fred Biery.
“[T]he case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” the judge wrote in his ruling.
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Unless otherwise noted, stories below were published by the Los Angeles Times.
