Lesson

Bad Bunny is constantly making history. Last Sunday he broke a new record by winning album of the year at the Grammys for his 2025 album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which was the first fully Spanish-language album to claim the title; and come Feb. 8, a.k.a. Super Bowl Sunday, he’ll be the headlining act at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Yet he is also teaching history. Bad Bunny’s latest record is not only a celebration of Puerto Rico and its people, but it offers a window into some of the challenges the embattled territory is currently facing — including massive migration, displacement and an infrastructure on the brink of collapse. In a moment when education is under attack, both in the United States and Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny is using pop culture’s biggest stage to offer the world a history lesson. And in this political context, that matters greatly.

In December 2024, I was contacted by Bad Bunny’s team to produce 17 pages outlining Puerto Rican history, to pair with each song’s YouTube visualizer for “DTMF.” Altogether, they have been viewed more than 775 million times.

I later produced 40 slides jam-packed with historical and cultural facts about Puerto Rico, which were screened at Bad Bunny’s 31-show residency in San Juan. These ranged from facts about the history of women’s suffrage to the founding of Puerto Rico’s oldest punk band, La Experiencia de Toñito Cabanillas.

When Bad Bunny was announced as the NFL’s choice to headline the halftime show, I was hardly surprised by the backlash from conservatives — including multiple Fox News hosts, podcasters and even President Trump, who said, “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why they’re doing it … [It’s] crazy.”

As communities of color celebrated on social media, critics raised two questions: Why would a Spanish-speaking artist — even if he is the most-streamed artist on Earth — be chosen for that stage? And why wouldn’t they choose a more patriotic, Anglo-American artist?

While undoubtedly xenophobic in nature, these questions highlight their acute ignorance about the place that birthed Bad Bunny, and its ongoing entanglement with the United States.

Puerto Rico was first colonized by the Spanish from 1493 until 1898, the year that the United States occupied the country as part of the Spanish-American War. Later, in 1917, Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens through the Jones Law. Eventually, we drafted a constitution and became a Commonwealth of the United States in 1952. But there is never one single historical narrative.

What these facts occlude, however, is that Puerto Ricans are second-class citizens who cannot vote for the president — and those in the archipelago are not fully protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. According to the U.S. Supreme Court’s early-20th century Insular Cases, we belong to the United States, but we are not part of it.

Put simply: We are a colony of the United States in the 21st century.

When drafting the historical narratives for “DTMF,” Bad Bunny understood that Puerto Rican history is often unknown, even to our own people. He was interested in making history available for those who don’t have access to higher education. He wanted me to write these narratives in a candid manner to be read by people in the barriadas y caserios (working-class neighborhoods and the projects). These were the places where I came of age in Puerto Rico.

With the success of “DTMF,” Puerto Rican history was amplified to the world. I’ve had countless conversations with journalists from around the globe, who marveled at how little they knew about Puerto Rico’s history or its relationship to the United States. This is precisely what I think drives those debates about language and who gets the right to claim Americanness — a lack of information.

And even though Bad Bunny is a U.S. citizen, conservatives have organized an alternative “All-American Halftime Show,” which reveals how “Americanness” is policed through language and race. This is the product of willful ignorance.

Puerto Rico’s history is also that of Latin American, Caribbean, United States and Latinx communities. I believe Bad Bunny’s performance will invite people to understand the beauty and complexity of our people’s history, even if it makes outsiders uncomfortable. That he will also be doing so entirely in Spanish in a moment when Latinx people in the United States are being arrested or interrogated by federal agents for speaking in Spanish — or simply for having an accent? That matters.

Of course, artists alone will not save us from the perils of racism and xenophobia — I learned that from my time in the punk community. We cannot just wait on anyone, especially not celebrities, to change institutions without some people power to back them up.

Yet given his enormous reach — just this week his latest album hit No. 1 on Apple Music in China — Bad Bunny has the power to move the cultural needle. And if there’s one thing to take from the Grammys ceremony last Sunday, it’s that he’s not alone — other artists have taken a stand on anti-immigrant violence. They are living up to the moment. That matters too.

So while conservatives organize their bland counter to the Super Bowl halftime show — with none other than Kid Rock as headliner — Bad Bunny will be offering the world a much more valuable history lesson, full of sazón, batería y reggaetón.

Jorell Meléndez-Badillo is the author of “Puerto Rico: A National History” and associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Faced by an increasingly authoritarian regime, Venezuela’s opposition requested support from international organizations over the years, denouncing human rights violations and showing evidence of the 2024 electoral fraud orchestrated by Nicolás Maduro and the chavista overlords. The international community’s answer only gave the government breathing space. The lack of decisive responses from global institutions, such as the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the European Union contributed to a state of irresolution and prolonged political violence in Venezuela, while political imprisonment and disappearances became commonplace. 

Political change in Venezuela has ultimately come to depend on Trump’s geopolitical ambitions. Rather than returning to the now-exhausted democratic avenues offered by multilateral institutions, opposition leader María Corina Machado has made efforts to align her political agenda with Trump’s commercial interests and military might. Her dedication of the Nobel Peace Prize to him only highlights this strategic alignment, along with Machado’s willingness to publicly support US military deployment if this helps her cause against the dictatorship. 

Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has also aligned her political agenda with Trump’s. She has not only agreed to satisfy all of Trump’s oil-related demands—even before Maduro’s capture—but everything indicates that she might have been the one who facilitated her boss’ extraction in exchange for power. 

However, both Machado and Rodríguez have paid a high price for dancing at the tune of Trump’s desires. Machado has been criticized around the world for giving her Nobel Prize medal to Trump and mocked as a weak political actor. On the other hand, Rodríguez seems to be walking on an increasingly tight rope, as seemingly demonstrated by the powerful interior minister Diosdado Cabello’s threatening appearance next to her on national television wearing a hat that read ‘dudar es traición’ (to doubt is betrayal). 

‘We’ve tried everything,’ many of our interviewees conclude in frustration.

The pivotal role that Venezuelan politicians like Rodríguez, Machado and even chavista hardliners like Cabello played in US plans for Venezuela demonstrates the inadequacy of considering US actions as a unilateral imposition of Trump’s agenda. As sociologist Rafael Uzcátegui argues, Venezuela’s current politics cannot be understood in the Cold War dualistic light of imperialism vs. self-determination that likens politics to a game of chess. Instead, it is more like a game of poker, where the best hand may not always be the one to win. Machado and Rodríguez are playing their best hand, which involves aligning themselves with US commercial interests and military might to survive politically in a context of weakening international law.

What Venezuelans think

In the process of writing this article, we spoke to Venezuelans in the US and back home. Most expressed their frustration in the face of the international community’s inability to support democracy in their country. ‘We’ve tried everything,’ many of our interviewees conclude in frustration.

The Venezuelans we spoke with perceive Trump’s military pressure as the first tangible movement against the dictatorship, leaving many feeling that they have little choice but to endorse US actions to end Maduro’s rule. Fully aware of US interests in the nation’s oil, Venezuelans’ calculation is shaped by a longer history in which the country’s most valuable asset has rarely served the interests of its people. As Venezuelans see it, Trump’s thirst for oil at least helps their democratic cause. So, rather than imperialism, Trump’s commercial ambitions are seen by Venezuelans as an avenue for change. 

Pedro, a Venezuelan business owner in Doral, Florida, told us: ‘If the price for my country to be safe and have food is to give away our oil, so be it. Please, Mr Trump, come and take our oil.’ For Venezuelans like Pedro, who are aware of the regime’s political brutality, the image of a cuffed and blindfolded Maduro has a taste of justice. 

Even Amanda, a Venezuelan student in New York who once supported Chávez and disagrees with how Maduro was arrested, admits to feeling satisfaction at finally seeing justice served. Following the capture, many Venezuelans across the world took to the streets to show their cautious hope for political change.

While the future in Venezuela is still uncertain, the fact that change could only be attained by violence, further erodes a global culture of democracy and trust in international law.

In Venezuela, however, the reality is more complex. The regime continues to operate with its mechanisms for social repression. Fear of expressing any form of celebration inside the country is strong, as it might lead to charges of treason. ‘We are happy, of course,’ one of our interviewees in Caracas told us. ‘But I don’t even dare to hang a flag outside my window.’ 

Alignment for political survival

Tragically, US (not-so-chirurgical) military action has achieved more in a few weeks than what democratic international institutions achieved in Venezuela over the last decade. Catering to Trump’s pressure, Maduro slowly started releasing political prisoners in December. Since January 8, Delcy Rodríguez has ramped up the number of releases, currently amounting to over 260, something unthinkable before the US military build-up in the Caribbean. Whether or not these releases are a regime’s farce, as some relatives of prisoners warn, they still reveal the fact that Rodríguez is willing to dance to Trump’s tune.

While the future in Venezuela is still uncertain, the fact that change could only be attained by violence, further erodes a global culture of democracy and trust in international law. The lesson that Maduro’s capture might teach the international community is that, in Trump’s new world order, international law is insufficient to secure political survival, and that military force and commercial expansion always prevail.

Machado and Rodríguez seem to have learned this gruesome lesson, although they have yet to disclose their full hand in this ruthless game of poker.